Sidney Mintz, Father of Food Anthropology, Dies at 93 - The New York Times: "Sidney W. Mintz, a renowned cultural anthropologist who provocatively linked Britain’s insatiable sweet tooth with slavery, capitalism and imperialism, died on Sunday in Plainsboro, N.J. He was 93.
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The cause was a severe head injury from a fall, his wife, Jacqueline Mintz, said.
Professor Mintz was often described as the father of food anthropology, a mantle bestowed on him after the critical and popular success of his 1985 book, “Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History.”
Even before that, though, he had stretched the academic boundaries of anthropology beyond the study of aboriginal peoples. (He joked about those who believed that “if they don’t have blowguns and you can’t catch malaria, it’s not anthropology.”)
His groundbreaking fieldwork in the Caribbean was the basis of his book “Worker in the Cane: A Puerto Rican Life History” in 1960, in which he profiled the rural proletariat — the “millions of people in the world, nearly all of them people of color, working at ghastly jobs producing basic commodities, mostly for consumers in the West,” as he described them to the journal American Anthropologist last year."
http://sidneymintz.net/sugar.php
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