"Tobacco, sugar, and tea were the first objects within capitalism that conveyed with their use the complex idea that one could become different by consuming differently. This idea has little to do with nutrition or primates or sweet tooth, and less than it appears to have with symbols. But it is closely connected to England's fundamental transformation from a hierarchical, status-based, medieval society to a social-democratic, capitalist and industrial society."
He shows how English working-class people came to fill themselves up on bread and sugary jam with sugared tea giving the illusion that they were eating hot meals. This applied particularly to women and children while men got more protein so that they would have the strength to do physical work. He suggests that this functioned, to an extent, as a means of population control through maintaining a high child mortality rate based on chronic malnutrition of growing kids.
Probably Leslie can confirm the large amount of hidden sugar in the junk food contemporary Americans eat, including items not formally seen as sweet, where it also has some preservative effect.
Another nugget from Mintz --
"Increasing sugar consumption is only one of the ways 'development' changes food habits and choices, of course. While caloric intake probably increases as sugar consumption rises, this increase is partly achieved by substitutions, one of the clearest being the replacement of complex carbohydrates (starches) with simple carbohydrates (sucrose)."
This is one of the more interesting books I've read in the last few years.
Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema