by James Walvin
Bitter-Sweet Prospects
HOW DID IT come to this? How did so many millions of people become so overweight? And how has obesity managed not only to grab headlines the world over, but to become a pressing concern for governments and health agencies everywhere?
Through the ages, human history has always experienced instances of overweight people, largely caused by a number of well-known medical conditions. And, as we have seen, being overweight in the past traditionally meant being a target of ridicule and personal abuse. This still remains the case, with those who suffer with excessive weight continuing to complain of their treatment by society in general, but the issue is now being played out at a whole new, unprecedented level.
The current problem of obesity has produced an unusual convergence of opinion – the coming together of a broad coalition of individuals and groups anxious to tackle what they see as a major health problem. An array of medical experts, social commentators, media analysts, politicians – and, not to be discounted, parents anxious to shield their offspring from the patterns of behaviour that seem to lead inexorably towards being overweight – all these have come together, first to complain about the problem and then to do something about it.
But what exactly are they complaining about? If people eat and drink unhealthy food and drink, that, surely, is their choice, their decision? The stark, liberal view would be that people should be free to choose to do, and to conduct their lives, in whatever way they wish. They have a choice – it’s their responsibility.
The trouble is, the consequences are not their responsibility alone – they are foisted upon everyone who has to pay the enormous cost of treating or caring for the impact of obesity. And the decision about diet isn’t merely a simple matter of individual choice. People are steered towards decisions about consumption by powerful – in some respects irresistible – commercial forces. They cleverly blend the appropriate strands of science (food, nutritional and medical research) with the findings of market research and advertising. The entire package is then targeted to capture people at their most vulnerable and suggestive. Scientists have long known that children, from birth, like sweetness; the food industries have created products which satisfy and nurture that taste; marketing executives then devise means of exposing their young target audience to the irresistible temptations of sweet treats. The result has been what contemporary parlance might call a ‘perfect storm’ – a confluence of irresistible forces which people are unable to withstand. At the centre of that storm lies the role of sugar.
Analysts of the chemistry and physiology of obesity have returned time and again to sugar. Although sugar is not alone in the cocktail of ingredients that have transformed the world’s dietary habits in recent decades, it has proved to be the pre-eminent ingredient in a huge range of those foodstuffs that create such damaging consequences for human well-being.
Yet this is curious, because sugar did not emerge from the research labs of food scientists, but from a very long historical presence in mankind’s diet stretching back millennia. People have traditionally liked sugar, adding it to their drink and food in societies and cultures around the world. We now know that those sweet pleasures eventually came at a price – initially in the form of serious dental trouble. The bad teeth of Elizabeth I, Louis XIV, and working-class children in the late nineteenth century were clear warnings of what was to follow. The scale of the health problems – from royal dental decay in the late sixteenth century to today’s obesity epidemic – was, of course, utterly different. But the cause was the same.
To add to the conundrum, mankind’s relationship with sugar is a force of considerable power and significance. Moreover, there has been no interruption in that relationship. To put it crudely, the world of modern industrialised foods with their own addictive use of sugar has something in common with doctors in Baghdad in AD 1000: both recognized that people like sweet tastes. And around that desire for sweetness it was possible to wrap a host of things – be it ancient medicine or a bottle of Coca-Cola.
For all that, sugar also corrupts – most obviously and directly through the damage it inflicts on consumers’ teeth. The most compelling evidence became available with the emergence of modern dentistry, and the ever more detailed scrutiny of children’s teeth in the Western world. It was obvious that those who relied most heavily on a sugary diet – and that meant, primarily, the poor – were the most seriously damaged by sugar. Their teeth bore testimony to the destructive effects of a sugarrich diet. Although now confirmed by medical science, it had already been visible, among the upper echelons of society, centuries before. In the years when only the rich could afford sugar, and when decorative sugar work were symbols of power and prestige, the rich bore traces of their sweet indulgence in their rotten teeth. European monarchs were the more prominent victims of a passion for sugar. At the time, having a sweet tooth often meant having a rotten one – or sometimes none at all.
