6
American Bliss
In addition to candies and confections, sugar is added to a large number of other products sold throughout the world, including breakfast cereals, biscuits (cookies), doughnuts, ice cream and soft drinks. Sugar is also added to processed foods that were not traditionally sweet, and where its flavour may not be dominant. Hidden sugar can be found in canned soups and vegetables; breads, crackers and chips; frozen dinners; condiments (ketchup, chilli sauce and Worcestershire sauce) and salad dressings; peanut butter; baby foods and infant formula; pizza; hot dogs and lunch meat; pickles and cocktail snacks; flavoured yogurt; frozen foods; fruit juice, fruit coolers, ‘energy’ and sports drinks; and even pet foods. Sugars hide in processed foods under a variety of names, including sucrose, glucose, dextrose, maltose, lactose, galactose, malt syrup, maltodextrin, corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup, molasses and corn sweetener, to name a few.
Nowhere is this sugarization of processed foods more apparent than in the United States. As sugar prices declined in the nineteenth century, sweet desserts and snacks became universal in American homes, regardless of income or social class. More and more sugar went into cakes, cookies, pies and other pastries. Foreign visitors remarked upon this, noting that the amount of sugar and other sweeteners ‘used in families, otherwise plain and frugal, was astonishing’. By the 1870s, U.S. sugar consumption per capita was 41 lb (18.6 kg) per year; as commercially processed foods came on the market and sugar prices sank further, American consumption shot up. Cakes, from simple to lavish, were becoming an everyday part of the American diet. Parties were celebrated with a profusion of jelly cakes, pound cakes, plum cakes and lady cakes. From American kitchens issued a steady, fragrant stream of sugar cookies, wafers, kisses, drops, jumbles, snaps, macaroons, gingerbread, crullers and doughnuts – all with ever-greater quantities of sugar. Sweet rolls and doughnuts became regular breakfast fare. By 1901, Americans were consuming an average 61 lb (27.7 kg) of sugar per capita per year. The American love affair with sugar was flourishing, but was still a long way from its peak.
Cotton candy (candy floss), spun sugar in a paper cone, became popular in America in the early 20th century.
Until the twentieth century, the typical American breakfast included fruit, breadstuffs, eggs, potatoes and meats of all kinds – not just bacon or sausage but beefsteak, savoury meat pies and calves’ liver. During the late nineteenth century, vegetarians and health reformers began to develop breakfast foods based on unrefined whole grains, which they thought better suited to the digestion of the modern-day office worker. The first commercial cereals were unsweetened and were meant to be moistened with plain water. As the industry took off, entrepreneurs found that customers preferred their cereal sweeter, so the new fashion was to serve it with cream and sugar. Will Kellogg added sugar to the formula for Corn Flakes over the objections of his brother, the health food guru and vegetarian John Harvey Kellogg, who believed that ingesting sugar carried more potential health risks than eating meat.
As more women entered the workforce during the twentieth century, cereals were advertised as a means of easing mother’s workload. Children could prepare their own breakfasts without help and they loved sugary cereal. According to the medical authorities of the day, cereal was good for children, so this was a double win for busy mothers. Cereal companies, largely because they aimed their marketing directly at children, did well during the Depression; adding more and more sugar to their products helped seal the deal. After the Second World War, with sugar rationing a thing of the past, cereal makers upped the ante even further. In 1949, Post Cereals introduced Sugar Crisp, puffed wheat with a crunchy sugar coating. It was an immediate success, and other cereal companies followed suit with heavily sweetened cereals targeted at children. Some cereals approached 50 per cent sugar by weight; Kellogg’s Honey Smacks hit 55.6 per cent sugar; Post responded with Super Orange Crisps, which weighed in at 70 per cent sugar. This led observers to ask, ‘Is it cereal or candy?’
These high-sugar cereals were heavily promoted in children’s media, especially radio and television, point-of-sale marketing and, later, the Internet. The big three American cereal manufacturers (Kellogg’s, Quaker Oats and Post) spent more on advertising their products then they did on the ingredients that went into them. Annually the U.S. cereal industry uses 816 million lb of sugar, or almost 3 lb (1.4 kg) of sugar per capita. Ironically cold breakfast cereals, which started out as health foods, are now considered major contributors to excess sugar in the American diet, especially those of children. More than 1.3 million cereal commercials air on American television each year, and most of them are aimed at children.
Diverse breakfast cereals are numerous in American supermarkets.
