| Title | The Sugar Devil: Demonizing the Taste of Sweetness in Denmark |
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| Contributor | Susanne Højlund (author) |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.33134/HUP-13-5 |
| License | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ |
| Publisher | Helsinki University Press |
| Published on | 2021-12-13 |
| Long abstract | This chapter focuses on how a food item, namely sugar, suddenly emerged as devilish in Danish children’s institutions. How, the article asks, has it become possible within a relative short number of years to change the perceptions of sugar and agree on it as a dangerous foodstuff to an extent that there are written rules for its use for nearly all children in Denmark? The folk devil here is someone, or something, that has always been there but which suddenly (re)emerges as particularly evil. |
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Susanne Højlund is associate professor at Department of Anthropology, Aarhus University. She has done research centred around questions of welfare and wellbeing of children in Denmark with different projects: The meaning of home and hominess at children’s homes; marginalised youth and future; the anthropology of food and taste (including fieldwork in Cuba – published in the book Sugar and Modernity in Latin America, 2014). Since 2014 she has been partner in the national project Taste for Life (Smag for Livet), where she does research on children, youth and taste. Co-edited Making Taste Public, Bloomsbury 2017, with prof. Carole Counihan.