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Texas Standard: October 28, 2019

Houston: for sale to the highest bidder? Allegations against the incumbent mayor rocking the race in Texas’ biggest city. We’ll have a closer look. Also, why a major Texas city appears to be an outlier amid good news in the fight against the spread of HIV. And the large building some east Texas developers would rather you not go into when checking out the subdivision. Those stories and so much more today on the Texas Standard:

Sugar: Sidney Mintz (Ep. 1)

In this episode we talk with anthropologist Sidney Mintz about his seminal work Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar In Modern History. Mintz takes us through our prehistoric relationship to sweetness–from the bloody history of slavery and sugar production to our current state of the mass production and consumption of sweetness worldwide. He talks about how factories developed on the sugar plantations and the way slavery developed in the New World, as well as the role this brutal past plays in current volatile racial relations in the U.S.