by James Walvin
Nutritionists working for food manufacturers discovered, in exact scientific detail, what had been apparent for centuries that people like sugar. By the late twentieth century, science could prove what mothers cuddling a sick child at any point over the past 2,000 years could have told them – infants like the taste of sweetness. From their early days, in sickness and robust health, babies liked sugar and honey. They reacted badly, however, to bitter, sour or salty tastes.1 Exactly why that should be so has been an abiding interest of modern scientists, their curiosity spurred (and often financed) by major food and drink companies. From the early twentieth century, physiologists had suggested that particular biological features of humans were receptive to sugar. In the 1960s and ’70s, a string of research projects confirmed in humans and animals the power of sugar and sugary foods in developing cravings and excessive eating habits. Rats and human seemed to enjoy eating sweet foodstuffs; when unrestrained, they all became obese. By the end of the century, research into the body’s physiological reaction to sweetness had begun to yield findings that were of great interest to the food industry. Indeed, much of that research had been sponsored by it.
The more research emerged, and the more scientists discussed the topic, the clearer it became that taste – flavour – had little to do with nutrition. People chose their food and drink because of what they expected the taste to be. And of all the tastes humans enjoyed the most, sugar seemed to reign supreme. Once this simple point had been established scientifically, it was as if the food industry had discovered the key to alchemy – how to convert something worthless into something apparently of great value. What mattered now was to create a product – a food or drink – that targeted those physiological reactions.2
Scientists in a range of disciplines had begun to track down the precise way sugar is absorbed into the body, and exactly how the body reacts to the presence of sugar. What emerged was the sense that humans are hard-wired to enjoy sugar. This seemed to be the case not merely with refined sugars, but also with refined starches, which the body then converts to sugar. In this way, the starch in a pizza, for instance, becomes sugar – and the brain reacts to the pleasure accordingly.
In commercial terms, however, it was research into children’s reaction to sugar – the search to find what became known as the ‘bliss point’ in various children’s foods – which opened up a treasure chest for food manufacturers. Sugar prompted pleasure in children; it also provided the energy needed for growing children, and it conveyed a ‘feel-good’ factor, not unlike an analgesic.3 Major food corporations set out to devise sweet foods for children that would hit these various targets; food that would capture a child’s desire for sweetness, energy and a generally good feeling. Everything seemed to revolve around the problem of providing exactly the right mix of sweetness in a particular food and drink. But the base point was simple – sugar provided the key to commercial success in food and drink.
It was, then, no surprise that food manufacturers began to target children with sweet foods. But the increasingly sweet diet of the young faced growing criticism from medical interests – not least when it seemed to be adding to childhood obesity and creating dental problems. All this was reinforced by the growing awareness that sweet drinks, in particular, were a major contributor to obesity. Equally worrying, children who were allowed to drink sweetened, carbonated drinks had come to expect all their drinks to be sweet. Fruit juices, sports drinks, flavoured waters – all were expected to be sweet to gain children’s approval, and so attract their spending. In the very years that obesity, especially childhood obesity, emerged as a major Western problem, sweet drinks seemed to lie at the heart of the matter.
Worried observers felt sure that sugar was involved. But the exact formula – the precise role of sugar in the rise of obesity – remained unclear. This allowed defenders of sugar and sugary diet to dispute the criticisms of sugar as a major contribution to global obesity.
From the mid-1960s, the fight was on. In the sugar corner, the producers of sugar itself and the food manufacturers who poured sugar, in vast and growing volumes, into their products. In the opposite corner, health professionals, medical staff and a growing band of activists determined to alert all and sundry to the dangers of the sugary concoctions that had come to form the bedrock of the modern diet.
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The American food industry in the 1950s was driven forward by the concept of convenience, which resulted in an ever-changing array of easily managed and quickly cooked products. The word ‘cooked’ was hardly appropriate – heated, boiled or grilled became the dominant forms of preparation, and all that was made possible by new kitchen gadgets. Women – the whole phenomenon was aimed at women initially – who remained loyal to old-fashioned food preparation found themselves surrounded by younger women who found the labour-saving food products easier and more convenient. Despite the hard work of those school teachers who stuck to the skills of domestic science, American domestic cuisine swiftly succumbed to the culture of convenience.
