by James Walvin
One major change in eating habits in the last fifty years has been the growing interest in visiting restaurants. Until recently, eating outside the home was, for millions, a very special treat. Today, it is an unremarkable event. Between 1980 and 2000, one half of the budget spent by Americans on food went on dining out. Equally striking, Americans ate substantially more when dining out. In the years since 1950, portion sizes of food served to customers in American restaurants increased fourfold.24 Meals outside the home are eaten at work, at school, in a canteen, or food is bought to the workplace from local food outlets. Institutional food (provided, say, by schools and the workplace) has to be cheap and plentiful, and that invariably means processed foodstuffs with sugar as a significant additive. This presence of sugar in processed food is much more striking in fast-food restaurants and takeaways. A burger or fried chicken with chips and a cola – followed by a frozen dessert – are all heavily laden with animal fats, with sugar being a predominant carbohydrate. Typically, such a meal can easily amount to 1,600 calories.25
Yet such fast food is now simply inescapable – outlets dot the high street, shopping centres and are signposted along major roads and highways. The food they offer has come to dominate the diet (and hence the health) of tens of millions of people. The USA, again, led the way, and eventually became the most seriously affected by the consequences. By 2001, the USA was home to more than 13,000 McDonald’s outlets, 5,000 Burger Kings and more than 7,000 Pizza Huts. In the twenty-five years to 1995, the number of fast-food meals eaten by Americans increased fourfold. In Britain, the number of McDonald’s restaurants doubled in the decade to 1993, while in Europe they quadrupled between 1991 and 2001, from 1,342 to 5,792, and there was a similar growth of Burger King and Pizza Hut. More astonishing still, the rate of growth was even faster in Asia. By 2004, Indians and Chinese were eating fast food more frequently than Americans.26
As if this were not startling enough, the fast-food revolution is paralleled by changes in the way people eat at home. Pre-cooked, chilled or prepared dishes (main courses, vegetables and desserts) have taken the place of meals that are prepared and cooked in the family kitchen. We have already seen the reasons for this – convenient, cheap food has offered an easy alternative to the more time-consuming effort of creating nutritious meals from scratch. In millions of homes – even when those homes are equipped with a state-of-the-art kitchen – the key appliance is now the microwave. From 1970 to 2000, the microwave came to dominate the Western kitchen. In that time, more than 90 per cent of American and Australian kitchens possessed a microwave. The only exception to this growing trend was France, a society which holds on to its more traditional cuisine and dietary habits. The increase in the use of microwaves was also less significant in developing countries where refrigerators were a priority – notably, of course, in hot countries.
Often, the family meal is eaten while watching TV, which has come to dominate breakfast-time as well, when children, particularly, are watching. This habit was, inevitably, of great interest to food manufacturers. Market researchers told the food manufacturers that traditional meal-preparation was changing very quickly (in parallel with the rising proportion of women in the labour force) and the food companies were quick to step in by devising and marketing a string of ready-made, pre-cooked or chilled meals that could be easily prepared for a couple or family – without requiring any cooking skills at all.27
The food industry set about methodically to move all forms of cooking from the kitchen to the factory . . .’ They were helped, again, by science and by the development of new plastics with which to package, cover, bottle and seal their products. The end result is now familiar – all that is required is for the ‘cook’ to remove the vacuum-sealed package and pop the entire meal into a microwave oven for the requisite number of minutes printed on the label. What could be simpler?
These major changes in the way we eat, and what we eat, have become global habits almost imperceptibly. They are widespread throughout the West, but they have also become even more striking, and with more fundamental changes, in the developing world. The West took a long time to emerge from societies where hunger (and even starvation) was commonplace, to the current state of widespread obesity. Developing countries have undergone the same transition very recently, and at breakneck speed. Once haunted by malnutrition and undernourishment, many are now plagued by obesity. Yet it is now clear that obesity has become a form of malnutrition.
What reinforced the changes brought about by the global drift towards industrialised food and drink has been a trend which, again, tends to be overlooked because it is so basic to the way we now live. What we eat and drink has been refashioned by the way we shop.