Sugar’s ability to corrupt, though, went far deeper and wider than dental health. If we stand back from the broad sweep of the history of sugar, and consider how sugar rose from rare luxury to an item of mass consumption, its power to corrupt becomes quite startling. It transformed the physical and environmental face of large expanses of the earth’s surface. It was also primarily responsible for one of the most hideous and damaging migrations of humankind in history, which has echoes and repercussions that still trouble us today. For the best part of four centuries, sugar was cultivated in Brazil and the Caribbean by enslaved Africans and their descendants born into slavery. Sugar and slavery went hand in hand, and it seemed to most of the people involved in the system – except, of course, the slaves themselves – that there could be no sugar without slavery. The crudest measurement of sugar’s corrupting influence was that the Western world devised, perfected and justified that most brutal of systems for its own pleasure and profit. What greater corruption could there be?
Many millions of Africans were uprooted and shipped in the most debilitating and degrading of conditions thousands of miles – and all for what? To feed the pleasures and palates of the Western world and to profit their masters. The sugar they produced became the sweet delight of millions who knew little (and cared even less) of the slaves’ wretchedness. Much the same reaction followed the introduction of indentured labour to the former slave islands, and to new sugar economies the world over. Their efforts enabled sugar to become a viable commercial crop in new tropical settings and become a commodity produced worldwide – from Mauritius to Hawaii. There, as in the Americas, they toiled on plantations, and the plantation model became the chosen way of developing a string of new tropical commodities. But the plantation also wrought enormous environmental damage, as gangs of labourers burned their way through the native habitat to clear the land for the cultivation of sugar. The end result was human and ecological damage on a scale that is hard to assess, not least because it created an utterly new world. What emerged were peoples and habitats which, today, seem natural and timeless. In fact, both had been reshaped by foreign oppressors. And at the heart of those human and environmental changes was the story of sugar.
The ever-increasing volumes of cane sugar, later joined by beet sugar in the nineteenth century, won over the world to sweetness in food and drink. The ancient luxury of the rich was now an everyday essential of the common man, bringing pleasure and energy to labouring people around the world. The by-product of sugar production – rum – did much the same, though it, too, inflicted its own corrupting influence on peoples such as those indigenous to the Americas.
By 1900, sugar was cultivated and produced all over the world, and had become an essential item in the diet of millions. So valuable were the sugar-producing regions that the USA wielded its influence to ensure American control over sugar supplies. Like Britain and France in the eighteenth century, the USA in the early twentieth century saw sugar as an important element in the way it defined its power and strategy. In its dealings with Cuba, the American addictio
n to sweetness was to have profound consequences on global politics throughout the second half of the twentieth century.
American power came in various guises in the twentieth century. By 1945, it was, most obviously, the world’s major military superpower, but its influence spread well beyond its military might. The power of major US companies provided a model of corporate power for others, and there emerged a galaxy of global conglomerates that came to wield unprecedented power the world over. By the early years of the twenty-first century, those corporations – most owing no loyalty to individual states – controlled or dominated the world’s supplies of food and drink. And central to many of those commodities lay sugar itself.
As global diets became ever more processed and industrialised, sugar and sweeteners secured their unique importance in the whole process. Cane sugar had fuelled the initial global demand for sweetness, but concerns about sugar, and discoveries of new sweeteners, saw the emergence of other methods of sweetening food and drink. In the process, the world’s processed foods and drinks were sweetened to extraordinary degrees, apparently without limit. And the result? Cardiac problems were just one of a multitude of ailments that stemmed from the plague of obesity that began to characterise a vast proportion of the world’s population in the early twenty-first century.
