In American Slavers, Sean M. Kelley surveys the relatively unknown history of Americans who traded in slaves in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
While many companies have trumpeted their support for the Black Lives Matter movement, others are beginning to face consumer pressure for not appearing to do enough.
This study isn’t the only one to show the positive impacts of sugary beverage taxes. This study on Berkeley’s soda tax found a whopping 21 percent decrease in sugary beverage consumption. At Harvard, researchers predicted that Philadelphia’s sugary beverage tax, which went into effect this year, could prevent 36,000 cases of obesity over 10 years, prevent more than 2,000 cases of diabetes in the first year after the tax reaches its full effect, and save $200 million.
The anthropologist Sidney Mintz has died at the age of 93. His book, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, used sugar as an entry point into a critical analysis of social institutions, in this case slavery, race, class, and global capitalism. The book continues to be relevant to those concerns as well as to today’s obsession with sugar consumption.
Soda is a fructose delivery system as tobacco is a nicotine delivery system. (And if it’s not “truly” addictive but only habit forming, so much the better; it’ll be that much easier to get people to cut back.)
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