I can remember easily the first time I stood deep in a field of sugarcane in full bloom, a field already marked for harvesting. It was the spring of 1948, and I had just begun fieldwork in Puerto Rico. The field lay in a rural barrio on the south coast of the island, only about a hundred yards inland from the beach. The well-irrigated soil in which the cane was growing was clayey, black in color. It looked cool under a blinding sun, but the air in the field was intensely hot.
The cane was the kind called gran cultura (literally, “big growth”), a term that means only that it was left to grow for 15 months or even more before being cut. Topped by the pale, wheat-like, lavender sugarcane blossoms they call guajana, the cane was thicker than a man’s wrist. Standing more than 12 feet tall, these plants are bred to be one of the most substantial and important economic grasses in the world. They were full to bursting of their intensely sweet green sap, guarapo, which is drunk by the cupful nearly everywhere that cane is grown.
That sap is not won easily from the cane. Once it is cut and stripped of its leaves, it must be delivered to the mill as soon as possible to be crushed, ground, and soaked to extract its juice, before it begins to dry out or to sour. When freshly extracted, guarapo is definitely an acquired taste, even among sweet-crazed humans. Gray-green in color, lukewarm and cloying, and, if not strained, full of bits of cane fiber and other even less pleasant stuff, it also brims over with calories. The cane on a single acre of good tropical land can supply about 8 million calories. To get that many calories in wheat requires 9 to 12 acres. (And how many acres to get that many calories in beef? Don’t even ask.)
There is a great deal aesthetically pleasing about sugarcane. Each stalk is a tiny living photosynthetic factory, transformed by human effort to maximize its yield. But the history of these beautiful grasses, and of the people who have looked after them during these last 2,000 years or so, is not so much beautiful as profoundly tragic.
After 30 years’ study of sugar and the countries that grow sugarcane and sugar beet and produce sugar in the New World, I started to write a book about it. I aimed to uncover the part that sugar played in world history during the first chapter of the economic system called capitalism. I knew something about the history of sugar. I realized that I would have to do what I could with this one thin thread, of sweetness and violence, embedded in the thick fabric of the past and stretching far back, long before anything like capitalism could even have been dreamed of. I found unexpected masses of data, much of it fascinating. What kept me afloat in a sea of alluring description was the simple hunch that sugarcane was not merely a “dessert crop,” as scholars of tea, coffee, chocolate, and sugar were wont to describe it. Far more than desserts, I thought, the history of sugar’s production and consumption might shed a bright light on the everyday unfolding of the capitalistic system.
Since it was linked for at least five centuries to the pain and suffering of millions of human beings, I have long thought of sugar’s sweet thread as red in color—the color of blood. During the long struggle against the slave trade and slavery, blood was in fact the liquid the abolitionists came to invoke to depict the terrible work of men and women in chains: a teaspoonful of sugar for so many drops of blood.
This essay is not the place to examine that link at length. One aspect of it should be pointed out, however. North Americans in particular associate slavery with cotton, not sugar, because of the American Civil War. But the crop that benefited the slave owners in the Americas most, and the one that used the largest number of slaves, was sugarcane. Plantation slavery in the New World lasted more than three and a half centuries, and it was involved with the killing or enslavement of an estimated 13.5 million Africans and African Americans. These people, and their descendants, were the victims of this institution during 375 years of profit-taking by some, and weighty discussions of the ethics of enslavement by others. During the first half of those 375 years, the West’s much-touted admiration for the idea of universal human freedom remained a terrible mockery. New World slavery simply grew more customary, and more important.
It has been sugar’s singular virtue for humans that the taste of sweetness can seem almost timelessly exciting, by which I mean that its taste is so intense it can nearly drown our senses. That taste, unlike salt, sour, or bitter, seems, when experienced, to evoke a desire for more of the same in nearly everyone. And the memory of sweet is easily awakened; the desire can become patterned, habitual. One thoughtful scholar has wondered whether our memories of food are qualitatively different from the rest of human memory (Sutton, 2001), and he may be on to something. But I’d claim for sweetness a memory that may be qualitatively different from all other food. Sweetness is unlike any other taste to the tongue, and as sweet as mother’s milk.
Sugar’s easy acceptance into nearly all cuisines occurred because its taste was so singularly pure. I want to contemplate that taste, and its uses and manifold meanings, from a perspective I never had before: 65 years of looking at what today is a cheap and banal food, but was once unimaginably rare and costly. Behold the substance that would one day overcome the sweetness that permeates the Bible, that other ancient sweetness we all know as honey.