No serious medical observer of this drift towards global obesity doubted where the prime cause lay. They blamed the unprecedented volumes of sweeteners liberally introduced to industrial food and drink, and all cleverly promoted by the persuasive cunning of modern marketing. Naturally enough, the sugar lobby, alongside its powerful allies in the food and drink industries and in advertising, put up a stout and often disingenuous defence. The facts were often in short supply; what mattered were the figures, the profits and progress of commercial products, reported to shareholders and board members. So enormous, so global were those corporations that they straddled national boundaries as if they did not exist. Individual nation states – not even the USA – could bring them to heel, although often that was because the corporations had the power to wield undue influence over politicians in the world’s capitals, most notably in Washington.
Yet the tide has begun to turn, and the clearest sign of that change is to be found in today’s newest range of Coca-Cola and in the company’s current adverts. ‘Zero Sugar’ is the new slogan, the current motif emblazoned on company products. That all-powerful corporation is currently promoting one of its major products by highlighting something that it lacks. The drink is, it is now claimed, better and healthier than anything that has gone before it, because it contains no sugar. Who would have thought it possible? After all, that drink had been devised and promoted for more than a century on the basis of its distinctively sweet taste. It had hit the ‘bliss point’ more consistently and with greater commercial success than any other product in human history, and had been swept to global fame and fortune by a unique formula which was sweetened by enormous additions of sugar. Now, in 2016, the game was up for sugar, and Coca-Cola was forced to put a significant amount of its corporate might behind the idea of ‘zero’ sugar.
That company’s dramatic change of approach to the formulation and promotion of one of its high-profile products was important in itself, but it was perhaps even more revealing as a signpost towards the direction in which the food and drink industry as a whole are heading. It is impossible to know how far or how fast that journey will take. But that the world’s major soft-drinks company has abandoned sugar for one of its highest-profile products, and proclaimed that fact as a key promotional strategy, forms a decisive, seismic shift. Coca-Cola has traditionally been a commercial pioneer – it has always led the way, and what they do, others quickly follow. Others may also now be ready to consider abandoning sugar for similar products, however much sugar has proven itself to be a cash cow over the years.
In the last few years, it would have been difficult for people most closely involved in the food and drink industry not to have noticed the heightened tactics of the opponents of sugar, most critically the shift to the accusation that ‘sugar is the new tobacco’. No corporate Board, looking back over the commercial troubles of tobacco over the past half century, can comfortably allow their own sugar-laden products to be placed in the same category as tobacco. The damage, the lawsuits, the commercial destruction of the tobacco industry – all provide an object lesson of what to avoid. Yet sugar is now inextricably linked with tobacco when considering harmful consequences.
No one expects sugar to vanish. It is an industry that employs too many people, and the cultural attachment to sugar runs too deep for sugar to simply disappear. Currently, there are 120 countries producing 180 million tons of sugar. In any case, how do we get round the simple, undeniable fact – people love sweetness and, as we have seen, for centuries have gone to great trouble to enhance their food and drink with sugar. For all the importance of beet and corn sugars, cane sugar continues to account for two thirds of the world’s sugar supplies. The world’s sweet tooth continues to rely on cane sugar, much as it did four centuries ago. As people have known for millennia, ‘Sweetness is the most basic form of tastiness and of pleasure itself.’1
Bibliography and Further Reading
Elizabeth Abbott, Sugar-A Bittersweet History, London, 2009
