Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Power, and the Past

Sidney Mintz, a professor of anthropology at Johns Hopkins University examines how foods such as sugar, alcohol, chocolate, and tea, once limited to the rich and powerful, became accessible to the general populace, and how companies such as Coca Cola gained international recognition--exporting their products to even the most remote regions of the world. In his final essay, "Eating American," Mintz discusses the nation's obsession with fitness and diet and our progressive weight gain. He also provides an apocalyptic view of the future--predicting a doubling of the nation's population by 2064, and a loss of more than 180 million acres of arable land through erosion and urbanization.