How sugar became daily: the link of colonial sugar reinforcement to “sweet” embeddedness in Javanese dietary culture

This research traces how sugar, once a ceremonial luxury of Javanese elites, became a normalized daily staple that continues to shape dietary culture in postcolonial Java. It reconstructs the historical and cultural processes that embedded sweetness into everyday life between 1900 and 1993. Drawing on Sidney Mintz’s Sweetness and Power and food-regime theory (Friedmann & McMichael), the study relocates analysis from metropolitan consumption to colonial peripheries, showing how coerced cultivation, industrial infrastructures, and postcolonial developmentalism together transformed sugar from an export commodity into a symbol of modern respectability. Using archival sources, colonial economic histories, and descriptive evidence from the Indonesia Family Life Survey (1993 & 2014), the research identifies enduring regional contrasts between the Javanese and Sundanese, where Javanese areas (Central Java, the Special Region of Yogyakarta, and East Java) proximity to sugar mills and plantations normalized sweetened diets, while West Java’s tea-based ecology fostered lighter tastes. These sensory divergences reveal how colonial zoning and labor organization reinforced dietary cultures. Post-independence reclassification of sugar as a domestic necessity, combined with neoliberal import policies, sustained these habits even after local production declined. The study proposes the concept of colonial taste inheritance to explain how structural and symbolic legacies of the sugar economy persist in present-day consumption. Ultimately, it argues that Java’s “sweet embeddedness” exemplifies how power, infrastructure, and cultural meaning co-produced a lasting dietary regime where colonial extraction continues to flavor postcolonial modernity.