fructose

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.