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  Sugar

  The World Corrupted:

  FROM SLAVERY TO OBESITY

  JAMES WALVIN

  Contents

  Preface

  Introduction Sugar in Our Time

  1 A Traditional Taste

  2 The March of Decay

  3 Sugar and Slavery

  4 Environmental Impact

  5 Shopping for Sugar

  6 A Perfect Match for Tea and Coffee

  7 Pandering to the Palate

  8 Rum Makes its Mark

  9 Sugar Goes Global

  10 The Sweetening of America

  11 Power Shifts in the New World

  12 A Sweeter War and Peace

  13 Obesity Matters

  14 The Way We Eat Now

  15 Hard Truth About Soft Drinks

  16 Turning the Tide – Beyond the Sugar Tax

  Conclusion Bitter-Sweet Prospects

  Bibliography and Further Reading

  Numbered References

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  Our new grandson, Max Walvin, arrived when I found myself immersed in sugar; he quickly proved himself to be the sweetest thing of all.

  This book is for him.

  Preface

  THE SHOP DIRECTLY opposite my childhood home was a small newspaper shop. But all the neighbourhood children called it ‘the sweet shop’. The counter was covered with a variety of national and local newspapers, but behind the counter were stacked rows of bottles and jars filled with the sweets we loved and which we were given as treats or bought with our spare pennies – as much, that is, as the ration books in the 1940s and 1950s allowed. For most of the time, however, we could only look at the jars enviously; money and rations were in short supply. Fifty yards away up the street, there was another sweet shop, in a small dowdy bungalow, which sold nothing but sweets and chocolates. As if that were not enough, we could stride back across the street to the local Co-op with its own enticing offerings of chocolates and sweets (and biscuits and cakes as well). Even in those straitened times, all this seemed a cornucopia of sweet things, and all within a mere hundred yards of our front door.

  We all had a sweet tooth, and the constraints of wartime and post-war rationing only made the craving worse. Sometimes we bartered one rationed item for another, swapping life’s essentials for a sweet pleasure. Our mother once exchanged our bacon ration for our grandparents’ sweets ration.

  This addiction to sweets and chocolates wasn’t just a family matter, but was deeply entrenched in the whole community; all my childhood friends and their families were equally addicted. On high days and holidays, birthdays, Christmas and Whitsuntide (a major event in Manchester), children were treated to special gifts of chocolates and sweets. Even on our summer seaside holidays – that annual Lancastrian trek from the cotton towns to the Irish Sea – one seaside treat was tackling lengths of that sticky, tooth-defying, sugar-filled Blackpool rock. Predictably, when sweet rationing finally ended in 1953, the local shops were swiftly cleaned out of the sweet temptations we had all looked forward to – my brother and I managed to get our hands on a small box of Cadbury’s Milk Tray.

  Our love of sugary treats was only one example of the role sugar played in our lives. In fact, sugar was everywhere. It held pride of place, alongside the teapot, on the kitchen table that served as a gathering point not merely for meals but as a rendezvous for the gaggles of women who trooped in and out of the house throughout the day. Daily social life was lubricated by regular servings of sweet tea. My grandpa could have rivalled Dr Johnson in his love of strong tea; he always had a half-pint mug of strong tea to hand, and it, too, was sweetened with lashings of sugar, scooped from the bag that lived permanently on the table in the room that served as kitchen, dining and sitting room.

  My mother and her women friends, like the nation at large, moaned endlessly about shortages, but especially about the scarcity of sugar, although what they were allowed now seems lavish in retrospect – far, far more than my own family would use in the course of a week. But at that time, from 1942–53, sugar was added to everything. It even accompanied us to school. We were dispatched to primary school with a snack for the morning break: slices of toast or bread, glued together with heavily sweetened jam, or simply sprinkled with sugar.