Shopping, for the modern consumer, has been transformed and, indirectly, this transformation in shopping has itself become a factor in the rise of obesity. New shopping patterns have, in their turn, created major consequences for what people eat and drink. The most important change – obvious, but generally unnoticed – has been the rise of the modern supermarket, which has affected not only where people shop, but what sort of food is available to them. Since there are now an estimated 20 million supermarkets in operation worldwide, they have come to exercise a massive influence over vast numbers of people. As supermarkets proliferated, millions of people got fatter. But what is the connection?
The origins of the supermarket can be traced to the late nineteenth century and the development of the new department stores and chains in Europe and North America. In the first half of the twentieth century, consumers began to move gradually towards buying industrially produced foodstuffs, but it was after 1945 that the process speeded up. Just as the industrialisation of basic foods was viewed in Europe as creeping ‘Americanisation’, so, too, did the arrival of the supermarket herald a revolution first pioneered in the USA. In Britain, the 175 supermarkets in 1958 had risen to 2,110 by 1972. By then, Germany had 2,802 and France 2,060. France, though deeply resistant to changes in eating and drinking habits, nonetheless succumbed and, by the late 1980s, 56 per cent of the French food market was in the hands of supermarkets.28
The rise of the supermarkets inevitably resulted in a precipitous fall in the number of independent retailers. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, the UK lost 120,000, West Germany 115,000, France 105,000, and Spain 34,000. All lost out to the modern supermarket. Today in the UK, the top five supermarket chains control 70 per cent of grocery sales. In the USA, the five largest control 48 per cent. In the Netherlands, ten supermarket chains control 75 per cent of the market. In the years when food and drink were being manufactured by ever fewer, ever larger conglomerates, food outlets were also declining in great numbers. The outcome was a convergence of massive food manufacturers and food outlets, and they were making hugely influential decisions about what and how their customers should choose and prepare their food.29
Supermarkets introduced a totally new way of shopping. They removed the shop counter, and made their food available ‘for the taking’. They invite shoppers to take what they want. But what those customers see, on the packed shelves before them, is carefully presented and strategically placed. Moreover, the massive supermarket chains can also dictate to the producers – to farmers and manufacturers – precisely what they want; they dictate the size, shape, colour, volume – and price – of food and drink on their shelves. Thus supermarkets have come to shape the consumption of food, and much of that consumption has increasingly involved packaged and ready-made cooked foods – most of it with copious amounts of added sweeteners.30
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Since approximately 1945, food itself has been utterly transformed by the rise of ‘agribusiness’ – major corporations creating massive agricultural businesses along the lines of corporate models – and the emergence of what critics have termed ‘Big Food’. In the USA, for example, half of all the nation’s food is produced by a mere ten corporations. Much of that food is processed, and most of it with the accompaniment of sugar.
And it is also worth bearing in mind that one nation’s processing of food is never restricted to domestic markets. The West exports enormous amounts of processed foodstuffs to other nations. Britain, for example, exports £19 billion worth of food annually. But of that, £11 billion is highly processed, and £6.4 billion only lightly processed. Only £1.4 billion is unprocessed.31
Sucrose lies at the heart of most of these processed foods and drinks. It is true that a range of sweeteners are now used instead of, or as well as, traditional cane sugar, but sugar retains its popularity as an ingredient. In the words of one study of sucrose, ‘The nexus of sugar (sucrose) and confectionary products is inescapable . . . Nothing yet devised by humans or nature has the unique sweetening, bulking and manufacturing properties of natural sugar.’32 And as we have seen, sugar pervades the manufacture of almost every type of food imaginable – dough and sponges, biscuits, icings and fillings. It appears in dairy products, ice creams, custards, frozen desserts and yoghurts. Processed foods use sugar ‘to import body and texture [and to] produce bulk . . .’ Tinned fruits and vegetables often contain sugar, as do ketchups and chilli sauces, as well as pie fillings, desserts, cured meats, bacon and sausages.33
But it delivers its most extravagant hit in breakfast cereals. About 30 per cent of these cereals arrive at the breakfast table pre-sweetened, with the most sugary of cereals consisting of more than 50 per cent sugar. Breakfast has become the main meal for sugar. And all this is in addition to the sugar in soft drinks, in alcohol and fruit preserves, jellies and jams.