Eight thousand years ago, a Mesolithic artist painted a scene that imparts drama to an inveterate human greed. The painting is still there, on the wall of a cave in northern Spain. It portrays a human figure in a tree, enveloped in a cloud of insects. The insects are bees. This ancient evidence of our species-wide love of intense sweetness probably attests to what must have been a practice or custom among those people who depicted their experience on a cave wall. Such quests for sweetness are characteristic of members of our species. Chimpanzees and bonobos, primate relatives with whom we share nearly 98 percent of our DNA, also rob beehives. So far as can be told, wherever humans coexisted with bees, they went to great lengths to obtain the sweet gooey syrup. Many, including this writer, are persuaded that this lust has been part of primate nature for countless millennia.
Honey is the sweetness of the Bible. Samson’s riddle (Judges 14) turns on bees’ honey. There is no sugar in the Bible. But today all the honey on earth amounts to a figurative spoonful when compared to the world’s sucrose, or “table sugar,” as it is generally known. While honey has always been treasured for its great variety of distinctive tastes and odors, refined sugar, for so long now honey’s greatest rival, tastes of nothing—that is, of nothing beyond sweetness itself. All artisanal honeys have distinctive tastes. They are justly prized for those differences, as are wines, hams, and coffees, among other food products. But because of sugar, the history of sweetness became a history of the so-called democratization of taste, a gigantic broadening of access to the mass production of factory food that has marked the emergence of the modern world. Sugar’s triumph was not that it was sweet, or even that it became so cheap. Beyond these facts, and unlike all its rivals, sugar was nothing but sweet. It could be made pure white; it could be used in any dish, any beverage, any cake, pudding, or candy (and at one time any prescription)—while providing a taste of sweetness alone, to which any other taste could be added.
Honey has not disappeared. But cane and beet sugar, which, for culinary purposes, are the same, have gradually pushed aside the many other caloric sweeteners, such as maple syrup, palm sugar, sorghum syrup, carob, and so on. These sweeteners have not disappeared; each has its own taste, and most of them enjoy specialty markets. But sugar’s market is the world, and for that market it is one product. The specialty markets of these other sweet foods are measured only against each other, not against sugar.
An epitome of sugar’s conquest was the manufacture of a semi-refined sugar syrup and its subsequent naming as “golden syrup,” thus reducing before the consumer’s eyes the apparent differences between honey made by bees and a cane sugar derivative processed by men. The crowning touch was to display on its label a dead lion surrounded by bees, along with the answer to Samson’s riddle—a biblical touch, courtesy of modern advertising. Though there is manifestly no honey in it, Golden Syrup has been eaten by generations of Englishmen as if they were eating honey. Golden Syrup is touted as England’s first brand, a sugar syrup that replaced—and for most users, supplanted—the taste of honey. It was cheap; it came in two “flavors,” light and dark; and it always tasted exactly the same. As noted earlier honeys are different from each other. The virtue of manufactured products is that they always taste the same, unlike the tastes of nature.
Several characteristics of sugar stand out, the most important being that it is sweet. (Saying so is not quite so vacuous as it sounds.) Our species’ diligent quest for sweetness appears to be universal, or nearly so. Though in some interesting cases, sugar has been tabooed, there is no evidence of any human group wholly uninterested in foods that taste sweet. Food taboos on the eating of a specific plant, animal, or other food (e.g., salt, eggs, blood) are common, but there is no taboo for sweetness. Nor has it been proven that a predisposition toward sweetness in humans and other primates is only determined genetically. Yet the evidence pointing to just such a structurally determined, species-wide, inborn liking for sweet is powerful. Many humans worldwide react positively to sweetness, and human infants everywhere exhibit signs of pleasure when given sweet-tasting liquids. The Eskimo and Inuit people of Alaska and Canada liked sucrose the first time they were given it, and they apparently chose to continue eating it even though it caused them digestive discomfort (Bell et al., 1973; Jerome, 1977). If this liking is indeed structurally determined, it may have evolved in relation to the sweetness of ripe fruit—a sign of edibility, as some writers have suggested.
