Sidney Mintz, American anthropologist and author of Sweetness and Power, introduces the work by discussing his own experiences conducting anthropological fieldwork in sugar-growing and manufacturing centers in Puerto Rico and the insights this work yielded for his research. He then lays out a roadmap for subsequent chapters and for the book as a whole, the purpose of which is “to explain what sugar reveals about a wider world, entailing as it does a lengthy history of changing relationships among peoples, societies, and substances” (xxiv-xxv). By examining the historical relations within sugar production and consumption, Mintz hopes to contribute to an “anthropology of the present” or an “anthropology of modern life” (xxvii).

With this introduction, the author teases his focus and interests for the rest of the book: the relationship between the English sugar-consuming metropolis and the Caribbean sugar-producing colonies; the history of sugar production culminating in the Caribbean plantation system; the historically changing uses and meanings of sugar different classes of society, and the future and possibilities of the discipline of anthropology.

Our food preferences, how we eat, and our feelings about food “speak eloquently to the question of how we perceive ourselves in relation to others” (4). Mintz provides the example of the !Kung bushmen of Africa who deliberately dispersed freshly hunted eland meat throughout the community in ways that demonstrated “who one was, how one was related to others, and what was entailed” (5).