Biscuits, Cookies, Cakes and Bread
The English word biscuit comes from Latin via Middle French; its original meaning was ‘twice baked’. Some early European recipes (like those still used for Italian biscotti) called for dough to be baked in loaf form, then sliced or split and baked again, slowly, to drive off any moisture; the drier the product, the longer it would keep. British biscuit recipes came to America with the English colonists, but the Dutch also colonized parts of America and their word koekje, meaning small cake, became the American term for a sweet biscuit. Amelia Simmons, author of American Cookery (1796), is credited with publishing the first known ‘cookie’ recipes, including one for ‘Christmas Cookeys’ made with a pound and a half of sugar to three of flour.
Cookies are the simplest of baked goods and require few ingredients – sugar being one of them. They take only a few minutes in the oven, so they can be baked on short notice and served as an informal dessert or eaten as a snack. A full cookie jar was long seen as emblematic of a well-run American home, a loving mother and a happy family, and the cookies in the jar should be (it went without saying) home-baked: sugar-cookie cutouts, oatmeal or peanut-butter cookies or the classic chocolate-chip cookies. But neighbourhood bakeries and pastry shops offered more elaborate cookies, and commercial baking plants in the U.S. started to churn out mass-produced cookies in the nineteenth century. By the turn of the twentieth century, store-bought cookies were available nationwide, and advertising campaigns strove to make them acceptable to the fashionable hostess. The National Biscuit Company (later Nabisco), founded in 1898 as a conglomerate of smaller baking companies, pioneered a wide variety of cookies, such as Oreos, today the world’s largest-selling cookie.
Christmas biscuits (cookies) have been served in Europe since the 16th century; they remain a Christmas treat today.
Cakes as we know them today began as a variation on breads. Some, like pancakes, were flat, and were turned to cook on both sides on a hot surface. Other cakes were baked in specially designed cake pans. If early cakes were sweetened, it was with a little honey, or they might be baked unsweetened and served with honey as an accompaniment. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, sugar replaced honey in cake batters, and sugar-based icings or frostings supplanted the accompanying honey. By 1615, cookbooks were advising the use of ‘a good deale of sugar’ in cake recipes. By the 1680s, cakes were commonly served as a dessert after a meal, or with tea or coffee in the morning or afternoon. Lavishly decorated cakes became a feature of special occasions and ceremonial feasts, such as Christmas, weddings and birthdays. As sugar prices declined and sugar refining improved, the amount of refined sugar used in cakes increased; powdered or icing sugar (also called confectioners’ sugar because it was used in candy-making) became widely available in the nineteenth century, when it began to be called for in recipes for cake icing.
Cake-baking traditions were brought to America by European immigrants, and cakes were popular in colonial times; they remain one of America’s favourite desserts. From simple gingerbread, pound, angel food and sponge cake to rich fruitcakes, cheesecakes, frosted and filled layer cakes, elaborate wedding cakes and whimsically decorated cupcakes, American cakes call for generous amounts of sugar. Although many people still bake cakes from scratch at home – especially birthday cakes – there is an abundance of mixes, bakery cakes and packaged or frozen products for those not so inclined.
Historically bread was made without the addition of sugar, although some early nineteenth-century recipes published for brown bread (also called dyspepsia bread) included molasses. This changed when millstones in flour mills were replaced by high-speed steel rollers during the late nineteenth century. The bran, germ and oil were removed from the wheat to produce a bland white flour. Bakers began to compensate for this tastelessness by adding sugar, and the amount of added sugar increased over time (sugar also adds moisture to bread, so it stays fresh longer). In the 1880s, cookbook authors recommended one tablespoon of sugar to every eight cups of flour. By the 1890s, this had increased in some recipes to about one tablespoon per cup of flour. Commercial bakers added even more. This increased even more for commercial bread during the twentieth century. By comparison, bakers in other countries, such as Italy and France, include little or no sugar in their bread.
American doughnuts (or donuts) may have been of Dutch, German or English origin. The Dutch called them olijkoeken (oil cakes) or oliebollen. These were pinched-off portions of sweetened dough that were rolled between the hands and then dropped into hot oil. The Dutch-style nuggets or ‘nuts’ of fried dough were popular in America, but doughnuts with holes in the centre were not common until the end of the nineteenth century. Purportedly the hole was a practical innovation that made for easier dunking in coffee. Others maintain that the shape helped the dough to cook more evenly.
The sale of commercial doughnuts greatly expanded after the Second World War. Doughnut retailing lends itself to franchising because the equipment is affordable. Doughnut franchisers include Dunkin’ Donuts, House of Donuts, Krispy Kreme and Winchell’s. Dunkin’ Donuts alone sells an estimated 6.4 million doughnuts per day (2.3 billion per year).