Fernand Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life, 1400–1800, London, 1967 edn
Jacob Adler, Claus Spreckels: the Sugar King in Hawaii, Honolulu, 1966
Cesar J. Ayala, American Sugar Kingdom: the Plantation Economy of the Spanish Caribbean, 1898–1934, Chapel Hill, 1999
Peter Brears, Cooking and Dining in Medieval England, London, 2008
Linda Civitello, Cuisine and Culture – A History of Food and People, Hoboken, 2007
Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik, eds, Food and Culture – A Reader, London, 1997
David Crawford and Robert W. Jeffery, eds, Obesity Prevention and Public Health, Oxford, 2005
Francis Delpeuch, et al., Globesity: a Planet Out of Control, London, 2009
Alfred Eichner, The Emergence of Oligopoly – Sugar Refining as a Case Study, Baltimore, 1969
Markman Ellis, Richard Coulton, Matthew Mauger, Empire of Tea – The Asian Leaf that Conquered the World, London, 2015
Bartow J. Elmore, Citizen Coke – The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism, New York, 2015
David Eltis and David Richardson, Atlas of the Atlantic Slave Trade, New Haven, 2010
Ben Fine, Michael Heasman and Judith Wright, Consumption in the Age of Affluence: The World of Food, London, 1996 Richard Follett, The Sugar Masters – Planters and Slaves in Louisiana’s Cane World, 1820–1860, Baton Rouge, 2005
David Gentilcore, Food and Health in Early Modern Europe – Diet, Medicine and Society, 1450–1800, London, 2016
Darra Goldstein, ed., The Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets, New York, 2016
Cindy Hahamovitch, No Man’s Land: Jamaican Guestworkers in America and the Global History of Deportable Labor, Princeton, 2011
B. W. Higman, A Concise History of the Caribbean, Cambridge, 2011
Gail M. Hollander, Raising Cane in the ‘Glades: the Global Sugar Trade and the Transformation of Florida, Chicago, 2008
Richard J. Hooker, Food and Drink in America – A History, Indianapolis, 1981, p. 130
Reginald Horsman, Feast or Famine – Food and Drink in American Westward Expansion, Columbia, Missouri, 2008
Colin Jones, The Smile Revolution in Eighteenth-Century Paris, Oxford, 2014
Kenneth F. Kiple and Kriemhild Conee Ornelas, eds, Cambridge World History of Food, 2 vols, Cambridge, 2000
Rachel Laudan, Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History, Berkeley, 2013
Hilary Lawrence, Not on the Label – What Really Goes into Food on Your Plate, London, 2013 edn
David Lewis and Margaret Leitch, Fat Planet – The Obesity Trap and How We Can Escape It, London, 2015 edn Harvey A. Levenstein, Revolution at the Table: the Transformation of the American Diet, New York, 1988<
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Robert Lustig, Fat Chance – The Hidden Truth about Sugar, New York, 2013
April Merleaux, Sugar and Civilisation. American Empire and the Cultural Politics of Sweetness, Chapel Hill, 2015
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D. Oddy and D. S. Miller, eds, The Making of the Modern British Diet, London, 1975
Avner Offer, The First World War – An Agrarian Interpretation, Oxford, 1989
Avner Offer, Rachel Pechey, Stanley Ulijaszek, eds, Insecurity, Inequality, and Obesity in Affluent Societies, Proceedings of the British Academy, 174, Oxford, 2012
Matthew Parker, The Sugar Barons – Family, Corruption, Empire and War, London, 2012
Barry Popkin, The World is Fat, New York, 2009
Mark Pendergast, For God, Country and Coca-Cola – The Unauthorized History of the Great North American Soft Drink and the Company that Makes it, New York, 1993
Tsugitaka Sato, Sugar in the Social Life of Medieval Islam, Leiden, 2015
Stuart B. Schwarz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society, Bahia, 1550–1835, Cambridge, 1995
L. D. Schwarz, London in the Age of Industrialisation, Cambridge, 1992
Andrew F. Smith, Drinking History: Fifteen Turning Points in the Making of American Beverages, New York, 2013
Andrew F. Smith, ed., The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, New York, 2007
Frederick H. Smith, Caribbean Rum – A Social and Economic History, Gainesville, Florida, 2005
Jon Stobart, Sugar and Spice: Grocers and Groceries in Provincial England, 1650– 1830, Oxford, 2012
Jon Stobart, Spend, Spend, Spend – A History of Shopping, Stroud, 2008
Joan Thirsk, Food in Early Modern England – Phases, Fads, Fashions, 1500–1560, London, 2007