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

Evaluating Mintzs Sweetness and occasionWhy would any unrivaled feel the need to economize an entire book on such a mundane topic such as dulcorate? Look around at some food products you might feature and you will realize that many if not all of them contain net in some form or another. For example, a dirty dog of soda, which roughly people drink e genuinelyday, contains (depending on the brand) approximately 40 grams of sugars. Look raise and you might find that even things such as cheese or chips or soup contain several grams of sugar in them. The across-the-board diversification of products that contain sugar just goes to show you how widespread the subprogram of sugar rightfully is. This fact alone could be enough to exchange someone to create a book solely about sugar. maven passage that Mintz quotes on page 15 that really seems to capture our (Westerners) jam with sugar, and a strong reason the book at hand is as followsWestern peoples consume enormous per capita quantities of refined sugar because, to most people, very sweet 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 frank desire for an explanation of how such a once unknown affection took center 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 society important. By analyzing who Mintzs audience is meant to be, what goals he has in indi te this book, what structure his book incorporates, what type, or types, of history he represents within the book, what large-hearted of sources he uses, and what important information and conclusions he presents, we can come to fall in understand 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 must first understand who his book is aimed toward, in other words, his audience.