Evaluating Mintzs Sweetness and Power :: Sugar Sweet Tooth Foods Essays

Evaluating Mintzs Sweetness and Powerwhy would anyone feel the need to write an entire adjudge on much(prenominal) a mundane topic such as saccharide? nip around at some food products you susceptibility have and you allow realize that many if not all of them contain sugar in some form or an other. For example, a can of soda, which most great deal drink everyday, contains (depending on the brand) approximately 40 grams of sugars. Look further and you might find that even things such as cheese or chips or soup contain several grams of sugar in them. The wide variegation of products that contain sugar just goes to show you how widespread the use of sugar really is. This fact alone could be enough to convince soulfulness to create a book solely about sugar. One rush that Mintz quotes on page 15 that really seems to capture our ( westwarders) infatuation with sugar, and a strong reason the book at hand is as followsWestern peoples consume enormous per capita quantities of corkin g sugar because, to most people, very bracing foods taste very good. The existence of the human sweet tooth can be explained, ultimately, as an adaptation of ancestral populations to favor the ripest-and hence the sweetest-fruit. In other words, the selective pressures of times past are most strikingly revealed by the artificial, supernormal stimulus of refined sugar, despite the evidence that eating refined sugar is maladaptive.With such an obsession with sweet foods, there is an obvious impulse for an explanation of how such a once unknown substance took tenderness stage on everybodys snack, dessert, and candy list. Thats where Sidney W. Mintz comes into play. He decided to write this book Sweetness and Power, and from the looks of all the sources he used to substantiate his ideas and data, it seems that he is not the first person to find the role that sugar plays in modern-day society important. By analyzing who Mintzs audience is meant to be, what goals he has in writing thi s book, what social organisation his book incorporates, what type, or types, of history he represents within the book, what kind of sources he uses, and what important information and conclusions he presents, we can come to better escort Mintzs views and research of the role of sugar in history, and how much it really affects our lives as we know them.To begin to understand and evaluate Mintzs Sweetness and Power, one mustiness first understand who his book is aimed toward, in other words, his audience.