  All this took place in a society that was severely rationed and we all ticked along in pinched conditions, making do as best we could. Yet throughout, sugar was everywhere. It was (like tobacco smoke) an inescapable fact of life, and so integral to the way we all lived that we did not even notice it – except, that is, when we ran short.

  We were also regular visitors to the local dentist. Not for regular check-ups, but to remove the damage wrought by our sugary diet. All my older relatives had dentures. My father had all his teeth removed at the age of twenty-one; my mother lost her remaining teeth in her mid-thirties. Grandma, uncles, aunts and close family friends – all had dentures. Grandpa was an exception; his few surviving teeth were like Elizabeth I’s – gnarled and discoloured – but they just about served their purpose. No one thought it odd or unusual to be without their own teeth, even at an age which, today, seems shockingly young. Teeth were extracted in people’s early years, partly for financial reasons – it was cheaper to have them whipped out than to spend money on regular dental visits. Overwhelmingly, however, teeth were extracted because they were rotten.

  In my family – and I suspect throughout my whole community – false teeth were more common than healthy, natural teeth among adults. Dentures were even a cause of family hilarity. One set shot out when a relative sneezed. When relatives were confined to bed, I recall visiting them and being transfixed by their dentures grinning at me from a bedside glass of water. When one elderly neighbour lost his teeth, we all turned his home upside down to look for them – in vain. On more formal family occasions – those Sundays when invited to ‘tea’ – relatives’ ill-fitting, clicking dentures were a giveaway, clues to a much wider, more significant narrative. These personal recollections of family life are important elements in the story that follows. Of course, I didn’t realise it at the time, but it now seems obvious. What lies behind all this is the story of the widespread damage and corruption caused by sugar.

  It took a very long time for the penny to drop. Even when I lived and worked on a Jamaican sugar estate in the late 1960s, I didn’t think about the connection between sugar and the health of people who consumed it. As a newly minted academic historian, I was hard at work on what became, in league with a friend and colleague, my first published book: the history of one sugar plantation between 1670 and 1970. It was studying Jamaica’s sugar fields that set me on course for my subsequent academic career as a student of slavery. But in the beginning, I didn’t make the connection between Africans in Jamaican sugar fields and the world I grew up in, in the north of England. Yet both were intimately linked.

  We have come to think of sugar very differently in the early twenty-first century, and the book that follows is an attempt to explain how that happened. At one level, we view it differently partly because we know so much more about it. But sugar has also taken a route no one could have predicted, even a generation ago. Very few people suggested, say in 1970, that sugar posed a global health problem. Yet, today, sugar is regularly denounced as a dangerous addiction – on a par with tobacco – and is the cause of a global epidemic of obesity.

  But how did this come about? How did a simple commodity that was once a prized monopoly of kings and princes become an essential ingredient in the lives of common people – before mutating yet again into the apparent cause and occasion of major global health problems?

  Introduction

  Sugar in Our Time

  HOW DID IT come to this? What persuaded tens of millions of people the wor
ld over to like – to need – a commodity, sugar, which medical science now insists is bad for us? As if to compound the confusion, in the summer of 2016 we were bombarded by adverts proclaiming a product because it contained no sugar. That summer, millions of TV viewers were exposed to a very unusual advertisement for Coca-Cola. At matches played at football’s Euro finals in France, and watched by millions globally (the entire competition partly sponsored by Coca-Cola), adverts flashed along the electronic hoardings telling us that their new drink contained ‘Zero Sugar’. Anyone watching a game would have seen that message – ‘Zero Sugar’ – dozens of times.

  Those games were, of course, an excellent platform for adverts. Next to the Olympics and the World Cup, the Euro finals were guaranteed to generate a global audience counted in the hundreds of millions. But what was striking about this particular advert was that it was promoting a product by asserting what it did not have; it was announcing a drink that lacked something, a drink that did not contain sugar. Launching that product had been a costly business – £10 million in the UK alone.1 It is hard to think of a comparable promotion – lauding a product, not for what it offers, but for what it doesn’t offer. Here is a drink without sugar.

