Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
tions of industrial cities, creating large, dense markets. Improved public
health measures, ranging from vaccinations to sewage systems, lowered
mortality rates. Workers' discretionary incomes also rose, enabling in-
creases in per capita consumption of foodstuffs and other goods. In min-
ing, milling, manufacturing, transportation, and other industries, cor-
porations capable of producing and selling commodities at previously
unattainable scales proliferated (United Fruit was hardly unique for its
time). In order to ''scale up,'' these corporations frequently invested in
processing and transportation technologies that enabled them to acceler-
ate the pace of production, distribution, and sale of commodities while
cutting labor costs. Increasingly, fossil fuels (mostly coal) powered the
machinery of mass production and mass transportation.
Consideration of the above processes is essential for understanding
what made possible mass consumption in general, but they are far less
helpful in accounting for the popularityof specific commodities. Explain-
ingmassdesireforcertainthingsandnotforothersrequiresconsideration
of cultural contexts. For example, Sidney Mintz has demonstrated the
power of sweetness in driving sugar production/consumption dynamics.
Sweetnessseemstohavewideappealacrosscultures,butMintzandothers
locatetheemergenceofapreferenceforsucrose(refinedwhitesugar)over
othersweetenersinpartsofsixteenth-centuryEurope.
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Inthenineteenth-
century United States, the consumption of both sugar-based confections
and sugar-sweetened hot beverages connoted European cosmopolitan-
ism.The increasing availabilityof once ''exotic'' and expensive goods pro-
duced in the tropics became an everyday sign of rising U.S. hegemony in
tropical Asia and Latin America.
The widespread availability of refined sugar (sucrose) contributed to
the rising consumption of other commodities. Many U.S. coffee drink-
ers spooned sugar into their cups in order to sweeten their daily caf-
feine ''fix.''
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At the same time, the psychoactive properties of coffee may
have simultaneously increased demand for refined sugar via a kind of
nineteenth-century ''synergy.'' Sugar and coca extracts were key ingredi-
ents in Coca-Cola, which, along with other sweetened carbonated bever-
ages like Hires Root Beer, would eventually supplant coffee as the most
widely consumed beverages in the United States. The popularity of coffee
probablycontributed to a decline in hot cocoa drinking, but refined sugar
helped to give rise to novel forms of cocoa consumption in the form of
solid milk chocolate, a shift in taste that Milton Hershey both capitalized
upon and promoted via the mass production of five-cent chocolate bars
and Hershey's Kiss candies. In order to ensure a steady supply of sweet-