It is easy to see why. For the growing number of women who worked, these changes in diet and cooking came as an indisputable blessing. Domestic chores – notably cooking for a family at the end of a hard day’s work – were eased aside by the availability of foods that needed no time-consuming preparation. Once again, the food industry saw the challenge, and inaugurated its own domestic science lessons conducted by company employees who were eager to promote the virtues of convenience products for the hard-pressed American housewife. The industry invented imaginary cooks who promoted the new foods, replied to fan letters and figured in promotional literature – but who never actually existed. Fantasy home-makers endorsed invented foods for a nation that had become seduced by the television screen. Millions now dined from a tray as they watched the evening television programmes, all of them punctuated with copious adverts, many of which were for food and drink. In the process, the teaching of old-fashioned home economics effectively died out, aided by subversive propaganda from the food industry. Time magazine caught the mood and the times perfectly when a 1959 article on convenience food carried the headline, ‘JUST HEAT AND SERVE’.4
Along with the ease of serving, consumers of the new convenience foods were also absorbing unacknowledged volumes of sugar; few of the new convenience foods were produced without the addition of plenty of sugar. All this, pioneered in the USA, very quickly spread to other corners of the world, hastened by the rapid evolution of new, global food corporations. Many of those US-based corporations gobbled up local companies in distant parts of the world and transformed them into producers of foodstuffs and drinks perfected in the USA. People round the world began to follow the USA not merely in popular culture – movies, TV and music – but in the food they ate. And what they ate was highly processed – and sugar-rich.
The story of industrial foods began at the American breakfast table in the 1880s, with the efforts of Dr Kellogg, fresh from medical work in New York, who aimed to transform America’s breakfast. His small-scale experiments with wheat products in his home kitchen and a small medical facility at Battle Creek, Michigan, laid the foundations for the company that bears his name. For centuries, gold prospecting had been a significant activity in the region; and when Dr Kellogg added sugar to his cereals, it was as if he, too, had struck gold.
Rivals followed with similar products – also laced with sugar – and the commercial war began for dominance of the American breakfast table. The food companies all used the new tactics and ploys of advertising to promote their products. These were the great days of the billboard, with colourful adverts plastered on sides of buildings, hoardings, on buses and trams, in newspapers and magazines – indeed, on any available space that might catch the eye of the paying public. Advertising – and heaps of sugar – transformed breakfast cereals into a basic ingredient in American daily life.
Despite in-house concerns in the 1940s about the amount of sugar added to new products, the combination of wheat cereals lace
d with sugar proved an astonishing commercial bonanza. By the late twentieth century, 85 per cent of the US breakfast cereal market was dominated by three giant companies, all guided by marketing and advertising men who scrutinised regular, detailed social trends to find the best way to generate greater expansion and sales. By the last quarter of the twentieth century, the key to further commercial success was the critical fact that young mothers were going out to work. In the early morning rush to prepare and feed children before dashing to work, convenience at the breakfast table become the pressing concern. They also needed to capture the imagination of the children themselves.5
The story of sweet products aimed at children began effectively in 1949 when Post Foods found itself struggling to sell its breakfast cereals against the competition. Up to then, cereals had been heavily promoted as a healthy alternative to the traditional fatty breakfast of bacon, sausages and spam. Post Foods now began to sprinkle their cereals with sugar and children loved what they were offered. Competitors in the food industry followed suit with a string of sugary inventions aimed at the American breakfast table. Thereafter, breakfast became a battleground between food giants and their advertising agencies. All sides began to add sugar in abundance until, eventually, 50 per cent of all American breakfast cereals contained added sugar.
Scientists in the food laboratories and marketing men on Madison Avenue now tinkered with a host of innovations to increase the appeal of breakfast cereals to children. Cereals began to appear in different shapes and forms (as letters, for example) and appeared on the supermarket shelves, and increasingly on TV screens, under a host of new, catchy names. In the decade from the mid-1950s, dazzled by extravagantly budgeted advertising campaigns for food and drink, and led primarily by General Foods, America was ‘led to a different way of thinking about food’.
The men at the helm of these massive companies grasped a simple but essential point. The foods they produced and sold ‘had to be easy to buy, store, open, prepare and eat’.6 America had entered the world of convenience food, some of which were so far removed from their original, natural state, they were unrecognizable – food and drink concocted by scientists in conversation with marketing men, tested by social scientists, and with the commercial results analysed by the most up-to-date mathematical formulae. Through all this, sugar was rarely far away. The invention of breakfast drinks that required only the addition of water – and sugar to taste – proved a massive hit, both for the manufacturers and the sugar industry. So, too, did ‘pop-ups’ – a type of cake or pastry pocket with a filling that was heated in the toaster. They came, like the drinks, in a variety of flavours – and all with ample additions of sugar.
The consequent sales of breakfast cereals were astonishing – $660 million worth in 1970 rising to $4.4 billion in the mid-1980s. Efforts to curb the power – the stranglehold – of the three biggest companies failed in the teeth of their dogged legal and political defence. Like the great trust battles of the late nineteenth century, the companies could wear down their opponents by the immense wealth and influence they were able to throw into the battle to defend their interests. No less troubling was the companies’ refusal when pressed to disclose to their customers just how much sugar was being added to their cereals.
