Part one of term paper
Why would anyone feel the need to write an entire book on such a mundane topic such as sugar? Look around at some food products you might have and you will realize that many if not all of them contain sugar in some form or another. For example, a can of soda, which most people drink everyday, contains (depending on the brand) approximately ...

Part two of term paper
... solely about sugar. One passage that Mintz quotes on page 15 that really seems to capture our (Westerners) infatuation with sugar, and a strong reason the book at hand is as follows: Western peoples consume enormous per capita quantities of refined sugar because, to most people, very sweet foods taste very good. The existence of the human sweet tooth can be explained, ultimately, as an adaptation of ancestral populations to favor the ripest-and hence the sweetest-fruit. In other words, the sel ...