PublishedRobinson, July 2017 |
ISBN9781472138101 |
FormatSoftcover, 352 pages |
Dimensions23.5cm × 15.3cm × 2.7cm |
The story of sugar, and of mankind's desire for sweetness in food and drink is a compelling, though confusing story. It is also an historical story.
The story of mankind's love of sweetness - the need to consume honey, cane sugar, beet sugar and chemical sweeteners - has important historical origins. To take a simple example, two centuries ago, cane sugar was vital to the burgeoning European domestic and colonial economies. For all its recent origins, today's obesity epidemic - if that is what it is - did not emerge overnight, but instead evolved from a complexity of historical forces which stretch back centuries. We can only fully understand this modern problem, by coming to terms with its genesis and history: and we need to consider the historical relationship between society and sweetness over a long historical span. This book seeks to do just that: to tell the story of how the consumption of sugar - the addition of sugar to food and drink - became a fundamental and increasingly troublesome feature of modern life.
Walvin's book is the heir to Sidney Mintz's Sweetness and Power, a brilliant sociological account, but now thirty years old. In addition, the problem of sugar, and the consequent intellectual and political debate about the role of sugar, has been totally transformed in the years since that book's publication.
Bill is one of the founders of Boffins and has been involved in selecting the books we stock since our beginning in 1989. His favourite reading is history, with psychology, current affairs, and business books coming close behind. His hobbies are reading, food, reading, drinking, reading, and sleeping.
This is the fascinating history of how sugar became so important to us, and of the brutal human cost and the ecological harm caused by the sugar plantations. The problem of sugar is on everyone’s lips. But before about 1600, in the West, sugar was a costly luxury available only to the rich and powerful. James Walvin has written extensively on slavery in the Americas, and as slavery enabled the cheap mass production of sugar he’s the right writer for this book. By 1800, slavery in the sugar plantations had made sugar a cheap, ubiquitous and hugely popular product, even among the poor. Australians consume about 50kg of sugar per person per year, so this is an important subject for all of us.