At the same time, it was becoming clear that America’s recently acquired diet was creating major health problems, most notably in dental health. One American dentist, concerned at the poor dental health he encountered among his young patients, acted on his own initiative. He bought seventy-eight brands of cereal and examined their content in his own laboratory. One third had sugar levels between 10 and 25 per cent, another third up to 50 per cent, with eleven even higher. There also seemed to be a correlation between the sweetest cereals available and their aggressive TV advertising directed at children.7
In addition to concerned parents, a host of critics emerged challenging the cereal manufacturers to explain and reduce their production of heavily sweetened cereals. The companies fought back, of course, sometimes changing the name of products, sometimes dropping items, and rethinking how they promoted their foods. By the late 1970s, however, they were also under scrutiny from federal agencies, themselves galvanized by dental professionals who provided damning evidence about the extent of dental ill health among the young. These pressures, at a time of rising consumer power, were led by energetic activists not easily cowed by commercial giants, and yielded results. But flawed legislation in Washington that was easily by-passed, and the enormous financial and commercial power of the food lobby and advertisers, ensured that proposed curbs on advertising aimed at children foundered.
All was not lost, though. Data about sugar and children was becoming more readily available. It was now undeniable that American children were being targeted by TV adverts about sugary foods. The food manufacturers and their agents knew that the adverts worked, and they were relentless in promoting sugary cereals. By the late 1980s, however, the companies had begun to remove the word ‘sugar’ from their promotions, and even from the name of the cereals. Even they had finally realised that sugar had been categorised as ‘bad’; it had become a word that conjured up a string of unhealthy qualities, a commodity which parents should try to avoid when feeding their children.8
Throughout the 1990s, the major food companies were engaged in a broad commercial battle against consumer groups agitating against sugar, against new competitors in the field and then – breaking ranks – against each other in a price war. Throughout the entire story, their in-house scientists and marketing men were devising new ways of presenting cereals; creating snacks and products which could be represented as cereals in another guise – in the form of a ‘handy’ bar, for example. Yet, time and again, new products were blended with volumes of sugar and launched at the children’s market. Sometimes, the adverts for such products were not only misleading but downright untrue, although criticism was often deflected by the companies’ reliance on slowing down to a bare minimum the handling of these assertions, and the time-absorbing complexities of legal processes.
Activists worried about the impact of sugar on America’s health had come to realise that drawing attention to foodstuffs was only part of their task. They also needed to challenge the major drinks corporations about their excessive use of sugar in the drinks that millions of Americans turned to throughout their waking hours. Soda drinks had become much more American than apple pie, and those drinks came bursting with sweetness. So it was, in the last decades of the twentieth century, that alarm grew in the USA about the consequences of the nation’s rapidly changing diet – Americans were getting fatter, and large numbers of children were suffering unusually high levels of dental decay at a very young age. Any scrutiny of the immensely powerful food and drink industries was bound to invite a prolonged and brutal conflict. Moreover, those companies were no longer simple American or British entities, but had morphed into mammoth transnational corporations of unprecedented wealth and influence.
Today’s global food systems are controlled by a small group of massive corporations that possess an unprecedented concentration of economic power and money. A small number of commercial behemoths dominate the food market at every level – the market for essential agricultural products, the manufacture of food, and food retailing. Oxfam calculated in 2013 that 70 per cent of the world’s food systems were controlled by no more than 500 companies which are the prime users of all the commodities which go to make up our industrial food and drink. Within that small band there is a tiny elite of megacorporations, the corporate giants who control much of what we eat and drink. Among them are household names, most notably Nestlé, Unilever, Mars, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Mondalez, Danone, Associated British Foods, Kraft, General Mills, Kellogg’s, McDonald’s and Compass Company. The power of such organisations almost defies analysis. Nestlé, for example, enjoyed a revenue in 2012 that was larger than the GDP of all but seventy of the world’s nations. Their sales figures that year, of $100 billion, compares to Uganda’
s GDP of $51 billion. And the emergence of this agri-industrial power play is not merely a commercial process, but has been encouraged and, indeed, aided by Western governments, primarily via massive subsidies in euros and dollars.
The origins of this global food system began after the Second World War, and the desperate need to restore a shattered European continent. Between 1947 and 1952, the US Marshall Plan pumped $13 billion into Europe, much of it in the form of American food, animal feed and fertilizer shipped into Europe. It was a programme which pulled Europe back from the brink, revitalised the continent, and also helped catapult the USA to global dominance by 1950. After 1945, governments across western Europe were equally resolved never to repeat the errors of the past, and were determined, among other things, to enhance European food production. One priority of European governments, coalescing into what became the European Community, was the creation of large-scale, healthy agriculture, assisted by subsidies. The eventual outcome was that European food became plentiful and affordable, and farmers were generally well rewarded for their labours.
Fifty years later, however, these subsidised agricultural schemes were creating massive surpluses – the ‘food mountains’ and ‘wine lakes’ that were so often mentioned in the media. Much of those surpluses ended up on the world market where they had the effect of undermining producers in poor countries. When the World Trade Organisation was launched in 1995, it was designed, among other things, to end such subsidies and remove trade restrictions. What happened, however, was that poor countries were forced to open their markets – notably under pressure from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) – while richer countries maintained their subsidies for local agriculture.