Sweetness and Power

Sugar’s diverse and historically changing meaning is a core preoccupation of this study. Mintz flags this early on in Sweetness and Power when he asserts that “uses imply meanings; to learn the anthropology of sugar, we need to explore the meanings of its uses, to discover the early and more limited uses of sugar, and to learn what and for what original purposes sugar was produced” (6). New products arrive with their own symbolic baggage, but people do not automatically absorb new meanings in the exact way previous consumers did.

When England’s aspiring upper classes began featuring their own sugar subtleties at dinner parties in emulation of the 15th-century royalty who first adopted the practice, this new class similarly intended to impress their guests with their little sugar sculptures. However, these items’ display and consumption did not reinforce the hosts’ power as it did for the royals; that is, these items did not “[give] concrete expression to temporal and spiritual power” (154). Rather, for the English upper classes, these subtleties became an edible status symbol that echoed the gravity of prior usage without truly furnishing it.

Sugar’s abundance and availability to the working class further changed the food’s meanings; although the “symbolic weight that endured among the rich and powerful until

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