by James Walvin
10
The Sweetening of America
BETWEEN THE MID-NINETEENTH century and the First World War, the Western world experienced seismic changes in its food and drink. What happened in the USA, however, was to prove especially important for the world at large in later years. The rise of the US economy and the global spread of US corporate power began to exercise an unprecedented influence over economic and social life in the world at large. The changes in America’s diet, for instance, were later adopted around the world and, at the centre of the American diet, lay the story of sugar. Even by 1914, Americans (and Europeans) were devouring unprecedented volumes of sugar. By the mid-twentieth century, those sugary habits had taken root and flourished to an astonishing degree all over the world.
The most obvious reason for the increased consumption of sugar, led by Europe and North America, was the increase in population. Between 1800 and 1900, the world’s population almost doubled; and as we’ve seen previously, North America’s population increased from 7 million in 1800 to 82 million in 1900, reaching more than 300 million in 2000. In the same period, the people of Europe increased from 203 million to 408 million, and then to 729 million. Although major regional and national differences lay beneath these numbers, one simple point stands out – many more millions of people required food and drink. The world’s resources were tapped – and taxed – to find sufficient sustenance for human needs and pleasures. In the process, food and drink were cultivated and manufactured on a scale never before imagined. New industries and technologies were given the task of devising new methods of food cultivation and food processing to satisfy an ever-growing demand. As with almost every other walk of life, new industrialised processes emerged to face the challenge.
In agriculture – be it arable or livestock – and fishery, revolutionary large-scale methods and equipment began to change the way crops, animals and fish were cultivated and reared – then processed. Transforming those products into marketable foods demanded new industrial systems of processing, packaging, distributing and marketing. Some of those changes are familiar. Railways, for example, had a dramatic impact, reaching into distant farmlands of North and South America and Australia, and bringing tons of grain and livestock to the grain elevators and slaughterhouses of major port cities and, from there, they were exported to Europe and beyond.
Behind this story of modernised food and drink lay a major fall in the price of key commodities. People could buy more with their money. The American dollar could buy more food, say, in 1900 than in 1870. Sugar prices, which had been falling since the Civil War, fell even further, thanks largely to industrialisation of sugar refining.1 This story, of the cheapening of food as it became more industrialised, is very familiar because it is the essential heart of modern foodstuffs. Less clear, in what was to become a long, drawn-out process, is why sugar should remain central to the entire story. Why and how did sugar (and, later, other sweeteners) intrude themselves into the new drinks and foodstuffs of the West, and then of the wider world?
Even in its early stages, the industrialisation of food and drink in the late nineteenth century involved the widespread use of sugar. Sugar was used in the development of new types of flour, in the packaging and refrigeration of meats, and especially in the new canning and bottling systems of a wide range of fruits, vegetables and soups. Step by step, sugar found its way into an enormous range of foodstuffs delivered to people’s dining and kitchen tables. In the same period, the rise of cheap fizzy drinks – sodas – had an even more prominent role to play in the use of sugar.
To understand how this happened, we need to look at the USA. Throughout the nineteenth century, the US economy, and the people it served, consumed sugar on a gargantuan scale. That sugar was imported from the Caribbean and later from Hawaii, while millions of tons were cultivated in the cane fields and sugar beet fields of the USA. On the eve of the Civil War, the US imported 694 million pounds of sugar. Twenty years later, that had risen to 1,830 million pounds. In 1900, sugar imports stood at 4,007 million pounds, only to double again by the mid-1920s.2 While the US was not alone in its love of sugar, its economy was hugely influential in shaping and influencing others around the world, and the story of what happened to sugar in the USA foreshadowed many of the global trends of the twentieth century. Today, key areas of world food and drink are dominated by major US corporations and, if we want to understand the global patterns of sugar consumption, we need to look closer at what happened in the USA.
Earlier, in Chapter 6, we examined the story of coffee-drinking in the USA, and the American love of sweetened coffee that became, and has remained, a national obsession. But sugar itself had a far wider importance in the USA than simply being an additive to coffee. Sugar became an issue in US federal economic policy, with tariffs imposed on imported refined sugar in order to protect the US sugar refining industry – and, of course, to generate income for the Government. Although the first tariffs were in place in the early days of the Republic, protection for the sugar industry only came fully into force in 1842. Fifty years later, when the McKinley Act (1890) changed the tariffs on sugar, sugar prices fell, and sugar consumption increased even further.
Until the 1880s, US sugar had been characterised by a multitude of sugar companies, with their refineries dotting the port cities of the east coast. The modernisation of the industry in the 1880s was prompted by major investments in new refining facilities and by the emergence of major refining companies led by the flamboyant entrepreneur Henry Havemeyer. He had been born into a family sugar business, was trained and raised in sugar, and was to prove both an astonishing businessman and the driving force behind the transformation of the American sugar industry. In 1887, Havemeyer amalgamated seventeen of America’s twenty-three refineries to create the American Sugar Refining Company – which controlled 98 per cent of the industry. It took the form of a trust – the Sugar Trust – mirroring Rockefeller’s more famous Standard Oil Trust. Like other trusts, Havemayer’s version revolutionised the sugar industry and, by 1891, there were only four of the original refineries in operation.