But there are significant differences in worldwide consumption of sucrose (and other sweeteners). Whatever the role played by genes and sweet tooths, economic and social factors profoundly affect sugar consumption. Where sugar does become significant, governments are disposed to treat it as politically relevant, similar to the ways that they had long treated alcohol and then tobacco. Fondness for sugar, on the one hand, and the rich (but cheap) harvest of calories from tropical lands, on the other, help us understand why sweet things please not only consumers, but also governments and corporations. Sweet calories from sugar (not honey), then, are cheap and versatile calories, deliverable in many forms. Those of us who were around during World War II may remember how a nation accustomed to plentiful alcohol, tobacco, coffee, and sugar (not to mention beef) would turn uneasy and sullen when confronted with food rationing.
Sugar did not begin to be treated as an everyday pleasure before about 1800. For the poor, sugar became a necessity in popular European taste mostly as a companion to the novel hot stimulant beverages—coffee, tea, and chocolate. Tea and coffee reached Europe as drinks; sweetening them with sugar was a European addition. Before the nineteenth century, chocolate was also known in Europe only as a drink, and it became a sweetened drink as well. Only after the invention of conching in 1879, which made possible the even distribution of the cocoa butter in the chocolate, was it possible to begin mass-producing chocolate candy bars. In a later era, it would be flavored soda, notably Coca-Cola, that became a vehicle for sugar and caffeine. Such foods may become so popular that a scarcity of sugar could prove to be as urgent politically as a shortage of caffeine or alcohol. Like those others, and maybe more so, sugar is good to keep plentiful, and good to control. Internationally, the United States discovered, sugar is also a good tool to control other nations with, by using quotas and tariffs to reward and to punish.
Our affinity for sweetness permeates our language. Sweet words become loving words: honey, honeybunch, sweetie, muffin, sweetie pie, lollipop, sugar daddy, sweetheart. But there is more to this than terms of endearment. An engine runs sweetly. A tenor sings sweetly. Sweets for the sweet. Think of the running back Walter “Sweetness” Payton, or of the boxers Sugar Ray Leonard and, earlier, Sugar Ray Robinson. Money can be “sugar,” too. We do not ask how come; it seems too obvious. “It mus’ be jelly ’cause jam don’ shake like dat” is notably suggestive about what sweetness can stand for. Both symbolically and metaphorically, sweetness is easily transferred to bodily activities beyond digestion. Perhaps no other concept associated with the human sensory system has been so thoroughly worked over, sifted through, or squeezed as fondly for figures of speech as sweetness.
The idea of sweetness is close to our hearts, and probably even close to our awareness of our own bodies. Most of us learn it first as a taste at a tender age, and often in the arms of those who love us. Once we are old enough to take note, it is likely to settle into our consciousness, often with enduring affective associations. Bitterness, sourness, and saltiness—all tastes that are powerful stimuli to our sensory system—are patently different from sweetness. Like sweet, salt lies close to our particular—mammalian and primate—nature. Yet these tastes are never confused, and they can never replace each other. The gentle, insistently alluring nature of sweetness, however, has its own assertiveness. Anyone who has been interrupted by an urgent request while eating chocolate may be able to recall a faint but genuine irritation aroused by the need to reply before swallowing. That is because chewing sweet things while speaking are acts in conflict with each other. To articulate properly means having to swallow the bolus of semi-melted chocolate in one’s mouth, and thus losing forever the fleeting sweet sensation that particular mouthful promised—a sacrifice the brain was already anticipating.
A remarkable feature of sugar is the ways in which, over the course of time, it has been employed aesthetically. When thoroughly mixed together, sugar and ground almonds with a bit of oil becomes a kind of modeling clay. When heated, refined white sugar liquefies. Properly handled as it dries, it can be dyed, spun, blown, artistically cast, or painted. Its uses in these ways have long existed in China, India, and the Middle East. Once sugar spread from the Old World to the New, its production expanded explosively, and it was put to such uses in many other places. Hence, there is no single center of origin for the artistic uses of sugar, even though the baker-sculptors of Egypt, Italy, Germany, and the United Kingdom, and the candy makers of Mexico and Indonesia, among others, are justly famous. Spun and sculpted sugar figures—some classic, some comical—seem to have become popular wherever artistic individuals happened to work in or near kitchens.
