S I D N E Y W. M I N T ZIn memory of Eduardo Archetti (1943–2005)Editor of Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 1999–2002

Notes toward a cultural constructionof modern foods

The creation of a scientifically pure sweetness was a historical process comparable to the standardisationof cooking oil or salt. But the case of sugar is almost unique. Today, quite different processes, concernedmore with marketing than with chemistry, serve to elaborate, multiply and reshuffle products. These have thecommon objective of enlarging the aggregate market. They play upon taste, class aspiration and otherwise,to diversify the market in terms of class, ethnicity, and other criteria of social assortment, by inflecting theproducts themselves. Here I argue that two different meanings of the term ‘purity’ are popular, and that bothare used to broaden and to deepen consumption.

Key words food, sugar, coffee, commodity history, (social) class

It was a great honour to join you in remembering our dear friend and colleague, whomwe miss so much, and whom we shall all go on missing.

I got to know Eduardo Archetti in 1970–71 at the Ecole Pratique in Paris, whereI was teaching a course on the ethnology of the Caribbean region. The students at theEcole at that time, still under the spell of 1968, felt the need to question everything,even whether to take any courses at all. My class split into three groups: from theCaribbean islands; mainland Latin America; and the Europeans, nearly all of themFrench. There were differences among these groups in their attitudes toward my courseand its contents. Many listeners were so deafened by my national identity – madedoubly visible by the tragic, seemingly endless American folly unfolding in Viet Nam –that they had difficulty hearing what I was trying to say. Eduardo was not one ofthem. It was Eduardo who, by his friendship and the dialogue he began with me then,sent me the message that, in spite of what I seemed to represent, what I had to saycould serve him usefully as an anthropologist of the Americas. For this gentle but bravedemonstration of his friendship I will always be grateful.

We were invited to offer papers to honour Eduardo within the broad sweep of hisown scholarship: masculinity, hybridities and modernity. I thought at first to turn backto the impressive corpus of work which he and his beloved wife had created togetheron the agrarian structures of Latin America, so as to draw contrasts with the Caribbeanregion which has, I believe, a quite ancient identity of its own (Mintz in press). Havinglearned so much from Eduardo’s thoughts on the modernisation of food in society, Idecided to make some observations of my own about modernity and commodities.

Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale (2009) 17, 2 209–216. C© 2009 European Association of Social Anthropologists. 209doi:10.1111/j.1469-8676.2009.00071.x

210 SIDNEY W. MINTZ

I have long been interested in the ways that raw plant materials can be processed intofoods and food ingredients. I became aware of the importance of such transformationswhen I began to study seriously the history of sucrose, or what we call sugar. It is onlyone of many different sugars, and an unimaginably lengthy technological history laybehind its processing.1 The refining of cane sugar involves reducing the cane stalks topieces of manageable size and expressing the cane juice, using pressure from gearedrollers or wheels, powered by animals, steam or otherwise, thus freeing the sucrosefrom the stalks in liquid suspension; then heating and cleansing the liquid; and once theongoing separation of impurities and extraneous material from the liquid is completed,realising its crystallisation in granular, almost perfectly pure, solid form. The conversionand reduction of the liquid contained within a thick green grass into a pure white powderor uniform crystals, was a technological triumph. It happened in more than one place,and by the use of different methods. But for many centuries the extraction of liquidsucrose and then its refining into powder or crystals – whether in the hands of theIndians, the Chinese or, eventually, the Europeans – required repeated boiling andwashing (refining). It was a labour-intensive and tedious process, which greatly addedto its cost.

Today the final product might be called a ‘nutraceutical’ – the food industry’sname for slipping a medicine into a food – so common was the medical use of sucrosein European medicine. Of the 24 pharmaceutical uses of sugar enumerated by thepharmacological historian P.S. Pittenger (1947), more than half were known to the Arabphysicians of the 14th century, and the West learned all of them. Only after its use as amedicine was known did sugar in Europe go on to become a spice, a flavouring agent,a means of preservation, and a substance for celebration and aesthetic display (Mintz1985).

What began as a technological triumph would become a commercial triumph aswell. In successive stages, sucrose was transformed from a rare and costly substance intoone affordable even by those of modest means, and in Europe and North America, froma remarkable luxury into a rather prosaic culinary necessity. Before mass consumptioncame to typify the markets for clothing and china, it had made its start with sugar, tea,rum and tobacco.

