by John McQuaid
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Fermentation’s powerful, evocative sensations transformed it from a mere culinary technique into a cultural force. Hints of this transition appear in myths dating back thousands of years. Homer incorporated them into his epics, the first written Western literary masterpieces. They were composed around the end of the eighth century BC, probably in an area that is now part of modern Turkey, not far from the birthplace of herding and cheese. In one of these stories, Odysseus and his crew, trying to make their way back to Greece, arrive at the island of the Cyclopes, giant, one-eyed monsters. They sneak into the Cyclops Polyphemus’s cave while he’s off with his flocks and help themselves to the large, flat cheeses they find carefully arrayed on racks. When Polyphemus returns, he curdles milk to make more cheese. But soon he discovers his stores have been raided, finds the Greeks, and starts eating them one by one, devouring “entrails, flesh, and bones, marrow and all.” Odysseus devises a plan to get the Cyclops drunk on a bottle of fine wine and blind him with a sharpened stake. He and his remaining crew escape strapped to the undersides of the rams when the wounded Cyclops, still a responsible herdsman, lets them out to graze.
The Cyclopes are on the cusp between savagery and civilization. They live in caves and eat men raw. Their island would make ideal farmland, Odysseus observes, but it’s wild and overgrown. But they do have some glimmers of sophistication. They make wine from wild grapes, herd goats and sheep, and make cheese. This cannot fully redeem the Cyclopes in the eyes of the Greeks, but that doesn’t stop them from tasting the cheese.
CHAPTER 5
The Seduction
Chef Homaro Cantu sometimes stages “flavor tripping” demonstrations for guests at his Chicago restaurants. Four slices of lime, six slices of lemon, and two plastic Japanese-style soup spoons—one holding a dollop of sour cream, the other plain Greek yogurt—are arrayed on a table. A plastic tub containing a fluffy, salmon-colored paste sits nearby. Participants are instructed to put a scoop of the paste in their mouths, allowing it to settle on the tongue. It’s cool, with a slightly sweet flavor, pleasant but bland. After a few minutes it melts away. Then the tasting begins.
The paste is made from an extract of the miracle berry, from the West African shrub Synsepalum dulcificum. The red berries contain a protein called miraculin that plays an unusual trick on the sense of taste. Alone, its molecules block sweet receptors from doing their job: the taste of sugar loses its sweetness. But in the presence of acids, miraculin ignites them. The more acidic a food is, the sweeter it will taste. Since many foods contain acids, including fruits, vegetables, cheeses, and spices such as black pepper, this effect temporarily transforms flavor. The taste of lemon becomes light, delicate, like lemonade but less cloyingly sweet. Limes taste like oranges, yogurt like cream, and sour cream like cheesecake.
Cantu first encountered miracle berries while researching ways to make food more palatable for a friend whose sense of taste had been damaged by cancer treatments. Chemotherapy drugs travel in the bloodstream and saturate the saliva, causing a persistent bitter, metallic taste. Because taste bud cells are fast-growing like cancer cells, the drugs also target and kill them in great numbers. Radiation damages them, too. After testing various remedies, Cantu formulated his miraculin paste, which counteracted the metal taste. His friend was able to enjoy food again.
Cantu had established a reputation as an innovative chef at his first restaurant, moto, which opened in 2005 in Chicago’s meatpacking district. He had played with diners’ expectations, doing things like creating edible paper infused with flavorings; one of these was a picture of a cow that tasted like a freshly grilled steak. But his ambitions stretched beyond avant garde cuisine. He wanted to apply his culinary talents to social problems. The miracle berry, he believed, had hidden potential, which he set out to explore.
He worked with an importer to make miraculin pills, which dissolve on the tongue, available to thousands of cancer patients. He experimented with flavor effects, creating desserts designed to be tasted before, then after, a spoonful of miracle paste. He spent a week eating nothing but weeds, leaves, and grass from his yard, using the paste to make them palatable. Gradually, Cantu’s attention turned to one of the worst food problems humanity faces. The taste for sweetness, an ancient and powerful urge once crucial to survival, has backfired in a spectacular fashion. The world is on a dangerous sugar binge.
