Sugar substitutes have been a part of American life since saccharin was introduced at the 1893 World's Fair. In Empty Pleasures, the first history of artificial sweeteners in the United States, Carolyn de la Pena blends popular culture with business and women's history, examining the invention, production, marketing, regulation, and consumption of sugar substitutes such as saccharin, Sucaryl, NutraSweet, and Splenda. She describes how saccharin, an accidental laboratory by-product, was transformed from a perceived adulterant into a healthy ingredient. As food producers and pharmaceutical companies worked together to create diet products, savvy women's magazine writers and editors promoted artificially sweetened foods as ideal, modern weight-loss aids, and early diet-plan entrepreneurs built menus and fortunes around pleasurable dieting made possible by artificial sweeteners.

NutraSweet, Splenda, and their predecessors have enjoyed enormous success by promising that Americans, especially women, can ""have their cake and eat it too,"" but Empty Pleasures argues that these ""sweet cheats"" have fostered troubling and unsustainable eating habits and that the promises of artificial sweeteners are ultimately too good to be true.

Empty Pleasures provides a fascinating window into the complex history of artificial sweeteners in the United States, blending business history with discussions about how these products actually worked within the lives of consumers. An in-depth, nuanced study.--Amy Farrell, author of Yours in Sisterhood: Ms. Magazine and the Promise of Popular Feminism
|""Empty Pleasures, a rich and rewarding read, makes the tools of cultural analysis available to a wide range of readers. De la Pena's argument, that artificial sweeteners provide consumers with a way to exercise 'indulgent restraint,' will surely re-energize scholarly and policy discussions of the American diet.""--Jennifer Scanlon, author of Bad Girls Go Everywhere: The Life of Helen Gurley Brown
|""At a time when we are overwhelmed by a million studies about the purported 'obesity epidemic,' Carolyn de la Pena's extraordinary book comes along as a refreshing historical perspective on dieting practices, commercial opportunism, and the social construction of 'expert' authority. This gracefully written study offers a bracing antidote to the food industry's craze for nutraceuticals, functional foods, and other technological fixes for public health problems.""--Warren Belasco, author of Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food

Carolyn de la Pena is a professor of American studies at the University of California, Davis. She is author of The Body Electric: How Strange Machines Built the Modern American.