These were the years of the formation of major corporate conglomerates – the rise of Americans trusts – in a string of industries: banking, tobacco, finance, oil and steel. These trusts were so massive and powerful that they effectively operated a stranglehold – in some cases, a monopoly – over their industry. But they prompted a fierce political and legal reaction, a conflict between the major industrial trusts (keen to press home their domination and to resist the legal and political restraints placed on them) and politicians anxious to defend the consumers’ interests. And it was a long-running story, a part of the ‘momentous organisational convulsion’ that transformed the American economy between 1895 and 1907. It was an era of major takeovers – the yearly average was 266 – and the end result was normally a single company dominating its chosen market. Sometimes, a single corporation might control 60 per cent of the market. By 1904, an estimated 318 corporations owned 40 per cent of all US manufacturing assets.
The Sugar Trust, formed in 1887, only five years after Rockefeller’s initiative in oil, was reformed in 1891 as the American Sugar Refining Company. It consolidated the major sugar refiners of the USA, and became the central agent for the manufacture of American sugar, owning most of the nation’s best-known brands, and was responsible for negotiations with state and regional governments. Havemayer’s company, with various subsequent legal names, became the main organisation for the manufacture of American sugar, and concentrated on promoting highly refined, white, granulated sugar. It also did no harm, from Havemayer’s point of view, to set out to undermine other sorts of sugar, notably brown sugar, in the process.3 Throughout, it developed complex but persuasive dealings with government.
As with other major trusts, it, too, had serious conflicts in the law courts and with government. But its power, and its money, enabled this new brand of American ‘King Sugar’ to deflect or win over political and legal oppositi
on and to advance the broader interests of the sugar industry. Although sugar is rarely lumped together with railroads, steel and petroleum, its cartel arrangements followed a very similar path – and with similar consequences for the way the industry was run. It was also a vivid illustration of the importance of sugar in the economic and social life of the USA at the dawn of the twentieth century.
This corporate story of American sugar, and its growth in the last years of the nineteenth century into a major national industry, was also a striking reflection of America’s deep attachment to sweetness. The sugar lobby and industry were important because sugar was an integral feature of American life. Sugar was everywhere – from medicine to home cooking, from commercial drinks to elaborate dining at family and formal occasions. Many of these sugary tastes emerged as powerful commercial entities from older, simpler and more functional items. The sweetening of bitter medicines, for example, led to the emergence of sugary candies (sweets). American candy bars were little more than boiled sugar.
By the early twentieth century, sugar, a long-time presence inside the home as an additive to drinks, became a staple in kitchens and cupboards as a vital ingredient in home cooking, baking and preserving fruits and foodstuffs. Sugar was equally important in the massive expansion of commercial baking and confectionery.
A new breed of commercial entrepreneurs, men who spotted the demand for sweet, luxury tastes, developed the highly mechanised production of modern sweets and chocolates, and were inspired to sell them in small, individual packets or items – a lollipop, a chocolate bar. Milton Hershey, following European pioneers, launched what became the massive American chocolate company that bears his name. So, too, Frank C. Mars, whose chocolate company became one of America’s largest family businesses. Candies and chocolates in myriad shapes and sizes were blended from a multitude of ingredients – but always with sugar. They, too, became essential components of American military rations from the First World War onwards. Sweetness offered instant enjoyment, strength and resolve – and, perhaps, brought fond reminders of very distant home pleasures and comforts for men serving overseas.
As the volumes of home-grown and imported sugar increased, the price of sugar in the USA dropped, and sugar-based rituals became an inescapable feature of the American diet. Sugar was essential, even for pioneers heading west. Printed guides to the perilous trek across country in the 1840s, for example, listed all the foodstuffs required for the journey – it included a supply of salt, coffee and sugar.4 When Mark Twain travelled by stagecoach from Missouri to Nevada in 1861, he complained that, at one stagecoach stop, he was served a foul concoction instead of tea – and no milk or sugar to go with it.5 Cowboys herding cattle on the plains in 1881 made sure that their food wagon contained plenty of sugar alongside other necessities. In all corners of the USA, from the most fashionable of New York City salons to life on the settler and cowboy frontiers, sugar was essential.6 Americans needed sugar in their breaks at work, at rest between chores and when travelling across that mighty landscape.
One of the most distinctive American inventions based on sugar that has passed down to us today is the elaborate, iced and tiered wedding cake. Today, we take the wedding cake for granted, but it emerged as a popular sugary indulgence in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The icing and decorations were almost exclusively sugar-based. It was, after a fashion, a modern-day version of the sugar sculptures of earlier periods, although, at the time, such displays were signs of exclusivity. Now, the sugary, white wedding cake had been democratised. Of course, many older communities had celebrated weddings with cakes with exotic ingredients, but the modern habit took off in its contemporary, sugar-laden form in the USA. By the 1830s, American recipes showed how to dress a wedding cake in almond paste, made with sugar, and, as the century advanced, these cakes became increasingly elaborate. The wealthier the families, the more ornate the cake, some of them baked by immigrant German bakers.
