Sidney Mintz Quotes

7 Sourced Quotes

If they don't have blowguns and you can't catch malaria, it's not anthropology.

Sidney Mintz
Everyone knew there were millions of people in the world, nearly all of them people of color, working at ghastly jobs producing basic commodities, mostly for consumers in the West, but hardly anybody had thought about it — including myself.

Sidney Mintz
I think anthropological methods can be fruitfully applied to a complex society. But to do it right, people must take seriously what "complex" means. The overwhelming weight of economic and political power has to be appreciated longitudinally, historically.

Sidney Mintz
Increasing self-confidence leads us to work in amore serious way; doing the work with expertise and ease means becoming professional. Of course, it also meant learning more about myself — but obviously that was not the point of it. It was not for self-realization that we'd been entrusted with funds and given an objective.

Sidney Mintz
I came by my interest in food honestly; feeding people had become what my father did for a living. As I grew, I was able to help.

Sidney Mintz
I was always interested in food, but it honestly never occurred to me that I might become an anthropologist of food until after I wrote that sugar book and people began telling me that I was one. Very early I became interested in how people acquired, prepared, cooked, and served food, and that all came from my father.

Sidney Mintz
We appear to be capable of eating (and liking) just about anything that is not immediately toxic," he wrote in "Sweetness and Power." "What constitutes 'good food,' like what constitutes good weather, a good spouse or a fulfilling life, is a social, not a biological, matter.

Sidney Mintz