Paper short abstract:

What can sugar and sweetness tell us about the specificities, and limits, of the anthropology of food? Drawing on ethnographic research with families and primary schools in Scotland, I use sugar to explore the intersections between the anthropology of food, medical anthropology and kinship studies.

Paper long abstract:

What can sugar and sweetness tell us about the specificities, and limits, of the anthropology of food? In 1988, Sidney Mintz demonstrated that sugar production and consumption are political – sugar not only reveals, but has contributed to the formation of economic relations, imperial legacies, patterns of labour and gendered consumption in the UK. In 2018, 30 years after the publication of Sweetness and Power, I carried out ethnographic observations on the role of sugar consumption in children and adults’ lives at home and at school in Scotland, reflecting on how sugar has become both a public health object and a matter of kinship. In my doctoral research, I argued that sugar – as an ambiguous substance navigated by parents – revealed contemporary conceptions of kinship in Scotland, and that kinship relations in turn revealed the values attributed to sugar.

Food and kinship are among anthropology’s oldest objects of interest, receiving fresh impetus in the 1980s and 1990s after a period of decreased attention. While food anthropology has emerged and expanded in parallel with public concerns over the links between food consumption and obesity, diabetes and heart disease, kinship studies have been reinvigorated by public interest in assisted reproductive technologies. Attention to biomedicine has partly mediated the rise and interest in these two fields, with biological reductionism and naturalisation emerging as key anthropological critiques. I use sugar to explore the intersections between the anthropology of food, kinship studies and medical anthropology, and to reflect on the future of these intersections.