By the end of the century, cheaper ingredients, especially flour and sugar, commercial mass-production, new ovens, advertising – and rising spending power – enabled the American middle classes to enjoy wedding cakes of a kind they could once only have dreamed about. Now the cakes were coated in white sugar icing made from the most refined sugar, and became more elaborate – they were finally stacked in tiers. Queen Victoria’s wedding cake was 9ft in circumference, but only the base was cake – the upper tiers were made entirely of sugar. The cake would be cut by the bride and groom, a ceremony started in the mid-nineteenth century, but which had become universal by the early twentieth century. All this was made possible by the abundance of cheap sugar.7
The wedding cake was only the more elaborate form of a more general pattern. At much the same time, sugar became a key ingredient in a huge number of desserts which began to dot fashionable tables and menus in late-nineteenth-century America – gelatins and jellies, as well as ice creams, bought commercially or, thanks to the spread of refrigeration, made in more prosperous homes. Sugar also featured as a main item on America’s evolving calendar of holidays and festivals – sweet treats at Christmas and Easter, on birthdays and St Valentine’s Day events. All were celebrated by sugary foodstuffs, and all were to reach remarkably elaborate heights in the late twentieth century.
In this, as in all dietary matters, American food was transformed by the introduction of industrialised, packaged foodstuffs and refrigeration. How to keep food, to stockpile or preserve it, had been a problem from the earliest days of settlement. European immigrants were unwilling to follow the Native Americans in accepting that there were periods of the year when hunger prevailed until the seasons changed. Preserving foods for winter required a plentiful supply of vinegar – and sugar. Pickled vegetables stood alongside sweetened fruits and jams in homes across America. It was a golden rule of preserving fruit to use plenty of sugar. One suggestion was that the best way to preserve jam, jellies and conserves was to use at least 60 per cent sugar.8 One cookbook claimed, in 1844, ‘If too small a portion of sugar is allowed to the fruit, it will certainly not keep well.’9 As long as sugar remained costly, it was more economical to dry fruit rather than preserve it with sugar but, when sugar became cheaper, and available in great volumes, it helped to sustain North Americans through their harsh winters. This, too, changed after 1858 with the invention of the Mason jar, a glass jar that was sealed via a screw-on lid and rubber seal. By keeping out fresh air, the jars required less sugar for preserving fruits, but even this innovation was soon replaced by the development of commercial food canning.
The initial process of food canning began in France, and was rewarded by Napoleon who recognized its potential for feeding armies on the move. By the 1820s, it had spread to Boston and New York, where the commercial process, at first, concentrated on bottling fruits and ketchup, before canning became the main process. From the first, sugar was added and followed traditional recipes for making ketchup in the home. Now, however, it was produced by the tens of thousands of gallons.10
At first, the process of canning was laborious because it was largely undertaken by hand, and the final product was costly. It also came with early health risks, such as contaminated food and poisoning. All this was swept aside by the Civil War, and the Union Army’s massive purchases of canned foodstuffs for the troops. Numerous entrepreneurs rose to the challenge and set about improving the system, and making the contents safer to eat. At the end of the war, when the Army released hundreds of thousands of men back to civilian life, those men had become accustomed to, and generally fond of, the range of canned foods they had eaten as soldiers. For many of them, particularly poorer men, the army diet had been more varied and more pleasant than the meals they had consumed before the war.
Along with everything else, the Civil War transformed the canning industry. In 1860, the US food industry produced 5 million cans of food. A decade later, it produced 30 million. As the canning business became increasingly industrialised, its products brought an expanding range o
f foodstuffs within the reach of ordinary Americans. No less important, the new railway system enabled foods to criss-cross the length and breadth of that vast continent. In the process, regional foods became national. Meat and flour, fruit and vegetables were packaged cheaply, and could be bought cheaply thousands of miles from their point of cultivation or production. And the same was true of sugar.
This post-1860 packaging of foodstuffs wooed consumers by its simple convenience. What today seems natural was, in the late nineteenth century, a change of fundamental proportions. The Campbell Soup company, for example, which started in 1869 with canned vegetables, had, by the turn of the century, concentrated on soup production. By 1904, it was producing more than 16 million cans a year. All was accompanied by extensive advertising of the company’s products, and a parallel campaign to persuade customers that their foodstuffs were healthy. These were the great, pioneering days of modern advertising – led by the US tobacco industry – and for all the colour and extravagance, the visual and verbal excesses of such campaigns, many of them concentrated on the healthy nature of canned products. From Campbell’s soups to Duke’s American Tobacco Company, the consumer was lured not only by the convenience and cost, but by the claims that the products would aid well-being. However unsubstantiated or deceptive the claims of this advertising, American customers bought the new foodstuffs in huge and growing volumes.