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The sweet taste is the body’s signal that something biologically vital is at hand, proclaiming, “Devour me.” Sugars are the foundation of the earth’s food chain. Made by plants during photosynthesis, sugar molecules contain the sun’s energy and make it available as fuel for all living organisms through their easily breakable chemical bonds. Because sugars are so useful, concentrated sources are rare in nature, found mainly in fruits, berries, figs, and honey. The combination of easy energy and scarcity makes sugars a prime target for hungry creatures, and sweetness a delicious and powerful motivator.
But humans found ways to overcome nature’s limitations and make a lot of sugar, and feeding the world’s voracious sweet tooth proved immensely profitable. Over the past three decades, two forms of sugar—crystals refined from sugarcane and sugar beets, and high-fructose corn syrup—have come to saturate diets as never before in history. Sugar flavors ubiquitous sodas, candy, and desserts. Corn syrup is added to many processed foods to enhance flavor, including bread, breakfast cereal, ketchup, baked beans, salad dressing, tomato paste, and even applesauce. Sugar has seemed to defy the law of supply and demand: the more that was added to foods, the more people wanted. Globally, the daily consumption of added sugars—those not already a natural ingredient in a food—rose 46 percent between 1983 and 2013, from 48 grams to 70 grams. Americans consume 165 grams per day, or 40 teaspoons, more than any other people in the world.
Humans evolved eating much smaller amounts of sugar; our bodies are not engineered to tolerate this much. A sugary diet can disrupt basic metabolic functions: how the body burns calories, stores fat, and processes nutrients. Over time, it can lead to chronic health problems including diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular diseases, and a lowered life expectancy. The flood of sugar in food closely tracks rising rates of diabetes and obesity: in 1980, 5.6 million Americans were diabetic, and approximately half the adult population was clinically obese. In 2011, 20 million had diabetes, far outpacing population growth, and three-quarters of adults were obese.
Sweetness, the most delightful of the basic tastes, has come to be seen as a menace to public health in the twenty-first century. A growing anti-sugar movement attacked food and soft-drink companies for using too much sugar and high-fructose corn syrup, and restaurants, movie theaters, and convenience stores for serving sugar-laden snacks. In New York City in 2011, then mayor Michael Bloomberg tried to limit the maximum size of soda cups to sixteen ounces, theorizing that smaller portions would cut consumption. But many people were outraged at what they saw as legislative overreaching, and the law was later overturned in court. Arkansas and West Virginia, among the states with the highest obesity rates, began taxing soda in hopes the extra expense would deter people from drinking it. Soda companies scrambled to find new sugar substitutes.
Cantu believed that none of these solutions would work. But he thought the miracle berry might. Unlike zero-calorie sweeteners such as aspartame or Stevia, it was not highly processed or refined. Its effects were pleasant and surprising. Cantu opened a restaurant named iNG in 2011 as a miracle berry showcase. Its eclectic tasting menus were built around flavor-tripping courses whose effects lingered through the meal. He changed course in 2014, closing iNG, and planned to make miracle-berry-flavored doughnuts and pastries the centerpiece of a new coffee shop, Berrista. These were steps along a path he hoped would lead to the mass market.
Cantu’s ideas were fanciful, and he was competing against huge food and soft-drink corporations with substantial research and developme
nt budgets. But those obstacles were small next to the underlying problem: breaking the spell that sugar casts on the body and brain. The conscious perception of a taste seems like the whole point to us, but it’s merely a decorative fillip on the cathedral of flavor. Underneath it lie the arches and buttresses that hold everything up: biological systems connecting flavor to the gut and the rest of the body. These connections infuse flavor with pleasure; they create cravings and compulsions and, for some, a dependency that resembles drug addiction.
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How and why sugar came to seduce so many of us is a cautionary tale. Sugarcane, the world’s primary source of refined sugar for thousands of years, is a species of grass. Its wild form must have frustrated prehistoric humans. Like a miser stuffing his mattress with cash, cane stalks store sugar in woody, indigestible cellulose fibers, using it to assist their own growth. Their husks can be stripped and the sugary insides chewed or sucked on like Popsicles, but it’s difficult to get much sustenance this way. With the proper tools, they can be chopped, crushed, and boiled to produce only tiny amounts of crystallized sugar. Yet humans thought it worth the trouble. Along with bananas, breadfruit, and yams, they started to till sugarcane around 6000 BC in the region of modern-day Australia, Tasmania, and New Guinea.