But when I first began to consider the parallels between sucrose and other foodingredients, I noticed that sugar had a certain distinctiveness. It was shared to a limitedextent by such foods as oil and salt; but sugar stood out. The chemical and mechanicaltransformation of liquid sucrose did turn it into a uniform product, and much the samewould happen eventually with tinned beef, say, or sardines, or oleomargarine. Eachbatch of such food from the same producer – indeed, every single container – wasmeant to taste exactly like every other, and did, sugar included. Swift competed withArmour in tinned beef, Borden with Carnation in tinned milk. In the case of sugar, inthe United States, Domino would vie with Jack Frost.2

1 Sucrose (C12H22O11), a product of photosynthesis, is found in most green plants. Its extractionfor commercial use is principally from sugarcane and sugar beet, but sugar beet extraction did notbecome economically practical until the early 19th century, while sugarcane has been a source ofsucrose for millennia.

2 It is an irony of American food history that the establishment of food firms and corporations inthe 19th century with names meant to endure, such as Heinz catsup or Campbell soup, was animportant factor in the maintenance of food safety. In contrast, among the miracles of globalisationof the last 25 years has been the sharp rise in serious cases of food poisoning, as inspection agencies

C© 2009 European Association of Social Anthropologists.

NOTES TOWARD A CULTURAL CONSTRUCTION OF MODERN FOODS 211

Yet sugar cannot be described using quite the same criteria as these other products.I realised this first when thinking about coffee, tea and chocolate – three exotic imports(from Africa, China and Mexico) that got my attention because, like sugar, they wereamong the first foods to enter Europe and to become new items of mass consumption.The West’s first exotic beverages, they would soon be drunk by nearly everyone, usuallywell sweetened, in contrast to customary usage in their places of origin.

And yet there is a fundamental difference between these beverages on the one hand,and the ingredient with which they are sweetened on the other; and that differencehas implications for how such substances are perceived, thought about and sold. Thedifference may be expressed by the way that production is organised; by differingquantities of labour expended per unit of material; and by price, among other things.But important as these external indices of difference are, after the final processing, it isthe intrinsic nature of the product itself that counts.

This requires a moment’s reflection. If such products are standardised to achieveuniformity, as in, say, five-pound bags of sugar and round tins of coffee or square tinsof chocolate, in what way is sugar different from these others? The difference lies inthe inherent characteristics of the product, and in the way those characteristics areconceptualised in marketing it. I can explain best by returning to sugar. Sugar is almost100% pure, meaning that it is composed of sucrose, and very little else. Not for nothingdo the manufacturers of sugar call this pure white product ‘packaged sunshine’. Puresugar tastes of nothing but sweetness – it is simply sweet, and hence a perfectly modernsubstance, as I shall explain.

One can sweeten with maple syrup, honey, palm sugar, sorghum molasses, fruitsyrups – but every one of these tastes of something. Yet sugar has no taste but sweet; it isthat essentiality that is so modern. This simplicity facilitates the combination of sucrosewith any other food material, equally pure or not. Its state is essential to the distinctionI am trying to draw here. Cocoa powder or chocolate can be brought to approximatelythe same level of purity. But it is at that point that the two products, chocolate andsugar, diverge in character. Anyone who cooks or bakes using sugar knows well whatsugar is. The differences among sugars (including the specialty sugars of bake shopsand patisseries, which may differ in size of grain or powder, melting point, etc., butwhich, excepting brown sugars are, unmistakably, pure sugar) have to do with the sameproduct, all of the time.3

Not so chocolate. Despite the level of purity, ‘chocolate’ does not stand forchocolate at all, in the way that ‘sugar’ stands for sugar. It is one of several ingredients,used in differing proportions, in making ‘chocolate’. Chocolates have an additionalsource of variety – place of origin – as do cheeses. Tea and coffee, though unitaryproducts, come in different varieties because of their inherent natures.4

are overwhelmed by the volume of their tasks and the lack of funding, while foods, both local andimported, now often reach the consumer uninspected.

3 Brown sugars, so called, began as incompletely refined sugars, and most sugar was brown, beforethe 19th century. Brown sugars do have taste beyond sweetness, of course; it has been deliberatelyretained. In recent years, a ‘fake’ brown sugar – white granular sugar to which a coating of brownsugar has been added – has become common.

4 In recent years, food marketers, smelling the potentialities of locality in the vintner’s referencesto terroir, have been applying the idea to other products. Though there is a good deal of ‘hype’involved, the case for taste variation by locality in whiskeys, cheeses, chocolates, teas and coffeesseems well founded.

C© 2009 European Association of Social Anthropologists.

