sweetness and power : 1 and 2

In the reading food is examined in its social meaning. The text claims that when "unfamiliar substances are taken up by new users, they enter into pre-existing social and psychological contexts." Sugar was used to demonstrate this concept. Sugar as it first entered into the British diet was reserved to the wealthiest and nobles. So this would result as the social meaning of foods in England. However, with time (by 1900), it entered the diet of the everyday worker supplying 1/5 of the calories obtained. The text goes further into the analysis of a concept seemingly even more global. In citing this concept the text examines the eating habits of an African tribe, the Bemba. Bemba meals consist of (ubwali) a semi-sollide paste (made of millet), some what like gellitin, and a sauce (umunani) consisting of vegetables, meat, fish, mushrooms and or insects. To the Bemba, ubwali is the only food actually qualified as real food, making a proper meal. Grilled maize, fruits, berries etc... were never considered filling. The sauce had the function to: one, make the ubwali easy to swallow and two, give it variant tastes. The ubwali alone would not be interesting to eat and too monotone. The text outlines that often different peoples "subsist on some principal carbohydrate" with some complement to it. More examples are "tortillas, rice, potatoes, bread, taro, yams [and] manioc cakes".
Another subject analysed is the general liking for sugar. To this the text explains and cites the general want of people for the sweetest and ripest fruits. Or again the milk people receive as babies which is in part sugary as leading a base for the liking to sugar.
In chapter two the origin of sugar itself is traced. It was first domesticated in New Guinea and followed to the Philipines, India, and possibly Indonesia. It follows up into the creation of sugar itself from sugar cane to sugar crystals. After the sugar is pressed and the juice extracted is bioled till saturerated (turning into crystals). This process of cultivation and processing was introduced in Europe by the Arabs through conquest. The text then goes into the sugar industry from the colonies which considerably brought down the price of the good along with tobacco.