Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Culture, and the Past (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Culture, and the Past Harvey Levenstein Sidney W. Mintz. Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Culture, and the Past. Boston: Beacon Press, 1996. xix + 149 pp. $22.00. The anthropologist Sidney Mintz’s book Sweetness and Power (1985) was something of a tour de force: in following the path of sugar from the slave plantations [End Page 567] of the colonial British West Indies, first to the tables of the upper class and then to the homes of the British working class, it managed to illuminate the intricate relationships between race, imperialism, class, culture, and power. The present slim book of short essays is hardly as sweeping or as deep, yet readers interested in food, culture, and history will nevertheless find it suggestive and often provocative. The subtitle, “Excursions into Eating, Culture, and the Past,” denotes the problem that collections of quite disparate essays such as this pose to the reviewer: how to find the threads linking them all. Indeed, Mintz himself seems to have a bit of a problem with this. On first reading, the preface and introduction seem more in the nature of a general plea for studying food and culture than a guide to what is to come. By the end, though, it becomes clear that this is really what most of the essays are about. Rather than being full-blown studies based on original research, they instead comprise mainly thoughts provoked by the research of others or, as in case of the essays on sweetness, power, and morality, of the author himself. Yet a recurring question is the one provoked by Mintz’s book on sugar: the all-important one of what powers shape people’s food habits. Here, unlike many anthropologists who, in the 1970s, were sidetracked onto Lévi-Straussian studies searching for the underlying mental structures governing human food choices, Mintz is a firm believer in looking to the past to help explain the present. Rather than searching for the immutable, he looks at difference and change, and asks what causes it. To some historians, the answers Mintz suggests may seem like the neo-Marxist equivalent of “Round up the usual suspects”: class, capitalism, and imperialism. But his ideas are much more complex, and subtle, than that. His view is leavened with respect for poststructuralists such as Pierre Bourdieu, who emphasize the importance of the symbolic properties that cultures attach to food, especially in class relations. Thus, while he almost lapses into a kind of crude economism in an essay that seems to account for the rise of Coca-Cola simply by its having had the contract to supply combat troops in World War Two, he tiptoes away from that and ends up suggesting that power includes the power to bestow meanings on things (including foods) and that how these meanings are assigned needs further study. The next essay, which deals with freedom as well as power, also reflects his refusal to buy into simplistic economic determinism. He argues that, by providing ostensibly powerless African slaves in the West Indies with a field upon which to exercise a certain kind of creativity and freedom, food preparation acted as a tool of empowerment: it gave them a sense of personal dignity and worth that helped them resist the dehumanizing forces of the system. Mintz seems at his most engaged when it comes to discussing food preparation, and this is not surprising. The charming preface, with its affectionate recollections of his father’s ventures into the restaurant business, makes it clear that he is very much committed to the importance of preparing and eating good food. His last chapter begins by raising the question of whether there is such a thing as “American cuisine” (he answers “No,” mainly because he thinks cuisines [End Page 568] are by definition regional, not national). After a brief, routine overview of American food history, the chapter ends with a ringing indictment of contemporary American food habits. Although Mintz repeats the usual lamentations about the increased consumption of fats and sweets at the expense of complex carbohydrates, he seems particularly exercised over the large proportion of their food budgets that...