  For English viewers, it might have seemed a timely advert because, only a year earlier, a major Government report had highlighted the problem of sugar-related obesity among millions of English people.2 Although sugar has been part of our diet for centuries, in recent years it has become a subject of contentious social and political debate. In my own childhood (in the years of wartime and post-war shortages and rationing), my parents often complained about not being able to get enough sugar. Today, parents are discouraged – by doctors, newspapers and politicians – from consuming too much sugar. For centuries, children were pampered and soothed by being given sweet treats; today, the principal drive is to restrict childrens access to sugar and all sweet things. In fact, sugar has taken on a pariah status. Yet, within living memory, it was widely viewed both as a necessity and a pleasurable essential a commodity that fortified and pleasured in equal part. What has brought about this extraordinary change in the way we see and talk about a commodity that has been part of the human diet for centuries?

  * * *

  Though part of Western diet for many centuries, before roughly 1600 sugar was a costly luxury, available only to the rich and powerful. All that changed in the course of the seventeenth century, with the rise of European sugar colonies in the Americas. Thereafter, sugar became cheap, ubiquitous and hugely popular. What had formerly been a costly item now became an everyday necessity. Sugar that had once graced only the tables of society’s elites was, by 1800, one of life’s essentials even for the poorest of working people. And that was how sugar remained, until the mid-twentieth century – an unquestioned part of the lives of millions and a vital ingredient in a wide variety of food and drink. Yet today, when sugar is discussed in the media, it is portrayed as a threat to health – a major contributor not only to individual ill health but also the cause of a global epidemic of obesity. As a result, sugar has become a matter of pressing concern for governments and international health organisations.

  Today, people the world over consume sugar in staggering volumes, with consumption highest in countries which produce sugar – Brazil, Fiji and Australia, for example. Australians consume more than 50kg per person each year. But these levels are only slightly lower in other countries – such as in Europe and North America – places that first pioneered mass consumption of sugar after 1600. Yet even these broad generalisations have changed quite dramatically over the past generation, thanks largely to the impact of modern fast foods and fizzy drinks, most of which come laden with sugar. Much of their sweetness today derives, however, not from cane sugar but from corn or chemical sweeteners.

  The taste for sweetness in food and drink is universal, and the cultivation of sugar is global. A great variety of sugar cane is cultivated in the tropics, while sugar beet is cultivated in temperate regions. But the engine behind the rise of sugar’s popularity was cane sugar. Its early history, in Indonesia, India and China, was small-scale and aimed solely at local markets. But when sugar cane was transplanted to plantations in the Mediterranean, then into islands in the Atlantic, the story changed and even more dramatically when sugar crossed the Atlantic to the Americas. There, sugar cane was cultivated and converted to sugar by enslaved Africans (themselves shipped across the Atlantic). It was this slave-grown sugar that brought about revolutionary changes in the landscape of the sugar colonies while transforming the tastes of the Western world.

  As Europeans and Americans settled and traded with the wider world in the course of the nineteenth century, they transplanted commercial sugar cultivation to new locations: to islands in the Indian Ocean, to Africa, Indonesia, to Pacific islands and to Australia. But wherever sugar took hold, local sugar planters had problems with labour. They found the answer in imported, indentured labour. From one sugar region to another – from Brazil to Hawaii – the sugar plantation became the home of alien people – people who had been uprooted and shipped vast distances to undertake the gruelling, intensive labour on sugar plantations.