A single artisan could brew beer or make cheese; making sugar in large amounts required a higher degree of organization. A system of written knowledge, specialized workers, mills, boilers, trade routes, caravans, and ships sprang up around sugar in the ancient world. It was the ideal food product: delicious, and easy to transport without spoiling. The combination of economic cachet and deliciousness made sugar a catalyst for cultural and even spiritual change. Flavor became a force in history.
A story from about 2,500 years ago captures this foment. Two brothers were leading a merchant caravan of ox-drawn carts out of the town of Bodh Gaya in northeastern India when they noticed a man sitting beside the road. He was dressed in rags. Something about him caught the brothers’ attention. “Stop!” they hollered back to the cart drivers. The brothers sent a boy to run back and dip into their stores.
The boy fished out a container of milk and some road food; accounts vary regarding exactly what it was. In some it’s a knob of peeled sugarcane; in some, honey; in others a more stick-to-the-ribs concoction, rice cakes or sweet rice balls made with milk, honey, and molasses.
“Go ahead, eat!” the brothers yelled as the boy thrust the food at the man. They had a schedule to keep; an act of kindness could not take all day. But the man hesitated. Then he bit into the cake and smiled.
The man was Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha. This incident took place a few weeks after his enlightenment. Buddhist scriptures say his insight, gleaned after a long struggle, freed the former prince from his desires: the cravings for food, sex, money, and success that cause the world endless trouble. Buddhism holds that all experience is tainted by cravings. For a while, Siddhartha had starved himself trying to extinguish them, but that had only made him crave food more. Now, thanks to his enlightened state, Siddhartha apparently ate the sweet treat with no trace of these cravings, just simple enjoyment.
This account from ancient times captures a world grappling with this intense new sensation, whose pure taste and granular form made it preferable to honey. The Buddha lived in a sugarcane-growing region, and during his lifetime, India was starting to develop sugar refining into an industrial art, and created the world’s first dessert cuisine. References to sugar started to appear in poetry, medicinal advice, and official records around the same time, including the Arthasastra, a governing manual written around 300 BC by a bureaucrat named Kautilya. He noted sugar’s different forms in order of rising quality: guta, sarkara, and khanda (the second two are the roots of “sugar” and “candy”; sarkara is Sanskrit for “gravelly”). Members of the Jain sect, forbidden to kill even the tiniest living creature, could not eat honey because it might contain bee embryos. They turned to matsyandika, or sugar candy. Sugar was thought to keep the forces that ricocheted around the body in balance. Indian doctors believed eating it conferred special healing powers, helped digestion, and made semen more potent. According to an Indian book of cures from the second century BC: “In such a man’s body even poison becomes innocuous; his limbs grow hard and compact like stone; he becomes invulnerable.” One elixir of ginger, licorice, gum, ghee, honey, and sugar, if sipped each day for three years, was thought to guarantee a century of youth.
The two merchant brothers from the above tale, Tapassu and Bhallika, became the Buddha’s first lay disciples: they continued to spread the Buddhist message on their travels. This reflects the later historical reality: to generate income, Buddhist monks tended sugarcane and refined it. Over hundreds of years, both traders and Buddhist monks traveled the Silk Road, spreading sugarcane and the means for refining it.
But as sugar moved westward, it became an object of war. Early in the seventh century AD, the prophet Muhammad had founded Islam after receiving a divine revelation. He unified rival Arab tribes and territories into a growing empire spanning the Arabian Peninsula and beyond. Like the Romans before them, the Muslims of the Middle Ages didn’t adopt other peoples’ customs and technologies, they assimilated them. At this time in Persia, Sassanid-dynasty millers had figured out how to make pure granulated sugar. The name of the modern Iranian province of Khūzestān, still a major sugarcane-growing region, appears related to the word for cane, kuz, and khuzis for cane farmers. “Her lips aflow with sweet sugar / The sweet sugar that aflows in Khūzestān,” read verses composed by twelfth-century poet Nez.āmī Ganjavī. But Persia’s geography, stretching northward, imposed limits on its mastery of cane cultivation. Sugarcane grows best in temperatures above 60 degrees Fahrenheit.