Using techniques probably borrowed from the Middle East, the sixteenth-century European sugar artists produced replicas of famous sculptures called trionfi, or “triumphs,” for display at grand banquets in Italian centers of trade and luxury. In Great Britain and France, large sugar sculptures depicting cathedrals and castles, some emblazoned with messages, became a vogue among royalty and the high clergy. In England they were called “subtleties.” Such artful play with sugar depended not only upon the confectioner’s skill, but also upon an early post-Columbian drop in the price of sugar. When production was moved to the rich, ample lowlands of the Caribbean and intensive mass production became possible, the price began to fall. Lower prices put the purchase of large quantities of sugar within the easy reach of the wealthy and powerful, but not the poor. It would be another three centuries before sugar would become an everyday necessity of the European wage earner.
Like its shapes, sugar’s colors also became an experimental arena. But the process for producing a granular white or powdered sugar was long paramount. When it can be fully refined, sugar becomes white, and it can then be further whitened chemically. If not fully refined, it will be some shade of brown. The molasses drained from semi-crystalline sugar varies in color from brown to nearly black; the final molasses (used commonly for animal feed) is called “blackstrap,” and black is its color. The world is full of local sugars that come in various shades of brown and in various shapes, depending on local processing methods. Crystalline sugar almost certainly was made for the first time in India, and Sanskrit textual references to sugar are the world’s most ancient; sugar there figures frequently in religious ritual. But in India, for sugar to be ritually pure, it must not be white. At one time most sugar was not white, because it was incompletely refined, and hence brown. Such incompletely refined sugars have distinctive tastes, and for this reason might be called “unmodern.”
At some point the whiteness of sugar probably became an ideal, because white—at least in some places—suggested purity. Long before it had become ordinary, fine white sugar was made into a costly and desirable medicine by lengthy, labor-intensive processing. Every medicine for the Black Death (bubonic plague) contained powdered white sugar, which was also a favored item for treating eye ailments. Unfortunately, when mixed with gold dust and ground pearl and blown into the eyes, this remedy had nothing to recommend it beyond its cost and the fact that it was unavailable to the poor. One famous eighteenth-century English doctor touted sugar as a dentifrice, explaining to his patients how children more eagerly drank milk and other liquids if they had been sweetened beforehand. It is slightly humbling to notice that, only a few decades ago, Coca-Cola was being advertised as a health drink for the young.
Whiteness, medicine, and sugar reappear together in the Spanish manjar blanco and the French blanc manger, dishes composed of breast of chicken, almond milk or ground almonds, white bread, milk, ginger, and sugar. These were dishes intended for invalids, and the idea that what is pure can purify may have been embodied in them. Sugar did not disappear from the Western pharmacopeia until well into the twentieth century, while the association between whiteness and purity has still not lost its pull upon Western thinking.
People have been eating sucrose in its seemingly infinite incarnations for nearly two millennia. Touted and damned for centuries, all that seems certain is that the human craving for it is unimpaired. Even a glance at its world tonnage over the last couple of centuries suggests as much. Yet, over the course of the last half-century or so, sugar’s position as the world’s greatest sweetener has been challenged, and some of those challenges may raise questions about its future success as a food for human beings. Foremost among these challenges is sugar’s increasingly unfavorable press, inspired mostly by the role imputed to it in the higher rates of obesity, hypertension, diabetes, and other ailments in the United States and elsewhere. The industry has fought back fiercely, and it has held its ground with some success, at least in the United States. But the campaigns against processed foods and for healthier diets, organic foods, and sustainable agriculture, though still only blips on the sugar industry’s screens, have refused to go away. While establishing a scientifically solid case against sucrose alone has turned out to be more difficult than it might seem, a large number of reputable food scholars, physicians, and nutritionists are convinced that sucrose is at the very least one of a number of guilty parties, especially in relation to young consumers.
The rise of noncaloric sweeteners has continued, and can, I believe, be expected to spread. At this point there are some new contenders among them, including Stevia. Though long used in other countries, glucosides of the plant Stevia rebaudiana are relatively new in the United States. While such sweeteners are mostly used by persons who cannot eat sucrose for medical reasons, or by those who are seeking to limit or control weight gain, the continued pressure such substances are putting on the sugar industry cannot be ignored.
A third challenge has been the growing importance of high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), a contender for sugar’s place since at least the 1970s. This rivalry is complicated, however, by evidence that Stevia rebaudiana may be a healthful substitute for both table sugar and HFCS (Jeppesen, 2013).
Lastly, there is the old rivalry between cane and beet sugar. This debate deserves mention because the two crops have always represented two different climatic zones: tropical and temperate. In the light of global climate change—and even though beet sugar currently constitutes only about a fifth of the annual globally marketed sucrose—change may be coming.