212 SIDNEY W. MINTZ

Whenever any of these foods is discussed, people instantly speak of taste. Incontrast, sweet foods may be discussed in terms of taste, too; but only in their beingtoo sweet, just right or not sweet enough – without differentiation as to kind of sweet.It is obvious that such discussions share nothing with discussions of whiskies, cheeses,teas or coffees. Hence there are foods that belong to a category of mass-producedand standardised foods, such as sugar, and others in a category of specialty foodswhich, though also standardised, resist uniformity. These categories are admittedlyrather porous. Their benefit lies in what they might help to tell us about substances,about the market and about those who compete to sell them.

If we now take a second look at such commodities as tea, coffee and chocolate, wenotice that while they are packaged and sold in the uniform, sugar-like category, theybelong in the other, specialty category as well. Coffee is a prime example of this duality,and I want to say more of it here.

In the United States, until the mid-nineteenth century, coffee consumption waslow and irregular. In 1830, the average annual per capita consumption of coffee wasonly three pounds. But this doubled by the Civil War. Then, as the nation became moreintegrated economically and its infrastructure grew outward from the cities, distributionand marketing of consumer products generally became more reliable. Americans wereconsuming more foods from elsewhere, and consumer demand continued to rise. Aspeople ate out more, and coffee became an all-purpose beverage, coffee drinking changedfrom ‘an elite and more often private affair’ (Jimenez 1995: 39) into ‘practically a staple’(1995: 42). By the early 20th century, coffee-drinking was widespread, and had becomehabitual for many consumers.

The inability of American processors, marketers and bankers to control or maintainthe supply of coffee, however, led them to act. They pushed for more foreign suppliers,sought government regulation of the importers, and began to install commissionmerchants and local representatives in coffee-producing regions. Between 1900 andthe World Depression, American business interests, helped by their lobbyists, wereable to supplant the German producers and import houses in Guatemala; establishtheir own importers in Colombia; and buy out, or drive out, small import houses andpackagers in the United States. Significantly, they developed local brands into nationaltrademarks, such as Hill Bros., Maxwell House and Eight O’Clock.5 Urbanisation, theassembly line and the factory system, the concept of the ‘coffee break’ and, in 1906, theinvention of the electric coffee maker, all played a part in making coffee the Americanbeverage by the 1930s (Jimenez 1995) .

Yet what had first become a standardised commodity half a century earlier was yetto go through another smaller, but significant, transformation: the so-called ‘specialtyrevolution’. The rise of new kinds of coffee to do battle for customers with Folgers andMaxwell House makes clear the duality of commodities I have in mind. It has becomeparticularly vivid in the last few decades in the United States, and work by the lateWilliam Roseberry (1996) and most recently by Stuart McCook (n.d.), among others,

5 In the United States, the rise of standard national brands involved the elimination of a large numberof local importers, roasters and grocer retailers, who were known locally for their distinctive roasts.I think it likely that the rise of specialty coffees at a much later point in the history of coffee in theUnited States has involved attempts to re-create or resuscitate some of the features associated withthose early local coffees, such as packaging, print style and photos of early import houses. In modernadvertising, when an excessive stress on the new and modern fails, sometimes a fake archaism willattract customers.

C© 2009 European Association of Social Anthropologists.

NOTES TOWARD A CULTURAL CONSTRUCTION OF MODERN FOODS 213

provides a wealth of detail. Roseberry’s paper chronicles the rise of ‘Yuppie coffees’,alongside the millions of cups of ‘Joe’ and ‘Java’ drunk each day by scores of millions –perhaps hundreds of millions – of working Americans:

Surely these developments are ‘good.’ Specialty coffees taste better than mass-market coffees. They offer pleasure in many ways: the aroma, ambience, andexperience of the coffee shop itself (indeed, part of the experience of a place likeZabar’s is the succession of smells), the casual conversation with the shop ownerabout varietals, roasts, preparation methods; the identification with particularplaces thorough consumption – Copenhagen or Vienna, Jamaica or the Celebes;or the inclusion of coffee purchasing, preparation, and consumption in a wideningspectrum of foods – including wines, beers, waters, breads, cheeses, sauces andthe like – through which one can cultivate and display ‘taste’ and ‘discrimination.’Moreover, the expansion of specialty coffees marks a distinct break with a pastcharacterized by mass production and consumption. The move toward thesecoffees was not initiated by the giants that dominate the coffee trade but bysmall regional roasters who developed new sources of supply, new modes andnetworks of distribution that allowed, among other things, for consumers tobuy coffee directly (well, not directly) from a peasant cooperative in Chiapas orGuatemala. New coffees, more choices, more diversity, less concentration, newcapitalism: the beverage of postmodernism. (1996: 763)

