Mintz's 'Time, Sugar, And Sweetness'

Pour Some Sugar on Mintz: The Success of Mintz in Anthropologic Writing
Food has been a topic of deliberation and study for years, mostly due to its implications for the society and people who consume it. Many people research foods in different ways and use the information they gather to come to various conclusions about people, places, times, or things. Namely, in the article “Time, Sugar, and Sweetness” author Sidney W. Mintz poses a very compelling discussion on sugar for its use in history and for its use today, while in the article “Why Revolutionaries Love Spicy Food” author Andrew Leonard contemplates the success of the chili pepper in China. Furthermore, in “More Than Just the ‘Big Piece of Chicken’” author Psyche Williams-Forson explores the creation and prosperity of chicken-related black stereotypes. Out of all three articles, however, Mintz’s “Time, Sugar, and Sweetness” was the most cogent, as his contained more unique ideas, the best support,
In the beginning of his article, Mintz says that the field of anthropology is examining food in new ways, which has “re enlivened the study of any subject matter that can be treated by seeing the patterned relationships between substances and human groups as forms of communication” (91). In order to truly understand relationships between food and humans, he says, one must combine history and anthropology and study more ordinary foods (Mintz 91). Out of all three articles, “Time, Sugar, and Sweetness” was the only one that took such a novel idea for the time period and supported it with a variety of strong evidence and sound intelligent reasoning. The articles “Why Revolutionaries Love Spicy Food” and “More Than Just the ‘Big Piece of Chicken’” also tried to explain innovative concepts and emphasize new ideas, but their