With the ‘life of sugar’, as explored in his historical study Sweetness and Power, Sidney Mintz (1985) shows us beautifully the various processes of change, caused by economics, by colonialism, by habit, and by class, that express themselves through the sweetness we eat. At first, this study gives us an insight into how sugar dramatically changed the British menu since 1900, which also happened to the American, the Dutch, the Danish, and the Swiss diet, but did not (for instance) have much of an impact on the French cuisine. On second thought, however, the empirical, materialist history of sugar consumption, as Mintz set it up, offered a most welcome and original rewriting of the idea of culture so important to the social sciences and the Humanities since the late nineteenth century in general and to the study of food and migration in particular.