The Muslims had the climate and irrigation technology needed to cultivate cane, and the built-in trade routes that go with the spoils of conquest. In ad 642, only a decade after Muhammad’s death, they conquered Persia, seizing its cane and its refining knowledge and technology.
“To enjoy sweets is a sign of faith,” the Quran declares; its version of heaven is a garden with rivers of sweet water, milk, wine, and honey, mirroring the bodily humors. A third of the dishes in the Kitab al-Tabikh, a collection of more than three hundred recipes dating to ninth-century Baghdad (the time of Aladdin and his magic lamp, and other stories from The Thousand and One Nights) are desserts. The Baghdad elite dined on forerunners of many modern treats, including ice cream, doughnuts, fritters, and pancakes flavored with sugar or doused in syrup.
The seeds of the modern, sugar-saturated world were planted during the East-West culture clashes of the Middle Ages. By the Third Crusade, late in the twelfth century (1,700 years after the Buddha), sugarcane grew from China to the southern Mediterranean and on to Morocco, yet sugar remained mostly unheard of in Western Europe. But French and English nobles and soldiers could not have missed it on their travels. In Sicily, where King Richard the Lionheart spent several months during 1190 and 1191, spiky stalks of sugarcane grew in broad patches on hillsides not far from foreign troop garrisons in Messina and Palermo, near sugar mills with steam spewing from their refineries. The plant had been brought there by Muslims two hundred years earlier. Sicilian sugar makers knew how to process large volumes of cane, and their product was used plentifully in the kitchens of the Sicilian nobility, and shipped throughout the Muslim world. When Richard’s armies returned home—having failed to secure Jerusalem—they brought samples with them.
The earliest record of the word “sugar,” taken from the contemporary Old French word çucre, is found in the accounting rolls of the Benedictine Abbey of Durham, in northeast England, from 1299, where monks kept track of various goods on hand, including “Zuker Roch” (rock sugar) and “Zuker Marrokes” (Morrocan sugar). Sugar wasn’t considered a food, but a medicine, spice, and preservative. Twelfth-century theologian Thomas Aquinas wrote that eating it would not break a religious fast beca
use it was a medicine taken to aid digestion. Over one year in the late thirteenth century, the royal household of King Edward I used nearly a ton of sugar flavored with rose petals, a common cure for various illnesses—far more than the 677 pounds it used for food. As late as the eighteenth century, Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish scientist and classifier extraordinaire, named the most common sugarcane species Saccharum officinarum, meaning “sugar from the apothecary.” Medieval European doctors embraced sugar cures touted by both the Arabs and the Byzantine Greeks. A popular Arab treatment for the common cold was al fanad or al panad, small sugar twists made from congealed syrup, which became known in English as alphenics or penides. In 1390, the Earl of Derby paid “two shillings for two pounds of penydes,” the Oxford English Dictionary recounts: the first cough drops.
The modest size of this culinary niche was a function of geography. Most of Western Europe was too cold to grow cane, and trade only brought so much. Europeans solved this problem in the traditional way, by conquest. But over time, they added new elements: capitalism and the Industrial Revolution.
On his second voyage to the New World in 1493, Christopher Columbus brought sugarcane from the Canary Islands—the farthest west it was then found—to plant on Hispaniola. It was a prescient decision. Tales of vast caches of gold and silver on the island turned out to be wild exaggerations. Making sugar became the only reliable source of wealth. Hispaniola’s warm climate, similar to that of sugarcane’s primordial birthplace near New Guinea, was ideal, and space unlimited. Sugar even interested the Taino natives, who began planting their own.
Spain’s colonies were expected to produce or die. Gonzalo de Velosa, a colonist trained as a surgeon, was canny enough to see that sugar production wasn’t for amateurs. It was now traded in the global marketplace, and in Europe the price was rising; a real investment might pay off. So in 1515, he paid a small fortune to bring experts from Canary Islands sugar plantations to Hispaniola. They built mills that could be powered by horses, cattle, or waterwheels, which could produce far more sugar than mills worked by men. By 1520, six sugar mills were operating and another forty being built. But then these budding sugar entrepreneurs found their labor force was dying. Many Taino fell ill from infectious diseases they contracted from the Europeans; more died from forced labor. To fill this void, the Spaniards began to import slaves from Africa.