Behind all these foodstuffs, there lurks a simple point – sugar is ubiquitous. It resides in many of the foods we consume, and food manufacturers regard it as an essential ingredient which adds flavour, bulk and texture to an enormous variety of consumer products – foods, drinks, cosmetics, medicines . . . and so the list goes on. It seems, on its own and in combination with other ingredients, to lurk behind the world’s growing problem of obesity. And if any single type of food or drink was to embody this problem of sugar-driven obesity, and perhaps even exacerbate it more than any other, then we need look no further than sweetened soft drinks.
15
Hard Truth About Soft Drinks
THE EARLY SUCCESS of sugar as an additive to hot drinks was as nothing compared to the impact of sugar consumed in soft drinks – carbonated or still – in the late twentieth century. Indeed, the global consumption of sugar (and later of other sweeteners) was utterly revolutionised after the Second World War by the emergence of the soft-drink industry. The range of nonalcoholic, water-based, still or carbonated drinks is now enormous, and most of them have been developed as highly sweetened – until a very recent campaign against them in the UK and the USA. Often flavoured by a variety of fruits, berries and sometimes even by vegetables, most were highly calorific – so calorific, in fact, that they have become both a major cause of obesity, a topic of fierce political debate and even a matter of punitive taxation. How did this happen to drinks that had their origins in a simple refreshment on hot summer days in the American South?
Non-alcoholic soft drinks – cordials and home-made fruit drinks – have a long history as both a medicine but mainly as a thirst-quencher. Although popular in the West from the sixteenth century onwards, they belonged to a much older tradition reaching back to classical Rome, and drinking spa waters. Suspicion of polluted water also encouraged experiments in creating aerated mineral waters, most famously and enduringly by Jacob Schweppe in 1792. At London’s Great Exhibition in 1851, for example, 1 million bottles of aerated water were sold. Such drinks were promoted for their medicinal qualities, but they really took off commercially as simple refreshments. When new flavours were added to them – ginger was the most popular – they became hugely popular on both sides of the Atlantic.
In the USA, local pharmacists created their own soft drinks, and competition developed to market new versions – new flavours, sweet and fizzy – for the growing urban population of North America and Europe. Sarsaparilla, root beer, dandelion and burdock, these and many others competed for customers’ cash. Eventually, many of these drinks ditched their therapeutic claims and simply offered refreshment. They were also warmly supported by the temperance movement as an alternative to the evils of alcohol, although their popularity was much more broadly based than that. There were millions of people who wanted, and liked, refreshing, cooling, cheap drinks – especially in hot American summers – without any of the disadvantages of alcohol. At the heart of all these drinks lay one ingredient which was to dominate the business from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first – sugar.1
Cheap soft drinks proliferated throughout the Western world in the late nineteenth century: Rose’s Lime Juice (lime juice had its own long history in naval use); concentrated fruit drinks (from Australia); barley waters; orange squash; blackcurrant juice; cranberry juice; and, in the USA, grape juice. The soft-drink revolution in the USA really stemmed from the ‘soda fountain’ invented by a Yale scientist, Benjamin Silliman, who had a Yale college named after him, and who sold soda water by the glass and by the bottle. Like many others, the drink was first promoted as a medicinal drink. But when flavours were added, ‘a whole new industry was born’.2 New, more elaborate soda machines were devised which allowed customers to choose their favourite flavour, and ‘soda parlours’ quickly established themselves as an indispensable feature of American urban life. By 1895, there were an estimated 50,000 of them in the USA. When, in that same decade, safe new bottles were invented, soda could be sold in a bottle, and could be bought as a take-away item for consumption at home, in restaurants or in parks.
