Remembering Sidney Mintz
(originally published on
foodanthro.com January 4, 2016)
Sid Mintz was the greatest food
anthropologist of all time. A dedicated social-justice scholar-activist,
he produced path-breaking studies of Caribbean sugar-cane workers (Worker in the Cane. A Puerto Rican Life History (W.W.Norton,
1974)), then turned his attention to the larger political-economic context in
which sugar transformed diets and lives (Sweetness
and Power. The Place of Sugar in Modern History (Viking Penguin,
1985)).
Growing up in Dover, NJ where his
father ran a small diner, he developed pluralistic food tastes. These
included a passion for Asian cuisine, which prompted his research and writing
about soya beans, their political culture and diffusion.
He followed up both food-commodity
case studies with a collection of essays that traced the history of particular
foods, such as Coca Cola, and concluded that modern intercontinental warfare
was a major force for introducing new foods and tastes, and corresponding food
production, industries, and trade. In the course of reviewing world
diffusions of foods, he practiced what he later characterized as a kind of
“grounded theory,” which meant that he entered with certain working hypotheses,
then modified them as he accessed new information and ideas. In his
preface and introduction to his essay collection, he described his childhood
exposure to different cuisines, and also his working methods, which involved
framing internal and external trajectories of change and their interactions.
Along with political-economic nationalizations and globalization, particular
local or regional cultures also displayed their own distinctive dynamics, which
informed their “insider” responses to these “outside” forces of change.
He favored such straightforward analytical language, even as he resonated with
Marxist and populist social writings.
My personal interactions stemmed
from our common passion for food studies in anthropology. Sid and I also shared
some multi-generational family background. The Messer family, moving out
of the illness ridden slums of New York City’s Lower East Side in the 1910s,
landed first in Whippany, then in Mount Freedom, NJ. The eight siblings
went first to the Ironia public school (one room schoolhouse) and then to Dover
for secondary school. Following up on his very personal, memoir-style
preface to Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom (Beacon
Press, 1996), I learned that he and my father’s family had indeed overlapped in
high school. The Messer boys traveled by horse and buggy (or sleigh) from their
distant farm into town, where Sid recalled his high-school classmate, my Uncle
Alfred, was always already there early in the school yard, wonderfully
rosy-cheeked from having already milked the cows before heading to school.
In a more academic vein, Sid’s
simple structural insider-outside scheme for analyzing food-culture change
provided the inspiration for the chapter I wrote on European acceptance of the
potato for Helen Macbeth’s edited volume on Food
Preference and Taste: Continuity and Change (Berghahn, 2007). Sid let me know
that he appreciated how effectively I had used his approach; this was exactly
the kind of follow-up studies he had intended.
During my 1999-2000 research on
anthropologists confronting hunger, we talked at some length about political
engagement in the issues. My format was to ask whether the individual
scholars or scholar-activists I was interviewing had engaged with the work of
Food First–Institute for Food and Development Policy, The Hunger Project, the
Brown University World Hunger Program, or America’s food bank network (then
called America’s Second Harvest, since renamed Feeding America). The
conversation provided a thoughtful opportunity for him to distinguish the kinds
of organized leftist and Marxist political rhetoric, mobilizations, and
leadership from the political-activism and activist-democracy organizing of
Frances Moore Lappe, which he found to be something very different and very
important, although Marxist theory dominated the academic and political
conversations.
Sid also included me in his 2001
activities at John Hopkins University exploring soy as a kind of alternative to
meat protein. A conference there served as a vehicle for the soybean
industry to promote its products as social and environmentally
protective. But I had just returned from an Earthwatch Science Advisory
Committee tour of that agency’s research operations in the Pantanal,
Brazil. There, we learned, the major threat to wildlife was not expansion
of cattle but of soybean cultivation, which was ravaging the forest and
grasslands, and removing the corridors that were necessary to maintain
biodiversity. This rejoinder to the soybean promoters, and their
appealing claims of virtue for vegetarian, soy-based fare, was not well
received by the industry representatives, although I recall I got a welcome
boost from Marion Nestle, who agreed with my presentation.
Sid, from beginning to end, was
very supportive of the kinds of anti-hunger work we did at Brown, and very
gracious in acknowledging contributions in the review, “Anthropology of Food
and Eating” that he co-authored with Dubois for Annual Review of
Anthropology (2002).
Sid Mintz died 26 December 2015 at
the age of 93. We are so glad that he lived so long to enlighten and brighten
our anthropological perspectives, and will continue his legacy in our works to
come.
Here's a simple recipe for black
beans:
1. Prepare black beans from scratch,
or if pressed for time use canned (preferably organic black beans (which are
seasoned only with sea salt)).
2. When the beans are soft, but not
falling apart, for each 2 cups of cooked beans add:
1 medium yellow onion
2 cloves garlic
1 tbsp olive oil
1/2 tsp cumin
1/2 tsp oregano.
Salt (with sea salt) to taste.
Boil for an additional ten minutes.
Serve as a soup/stew or grind in a
blender/or with an immersion blender into a paste or dip, accompanied with corn
tortillas or tortilla chips, and, according to taste: diced jalapeño peppers
and feta or cheddar-style cheese.