In this splendid paragraph, Roseberry counterposes one coffee against another; butthese very different products are indeed both coffee. Substitute ‘sugar’ for coffee andthe inherent differences between these two commodities becomes clear. What I havedone so far is to separate standardisation, as a process linked with modernity, fromthe inherent nature of various food substances. Among those, I call sugar ‘modern’because in its most highly refined form it is combinable with an endless number ofother substances, serving to make them sweet.6

My argument is that sugar can be contrasted with many (though not all) other foodsubstances because of its distinctive, ‘monotone’ nature. I choose here as its oppositecoffee (Coffea arabica, C. canephora [robusta]), which is also standardised. But in sharpcontrast to sugar’s ‘monotone’, coffee is highly variable in its taste, and is subject toendless taste nuances.7

But without exploring that contrast further here, I want to turn to a differentpolarity from which to contemplate sugar and coffee anew. In doing so, I wish to callattention to two quite distinct points. First, I want to take note of the immense powerthat inheres in being able to give new names to substances, and to attribute to themparticular characteristics. To the extent that we can define things for others, undercircumstances that make it difficult for them to test the meanings we are attributing to

6 In fact, sugar serves many other purposes for the cook, and particularly for the baker. But its primaryculinary use is to sweeten.

7 Not surprisingly, the taste of any particular brand of mass-produced coffee is kept highly uniform,and that taste is touted accordingly, and seen as closely tied to the brand name. In his paper, McCook(n.d.) shows that the two different species of coffee play an enormous additional role in complicatingthe rivalry between the standard (mostly robusta) coffees, and the specialty (C. arabica) coffees. Thepurists hold C. robusta in great contempt; the everyday drinkers of mass-produced coffee are, forthe most part, unimpressed with the superior reputation of C. arabica. But I cannot review thearguments here.

C© 2009 European Association of Social Anthropologists.

214 SIDNEY W. MINTZ

those things, we are exercising control over whether others use these things, consume orfail to consume them, prize them or disdain them. We affect the self-definition of othersif we succeed in motivating their consumption. We may be able to enter, sometimesintimately, into the organisation of their very personalities. In short, we affect who andwhat they think they are (Mintz 1985: 185).

Secondly, some years back I argued that, over time, two quite different meaningsfor the term ‘purity’ had emerged in the English language. By ‘pure’, we can meansomething that is natural, unaltered, unprocessed. We can mean an unspoiled productof nature’s agents: the unfettered action of sun, water, air, soil and organic growth,unaltered by the action of humankind. But we may mean something else – somethingequally comforting, though quite different: aseptic, hygienic, scientifically clean andprecisely quantifiable, free of germs and microbes, guaranteed not to make us sick(Mintz 1996: 85).

Nature at her best creates a figurative purity. Carrots shorn of their greenery,stuffed into two-pound plastic sacks and piled high, look quite different from carrotsthat are in smaller, unwrapped, modest bunches, bits of earth still clinging to them,their greenery intact, neatly tied at the root tops. The packaged carrots may actuallybe cleaner – but the unwrapped carrots, even with their bits of dirt, may seem cleaner.(They also – unfailingly – cost more.) I think that the purity of Nature’s dirt – ‘real’ dirt –is pre-scientific, and in some sense timeless. It appeals to us because it evokes the ideaof an idealised past, when Nature was less contaminated by its most powerful enemy,because then humans were better, and did less harm.

But there is also a more prosaic, secular meaning of purity that has an acknowledgedhistory, and has grown over time. It is a purity that is both chemically convincing andgerm-free, a purity that is the outcome of scientific achievement.8 I see these twomeaning of a single word as polarities of a kind, but they can coexist in a single mind.They figure importantly in much of our thinking about the world, and we may see themwith special clarity in association with food. Often these differing meanings overlap,especially if we read every line of the advertising on the package (or, if there is nopackage, of the self-dedicatory exhortations of the store). Organic food enthusiastswant their food to be doubly pure, scientifically safe, and also natural. All of us wantour food to taste good and to be good for us. The two meanings of purity that I offer hereare not the same, but merge easily in the mind of the observer. From the perspectivesof food producers and food advertisers, the same word covering two such basicallydifferent meanings invites considerable profit-making creativity.

This contrast between two meanings is relevant because the scientific sense is morelikely to be attached to foods of the sugar sort, and the other, ‘natural’ sense to foods ofthe coffee sort. Referring to sugar as 99% pure is explicit enough.9 Nature, sometimesmingled with hints of godliness, is likely to turn up in advertisements for sugar onlywhen the advertisers are busily fighting off Equal, Splenda or Sweet & Low. By way ofcontrast, the other meaning of ‘pure’ – pure as natural – is more commonly applied to

8 This is not the place to discuss domestication, beginning about 12,000 years ago. That capture ofenergy, far more important than any subsequent achievement, was realised by our ancestors, andwas, by any measure, an important scientific achievement, and a deliberate tampering with Nature.The Bible treats domestication of both plants and animals as an accomplished fact, as in the story ofCain and Abel.

