Culinary History vs. Food History: Food Historians: Social, Political, and Economic Influences

In Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (1985), the anthropologist Sidney Mintz created an influential interdisciplinary model for food historians by combining his field work with Caribbean sugarcane workers and a study of the social, economic, and political history of a major agricultural product. He argues that in England before 1800 sugar was a scarce food available only to the rich, but it later became available to everyone largely because plantation slaves in the Caribbean provided cheap labor while industrialists in England developed efficient manufacturing techniques for processing sugar.