A large number of new flavours were devised by blending sugar with fruits, vegetables, herbs and flavourings, and American customers could choose from an astonishing variety of sweet fizzy drinks. Enterprising manufacturers were constantly in search of new brands of drinks, while vigilantly keeping their recipes secret from competitors. At first, most of them claimed their drinks possessed medicinal qualities. Both Dr Pepper and Coca-Cola were launched on the American market in the 1880s and were heralded with medicinal claims, but these were soon forgotten in the wave of commercial success they enjoyed at the nation’s soda fountains. When the two companies franchised their secret syrups to bottlers, ‘the modern soft-drink industry was born’.3 There followed a quite astonishing story.
Although US soft-drinks manufacturers offered a wide range of flavours and ingredients, it was drinks with the addition of caffeine from the kola nut – and later, equivalent substitute flavourings – which rapidly outstripped all others and, by 1920, ‘cola’ drinks dominated the US market.4 In 1930, more than 7,000 US bottling plants were turning out 6 billion bottles annually, and Americans drank it in enormous quantities. In 1889, they drank an estimated 227 million, 8-fluid-ounce drinks; by 1970, that had risen to 72 billion. In the process, a curious cultural image evolved – sweet fizzy drinks became the very representation of America itself, and the best-known brand names seem to capture the essence of modern America. Coca-Cola (1886), Pepsi-Cola (1898) and Dr Pepper (1885) had all originated in the US South, and all began life in local pharmacies where ‘soda jerks’ experimented with their own sweet, fizzy concoctions. It was as if they had struck liquid gold. The American per capita consumption of their drinks grew by leaps and bounds, from 0.6 gallons in 1889, to 3.3 gallons in 1929, 23.4 gallons in 1969 and 44.5 gallons in 1985 – and ever upwards thereafter. Today, an increasing proportion of sales now takes place outside the USA.5
The most famous, and most globally recognized of all these drinks is, of course, Coca-Cola, and the modern-day data for that product makes for amazing reading. In 2012, the company sold its products in more than 200 countries, with 1.8 billion daily servings of the drink – that is one drink for every four people on the planet. Coca-Cola is the twenty-second most profitable company in the USA; its revenues exceed $48 billion, and its net income is $9 billion. ‘By the twenty-first century, Coke had conquered the glo
be, its market reach unmatched.’ All this from a commodity which had been a patent medicine in 1886.
Remarkably, the company was able to keep the price of a bottle of Coke at five cents from 1886 to 1950. Their vending machines, scattered carefully along America’s network of highways and bus stations, all dispensed bottles in return for a five-cent coin. Like most of its competitors, Coca-Cola was a very sweet product. The original formula mixed 5lb of sugar into every gallon of syrup. By 1900, every 6fl oz serving of the drink contained four teaspoons of sugar. The result, even as early as 1910, was that Coca-Cola was the largest industrial consumer of sugar in the world’. By then, some 100 million pounds of sugar were consumed annually via Coca-Cola.6
The key element in the success of Coca-Cola was cheap sugar, which, in the early twentieth century, was in plentiful supply from tropical producers and from US beet farmers. Moreover, the entire system was aided by the US Government’s policy of subsidies and tariffs for sugar. The price of sugar had fallen at the precise time the new soft-drinks companies began to pour unprecedented volumes of sugar into their new inventions, and the appetite of those producers for sugar seemed insatiable. Coca-Cola, for example, used 44,000lb of sugar in 1890. Thirty years later, that had grown to 100 million pounds. The US Government’s support for the sugar industry in effect bolstered not only the prosperity of the sugar corporations but also the fledgling drinks companies that relied on cheap sugar. It is no surprise then that the US political and strategic interest in sugar-growing regions became a key element in US foreign policy. It was as if the interests of US sugar and US foreign policy worked as one.7
Coca-Cola continued to thrive, even during the First World War when, along with other companies, the company had to reduce its sugar consumption by 50 per cent. Even here, though, the company was able to turn things to their advantage, via publicity which stressed its devotion to national duty by following the new restrictions. The post-war fall in sugar prices was a boon to the soft-drinks companies, although Pepsi was temporarily bankrupted by poor investments in the Caribbean. At the same time, the soft-drinks industry had become a major lobbyist in Washington and was keen to maintain the supply of cheap sugar.