9 It would be best to avoid the word ‘natural’, of course. Even the US Food & Drug Administrationlong ago gave up its regulation, such that legally anyone can use the word to mean anything.

C© 2009 European Association of Social Anthropologists.

NOTES TOWARD A CULTURAL CONSTRUCTION OF MODERN FOODS 215

foods such as coffee or honey, where references to mountains, trees, air, cows and evento coffee-pickers may be found. The distinctions will rarely be total. Advertisers useappeals both to science and to nature to sell both ‘monotone’ products such as sugar orsalt, and so-called ‘crafted’ or specialty foods such as coffee. But the differences betweenthe two sorts of appeal are nonetheless real.

As consumers, we need to decompose the product as perceived by its salespersons,in order to understand better how those who market it undertake to define for us whatit is. This, then, is an exercise, among other things, in decoding the techniques of thosewho provide us with meanings for the things they wish to sell us. As one of the greatstudents of modern society has written:

Meanings are not imprinted into things by nature; they are developed and imposedby human beings . . . The ability to bestow meanings – to ‘name’ things, acts andideas – is a source of power. (Wolf 1982: 388)

Some of the processed foods to which we consumers are drawn are made moreattractive because we are persuaded that they help us look ahead; others may win ourallegiance because we are led to believe that they enable us to stay as we are. And thenthere are those to which we are drawn because they help us imagine back to what we aresupposed to have come from. Of course I do not mean to say that the intrinsic characterof those various foods is irrelevant. But it may be useful for us to see how the world isconstantly being given a particular shape for us by the acts of others.

Over the centuries, the world of food – how and what we prepare to eat, andthe circumstances of its consumption – has changed immeasurably. These changes haveaccelerated, particularly since the onset of the so-called Columbian exchange, beginningin 1492; even more since the Industrial Revolution, with its technical and chemicalaccompaniments. But until recently, some of the world, or its rural sectors, remainedfundamentally unaltered by the most recent transformations.

In his compelling monograph on the guinea pig, Eduardo Archetti (1997) describesa chapter in the history of the modernisation of a food system. In it he shows us howthe peoples of the Andes were ushered toward modernity by official undertakings, suchthat their own logic of existence was compelled to confront the world outside. Thosewho read his book readily see the historical differences between, say, the guinea pig inthe life of Andean peoples, on the one hand, and today’s products, such as coffee andwhite sugar in our own lives. But as the world changes, more and more local systems –of food, and of all else – are pulled into more extensive webs of interdependence. Whatremains the same is how people are moved to push back against these pressures, intheir desire to protect one or another feature of the local. Such resistance, though oftenpoorly aimed, undergirds their own feelings of security and a predictable world. Thisquestioning spirit challenges wider forces, slowing the momentum toward uniformityand standardisation.

I know that if Eduardo were with us today he would be asking me the kinds ofquestions that would help me see better what I have been missing as I think throughthis paper. Like all of you, I wish he were here.

Sidney Mintz111 Hamlet Hill Rd., # 107,Baltimore, MD 2210, USAmintzsw@jhu.edu

C© 2009 European Association of Social Anthropologists.

216 SIDNEY W. MINTZ

ReferencesArchetti, E. 1997. Guinea-pigs. Food, symbol and conflict of knowledge in Ecuador. Oxford: Berg.Jimenez, M. 1995. ‘From plantation to cup’: coffee and capitalism in the United States, 1830–1930, in W.

Roseberry, L. Gudmundson and M. Kutschbach (eds.), Coffee, society and power in Latin America,38–64. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins.

McCook, S. n.d. The ecology of taste: ‘ordinary’ coffee and the limits of the specialty revolution.Unpublished manuscript.

Mintz, S. 1985. Sweetness and power. New York: Penguin.Mintz, S. 1996. Tasting food, tasting freedom. Boston: Beacon.Mintz, S. in press. Three ancient colonies. Caribbean themes and variations. Cambridge: Harvard.Pittenger, P. S. 1947. Sugars and sugar derivatives in pharmacy. Scientific Report Series No. 5. New

York: Sugar Research Foundation, Inc.Roseberry, W. 1996. ‘The rise of Yuppie coffees and the reimagination of class in the United States’,

American Anthropologist 98 (4): 762–75.Wolf, E. 1982. Europe and the people without history. Berkeley: University of California.

C© 2009 European Association of Social Anthropologists.