Sydney Mintz “profiled the rural proletariat” – millions of people employed in appalling conditions to produce food for Western consumers – in provocative books that earned him the unofficial title of father of food anthropology, says a New York Times obituary. His 1985 book, “Sweetness and Power, the place of sugar in modern history,” linked colonial Britain with slavery and capitalism. “In his view, that hunger [for sugar] shaped empires, spawned industrial-like plantations in the Caribbean and South America that presaged capitalism and globalization, enslaved and decimated indigenous populations, and engendered navies to protect trade while providing a sweetener to the wealthy and a cheap source of energy to industrial workers.” He described the increasing demand for sugar as “an artifact of intra-class struggles for profit.” Mintz was 93 when he died on Dec. 27 in New Jersey. He was interviewed at length a few months ago in the Secret Ingredient podcast from KUT in Austin.