  For all that, sugar plantations more than proved their worth to their owners and investors. But there was a price to pay for the development of the sugar plantation. The natural environments were hugely damaged by the development of sugar. From Barbados in the 1640s to the Florida Everglades in recent years, the ecological harm caused by sugar plantations has been enormous, and is only now being fully recognized. It is, however, the human cost of sugar cultivation which is most obvious and dramatic. It is at its most visible in the labour force, from the first slave gangs in sixteenth-century Brazil through to indentured Indian labourers in Fiji, the Japanese in Hawaii or the ‘South Sea Islanders’ shipped to Australia in the late nineteenth century. Cultivating sugar cane was a harsh business, and it was the labour of slaves and indentured labourers that transformed sugar from a luxury item to an essential commodity. Within the space of two centuries – roughly between 1700 and 1900 – sugar became a dietary essential for all sorts of people the world over.

  Clearly, there was something special, something distinctive, about sugar. People liked it and eventually came to need it. As global populations grew, especially in the nineteenth century, and as millions more expected sugar for their diet, the drive was on to satisfy their sweet cravings by cultivating sugar wherever the opportunity arose. Sugar could even be cultivated in colder climes by the late nineteenth century. The rise of sugar beet, first in Europe, then in the vast lands of North America, supplemented the world’s expanding sugar production. A century later, the production of sweeteners was augmented by the development of chemical and corn sweeteners. By the end of the twentieth century, the demand for sugar was rising by about 2 per cent a year, partly to satisfy the taste of an expanding population, but also because of the rise in living standards in newly developing nations. The wider world was turning to sweet food and drink much as the West had done in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As more and more people became prosperous, they demanded ever more sweetness.

  From the earliest days of slave-grown sugar in the Americas, sugar was so important, so central, that it became a source of political, economic and international dispute. Even today, sugar is a topic of intense discussion between nations and within international organisations. It serves to create a confusing welter of interests, commodities and prices, all of them weaving together the various producers and consumers, different international organisations and diverse agreements into a global web spun by the world’s need for sugar. What makes this even more perplexing, bizarre and even more difficult to grasp is the crucial point, now widely accepted, that sugar is actually bad for us. Indeed, medicine now affirms that sugar is bad. Full stop.

  But the claims that sugar is corrupting are of very recent vintage; if it is bad today, when was it good? In many respects, sugar has been bad for centuries; it was bad for i
ts labour force (slaves and indentured labourers), and it was bad for the ecology of sugar-growing regions. Now we learn that sugar is the prime cause of mounting ill health among nations all over the world. Nonetheless, sugar continues to be consumed in enormous volumes by more and more people. Sugar remains popular – more popular, in quantitative terms, than ever before. People still like sugar.

  How, then, did all this come about? How did hundreds of millions of people come to want and to rely on sugar? If it is true that sugar is bad for us, how did the world become so corrupted by this single, simple commodity?

  1

  A Traditional Taste

  SWEETENING FOOD AND drink has been part of human nutritional cultures for millennia. Sweetness for its own sake, sweetness to remove the bitterness of other foods and drinks, sweetness as a medical prescription, even sweetness as a religious promise – all and more have been part of human activities in countless diiferent societies. Think, too, of the way the images and ideals of sweetness have permeated English language – the very words ‘sugar’, ‘sweet’ and ‘honey’ have, for centuries, represented some of life’s happiest moments and the most delicious sensations. How often do people call loved ones ‘sugar’ or ‘honey’? Most of us can recall our very first ‘sweetheart’. And why, after marriage, and before embarking on a life together, do couples first enjoy a ‘honeymoon’? The English language fairly abounds with the vernacular and culture of sweetness, to convey the most delicate of personal feelings – of love for another person – to the baser instincts of bribery (‘a sweetener’).

  For many centuries, English has been replete with the language of sweetness. Middle English, for example, like the world it addressed, is littered with sweet references: to denote a loved one, a beautiful person, or someone with a good nature or disposition. Chaucer frequently uses ‘sweet’ to denote affection and love. So, too, three centuries later, does Shakespeare. Moreover, both men wrote in a society only marginally affected by sugar itself. The thesaurus on the very computer I used to write these words gives the following alternatives for sweetness: ‘lovable, cute, charming, engaging, appealing, attractive, delightful, adorable’.