(Originally published in The Independent March 22, 2016)
The New York Times
called him “the father of food anthropology.” The founder of an entire academic
discipline, Sidney Mintz caused academic shockwaves when he linked Britain’s
sweet-tooth with slavery, the rise of capitalism and imperial expansionism.
Reflecting on his major work of 1985, Sweetness and Power: The Place of
Sugar in Modern History, he said: “I became awed by the power of a single
taste, and the concentration of brains, energy, wealth and — most of all, power
— that had led to its being supplied to so many, in such stunningly large
quantities, and at so terrible a cost in life and suffering.”
In this ground-breaking
book he married the virtues of a careful historian with what he’d learned in
his apprenticeship with some of the pioneers of cultural anthropology,
especially Ruth Benedict, and wrested the discipline away from those who wanted
it confined to the study of aboriginal peoples. “If they don’t have
blowguns and you can’t catch malaria, it’s not anthropology,” was a
typical Sid quip; for this giant of academe had a wicked sense of humour. As
one of his distinguished former students wrote to me, “he was highly
entertaining, self-deprecating, insightful.”
He stated his own approach
to the subject on his personal website: “The subject of food or eating habits
reveals, as well as anything, the power of culture or cumulative tradition, to
shape food behavior. Because of their capacity for tool use, and eventually for
making and controlling fire, humans began to break the links between our animal
nature and the food we ate. Thereupon the apparently endless search for our
natural food became pointless as well. We have had no natural food since we
became fully human, except perhaps for mother’s milk. The foods of different
peoples, shaped by habitat and by our history, would become a vivid marker of
difference, symbols both of belonging and of being excluded.”
In contrast to some
anthropologists he felt that the discipline needed to be grounded in history,
and sometimes had political implications. “My work on sugar, Sweetness and
Power, situates it within Western history because [sugar] was an old
commodity, basic to the emergence of a global market,” he wrote on his personal
website. “The first time I was in the field I’d been surrounded by it, as I did
my fieldwork. That led me to try to trace it backward in time, to learn about
its becoming domesticated, and how it spread and gained importance in the
growing Western industrial world.”
He viewed the growth of
Caribbean sugar plantations in the the 17th century, with the
slavery needed to work them and the navies to protect them, as the spawn of
hunger. “There was no conspiracy at work to wreck the nutrition of the British
working class, to turn them into addicts or ruin their teeth,” he wrote in Sweetness
and Power. “But the ever-rising consumption of sugar was an artifact of
interclass struggles for profit — struggles that eventuated in a world market
solution for drug food, as industrial capitalism cut its protectionist losses
and expanded a mass market to satisfy proletarian consumers once regarded as
sinful or indolent…. No wonder the rich and powerful liked it so much, and no
wonder the poor learned to love it.”
Born in Dover, New Jersey,
Sidney Mintz’s parents were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. His father,
Solomon, was at first a diemaker, then a clothing salesman, and his mother,
Fanny Tulchin, a seamstress who became an organiser for the “Wobblies,” the
Industrial Workers of the World (before it was suppressed for being
revolutionary, starting in 1917. Sid and I went to an Oldways Foundation event
in Spain, and demonstrated that we both knew all the words to the old Wobbly
songs. An eminent food writer wrote to me that “I will never forget you and Sid
trading old [political] anthems on that train ride from Seville to Madrid in
1982. From ‘Joe Hill’ to the ‘Internationale.’ What a ride!”)
Sid had an impeccable
foodie pedigree: his father had been a washer-up in a Dover diner, which he
bought and then turned into “the only restaurant in the world in which the
customer was always wrong.” The business went bust during the Depression, but,
said Sid, “Very early I became interested in how people acquired, prepared,
cooked and served food, and that all came from my father,” Professor Mintz told
American Anthropologist in 2014. “I came by my interest in food
honestly; feeding people had become what my father did for a living. As I grew,
I was able to help.” Sid did most of the cooking at home with his wife,
Jacqueline, something his father had also done. “He cooked at home for us –
almost always Jewish food. During the Depression, he cooked a lot of innards –
offal. Those were truly hard years.”
Sid went to Brooklyn
College, where he graduated in psychology in 1943, then did war-time military
service in the Air Force before entering Columbia as a post-graduate student in
anthropology, getting his PhD. In 1961. In 1947 he joined Julian Steward in
what he described as a “very daring” fieldwork project in Puerto Rico studying
“the relationship between local social groups and the evolution of their forms
of governance.” He later felt that their “overall treatment of island society
was skewed by” their failure to confront “analytically the fact the Puerto Rico
was a dependent possession, a colony, of the U.S.”
In 1953, returning to
Puerto Rico, “I became the first anthropologist who ever took down the life
history of a working man who was a rural proletarian rather than a
‘primitive’,” resulting in the 1960 publication of the classic Worker in the
Cane: A Puerto Rican Life History, deeply humane, and with as much in
common with a 19th century Russian novel as with standard
works of anthropology. He felt that his teaching of undergraduates, especially
at Yale where in 1969 he headed up the first programme of African American
Studies, was at least as important as his legion of books and articles. After
25 years at Yale (where his wife was Associate Provost, before going to study
law at Philadelphia) he left to establish the anthropology department at Johns
Hopkins, in Baltimore. His recent work was on soy foods.
In his retirement Sid
wanted to write a book about how his own life changed during the Great
Depression: “It was as if the only person I knew for whom the Depression had
been good was me. I was too young to be victimised by it, but old enough
to work…. I grew into adulthood perfectly confident about the future.”
Sidney Wilfred Mintz, anthropologist, b, Dover, New Jersey, USA,
16 November 1922; married 1st (1 son, one daughter), 2nd
1964 Jacqueline (née Wei); d. Plainsboro, N.J., 27 December 2015.
I took this recipe from Ada Gail, the
Russian-Jewish mother of my childhood friend in Lexington, KY. It has had many
incarnations since. My wife now makes the pickles to this recipe - they are
much in demand.
(Published in The Official Foodie
Handbook, Ann Barr and Paul Levy 1984)
Ada Gail’s Authentic Jewish Pickled
Cucumber
3 kilos (6 lb) pickling cucumbers,
about 8cm (3 in) long, scrubbed
18 sprigs of fresh dill
18 peeled cloves of garlic
6 mild chili peppers
36 black peppercorns
1 tbsp mixed pickling spice
6 vine leaves (optional)
1 ½ tsp alum (available from the
chemist or pharmacist, important for keeping the pickle crisp)
8.5 litres (14.4 pints, 9 US quarts)
water
350g (12 oz, 1 ½ US cups) coarse salt
12.5 cl (4 fl oz, ½ US cup) cider or
white wine vinegar
Into each of six sterilised jars put
three sprigs of dill, three cloves of garlic, one chilli, six peppercorns, a
pinch of pickling spice and of alum.
Tightly pack the cucumbers into the jars.
Make the brine by boiling the water
with the salt and vinegar, and pour the hot bring over the cucumbers,
reserving the remaining brine. Cover
each jar with a vine leaf and seal.
After two or three days bubbles will appear, indicating
fermentation. Top up the jars with the
reserved brine, brought to the boil, and seal the jars again. When the brine clears, fermentation has
stopped, and you can eat the pickle four or five days after this. In any case, eat it all up within a couple of
months.
Green tomatoes, beans and other
vegetables can be pickled in the same way.