Though any specific link of sugar to obesity is disputed or denied by the sugar industry, the growing obesity pandemic worries health authorities everywhere. Obesity in the young is particularly worrisome, and it has grown in many so-called less developed countries, providing the disturbing image of overlapping populations composed of the obese and the malnourished. Similar images are also seen in the West, leading to campaigns to improve school lunches, change the contents of food-dispensing machines, intensify physical education programs in schools, and invest in other ameliorative or preventive measures. But whether any—or indeed all—of these changes are having any significant effect on the eating habits of Americans or others is not really known at this time.
Politics played an indirect role in HFCS’s first success in the American market, when President Eisenhower and the U.S. Congress placed an embargo on Cuban sugar in 1960. As a result, commercial demand for an alternative sweetener rocketed. Once in the market, HFCS began to supplant the sugar used in prepared and processed foods, such as cookies, breakfast cereals, frozen dinners, and, most of all, soft drinks. Though no one knew it at the time, HFCS’s first significant entry into the soft drink field with Coca-Cola was a flop, but it proved a triumph for its predecessor, the “classic” Coke made with sucrose, which it was intended to replace. Because HFCS is cheaper than sucrose when used for ready-to-eat foods, it is consumed more in the United States and Western Europe and by the middle classes in the world’s cities, but far less in lands where packaged foods matter little. In the United States, HFCS may now constitute one-third of the total sugars consumed. Much of the negative publicity for it rests on the way that the fructose in HFCS is metabolized, and on the effects of that metabolism on the liver.
Cane sugar became the world’s sweetener around the start of the nineteenth century. Three decades or so later, beet sugar began to compete with cane sugar, a rivalry that subsequently became global. That was the first time that a temperate-zone product threatened to become the effective rival of an important tropical commodity. Though the United States was able to produce beet sugar, and still does so, it solved many of its own sugar problems, intentionally or not, through war, when it scooped up Spain’s old sugar colonies in the Caribbean and Pacific regions during the Spanish-American War (1898–1899).
At best, a personal view is only that, a view encased in the flow of time. As moments in time become past moments, it is the flow of time that lets us see the personal for what it is. My parents came from Eastern Europe to the United States more than a century ago. My mother would complain for the rest of her life about American sugar cubes, which melted in her mouth before she could finish drinking her tea. The sugar that she remembered eating in Belarus was broken off a sugar loaf with a hammer; one could hold it under the tongue while drinking a cup of tea, and it would not melt entirely until the last swallow. (In Iran in 1966 we sampled loaf beet sugar produced for export to North Africa, where up until recently sugar loaves were preferred in the countryside. We brought back samples, to my mother's delight.)
But my mother also told me about her first sugary treat, long before she had ever tasted processed sugar: parsnips (pasternak), dug out of the frozen earth, peeled, and then grated. “Almost like ice cream,” she recounted.
I recall my own saccharose epiphany. It was around 1930, as the world Depression settled not only into the minds of people across America, but into their bones as well. I got to eat my first candy, and it was the most delicious food I had ever tasted. A waitress named Rosie gave me a taste: chocolate creams. They came from Woolworth’s, my hometown’s first five-and-ten, and they cost ten cents a pound. Those chocolate creams, I now think, had few mysteries. A glob of the cheapest sort of fondant—no egg white, butter, or cream in that stuff—thinly coated with inferior chocolate. Yet I found the taste of the sugar inside so intoxicating that I wanted to scrape the chocolate off with my teeth.
These memories are dated, and a far cry from Claude Lévi-Strauss writing about the honey of the stingless bees of South America. His memories of its taste reach back, perhaps, to our primate nature: “A delight more piercing than any normally afforded by taste or smell breaks down the boundaries of sensibility, and blurs its registers, so much so that the eater of honey wonders whether he is savoring a delicacy or burning with the fire of love” (Lévi-Strauss, 1973, p. 52).
Sugar has been part of New World history for half a millennium, and for at least four times that in the Old World. It is a food that has meant much to humans, one that supplanted its predecessor worldwide, and that is a metaphor for so much, its history brimming over with the cruelty of man to man, but also with thoughts of sweetness and all of the pleasures that taste connotes.
The author warmly thanks Jackie Mintz and Katherine Magruder for their invaluable editorial and research assistance.
Sidney Mintz