Sugar beets grown in the Red River Valley of North Dakota and Minnesota are the most important source of American-made sugar. Contemporary sugar production and consumption provoke some bitter disagreements. Local growing and processing of sugar beets is an essential economic driver in the Red River Valley region, yet these gains would not be possible without massive federal subsidies. Moreover, genetically modified sugar beets are refined into a substance that is directly linked to national epidemics of diabetes and obesity. This article explores lessons the author learned by moonlighting as a truck driver for the sugar beet harvest. Rather than dismiss industrial food as fake on the one hand or “foodie culture” as entitled on the other, the author looks for how the quest for authenticity can transcend this divide. He argues that food work offers ways to see differently the priorities of people invested in both local food and industrial food systems.

Using Donald Trump's “Make America Great Again” slogan from last year's U.S. presidential campaign as a framing device, this article considers how nostalgia in food commentary is a critique of present circumstances that also elides unsavory realities of the past. Noting that contemporary food nostalgia for past foodways is ironic given that food commentators of the past also pined for erstwhile foodways, this article examines how early twentieth-century dietary critiques projected anxieties about modernity in their disapprovals of the decline of home cooking and the rising consumption of items like white bread and sugar. While such critiques have much in common with contemporary food nostalgia, this article points to a unique preoccupation of the more recent dietary critiques—the obesity epidemic.

Sugar holds a special place in both public policy and scientific debate, each of which frequently attributes to it a unique, intrinsic power. A rather deterministic view of sugar is asserted in a range of scholarly fields, including findings of parallels between the brain's response to sugar and opiates, widespread suggestions of a hardwired human attraction to sweetness, and public health claims that increased access to affordable sugar inevitably leads to epidemic increases in rates of obesity around the globe. Japan poses an important counterpoint to such approaches because—despite high wealth levels and affordable access to sugary foods—it is a striking outlier to global obesity trends. Yet, surprisingly, while Japan's per capita consumption of sugar is much lower than other wealthy nations, the intensity of interest and cultural elaboration around sweet foods is arguably far greater than in the United States and Europe. Through an examination of attitudes, experiences, and patterns of use concerning sweet foods in Japan, this paper considers the conundrum of how and why Japanese tend to love sweet foods more but consume them less, furthering our understanding of the interplay of materiality and meaning in food and eating, while also addressing key questions regarding sugar and sweetness that have implications for issues of public health and nutrition.

Drawing from historical cookbooks, literary works, and contemporary sources, this article traces a shift in the conception of the French dessert course from an adjunct but fully edible form in the seventeenth century to a mainly visual element in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the current balance between edibility and “legibility” in iconic desserts. What was once simply fruit and then pure ornament is now at once delicious and symbolic. The essay argues that present-day desserts represent a merging of taste and aesthetics, with the “decoration” now in the form of a colorful and sometimes invented history. When the dessert course was democratized in the nineteenth century—open to bourgeois tables—specific dishes became “textualized,” codified by name and form and inscribed with origin stories that connect these dishes to French identity, making dessert both symbolically and materially accessible to a wider public.

This article is an anthropological archeology of Sicilian confectionery, from the prehistoric-like assemblage of sesame seeds and honey ( giurgiulena ) to the extravagant gelato di campagna and the baroque-rustic cassata. Sweets are analyzed as architectural constructions that rely on newly discovered ingredients and techniques to create edible edifices that amazed the eye as much as the palate. They emerge from their historical and social context and affirm themselves as moments of innovation in the culinary art. On a deeper level, the art of pasticceri bears the marks of an existential quest that constantly redefines man's symbolic relation to the forces and contrasts of life.