Yet another doughnut chain was established by Tim Horton, a hall-of-fame Canadian hockey player, who opened his first outlet in Hamilton, Ontario, in 1964. It was known for its coffee, which was guaranteed to be served fresh, cappuccinos, doughnuts and ‘donut holes’, but it quickly incorporated other items. The company soon expanded and it became Canada’s largest fast food operation. In 1995, Tim Hortons opened outlets in the United States. When Burger King agreed to purchase the chain in 2014, Tim Hortons had almost 4,600 systemwide restaurants, inluding about 845 in the United States and other countries.
About 80 per cent of doughnut business is take-out, and 80 per cent of doughnuts are sold before noon in North America. They come in a great diversity of shapes, sizes and flavours. There are yeast-raised doughnuts and baking-powder doughnuts, both deep-fried; for the fat-avoidant, oven-baked doughnuts are available. Most doughnuts have holes, and doughnut holes (or pieces of dough shaped to resemble them) are sold separately. Filled doughnuts are injected with jam (jelly), custard or a variety of other sweet fillings; further adornments may include a thick dusting of icing (confectioners’) sugar or cinnamon sugar, a thin layer of chocolate icing, a vanilla, chocolate or other flavour glaze, toasted coconut or sprinkles. Similar pastries are crullers (or krullers), large strips of dough twisted together and fried; and bismarcks, large, éclair-shaped jam doughnuts.
Entenmann’s doughnut variety pack.
Ice Cream
Ices, ice creams, and sorbets – frozen desserts initially sweetened with fruit juice – likely originated in Italy or France in the sixteenth century. They were sold in cafés in Europe from the seventeenth century on, and small vendors operated in most European cities by the 1800s. Several ice-cream recipes appeared in English cookbooks in the eighteenth century. European immigrants brought ice-cream-making techniques to America, where ice-cream parlours had opened in some cities by the 1790s. Many ice-cream recipes – most sweetened with plenty of sugar – appear in nineteenth-century American cookbooks.
Three main ice-cream flavours – chocolate, vanilla and strawberry – came to the fore in the nineteenth century and have remained favourites ever since. But other flavours proliferated during the nineteenth century, as did elaborate ice-cream presentations with inventive toppings, sauces and garnishes, and soda-fountain drinks made with ice cream. The late twentieth century saw the rise of the mix-in – premium ice cream studded with chunks of cookies, candies, chocolate, nuts or fruit, or with thick swirls of caramel, fudge or peanut butter running through the cream.
For much of the nineteenth century, going out for ice cream was a genteel pursuit. Served in establishments called ‘parlours’, ice cream was scooped into elegant glass dishes and eaten with a spoon. It was a popular summer treat, and the ingredients were cheap, but the problems for street vendors were how to keep the product cold and how to serve it without dishes and spoons. The solution was the ice cream cone, which was invented in the late nineteenth century.
Commercial production of ice cream did not take hold until technological improvements in refrigeration made sales possible through drugstores, soda fountains and grocery stores. In the United States, soda fountain offerings competed with the alcohol served in saloons and bars, and were therefore championed by the temperance movement. Prohibition gave a huge boost to the popularity of ice cream as bars, saloons and taverns were shuttered and soda fountains became community gathering places. However, it was not until after the Second World War, when self-serve freezer chests for grocery stores came into wide use and the freezer sections of home refrigerators increased in size and efficiency, that packaged ice cream became an everyday part of the diet.
By the 1950s, large ice-cream makers were underselling small producers, and supermarkets switched to national brands. But a niche had opened up for ‘super-premium’ ice creams, with a higher butterfat content and less air than supermarket brands. Häagen-Dazs, a new product from a decades-old family ice-cream business, first appeared in 1960, and Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, originally made by hand by two young men from Long Island, was first sold from a converted gas station in Burlington, Vermont, in 1978. Breyers is still the largest ice-cream manufacturer in America, a position it has held since 1951. It is followed by Dreyer’s/Edy’s and Blue Bell Creameries, Inc. Despite the concentration of the ice cream industry, the largest category of ice-cream makers in America today is private labels, generally sold at the local and regional level. In 2013, Americans purchased an estimated $11 billion worth of ice-cream – complete with a generous helping of sugar in virtually every serving.
Sugary Beverages
Yet another sugar-filled treat is soda pop, which, like breakfast cereal, began life as a health food and ended up as just the opposite. Mineral waters, both still and naturally effervescent, have long been considered therapeutic, and water artificially infused with carbon dioxide (CO2) was considered to have medicinal attributes. At European spas and resorts built at natural springs, drinking bubbly mineral waters was an important part of the health regimen. During the eighteenth century, several scientists, including Joseph Priestley and Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, discovered that carbon dioxide was the source of the bubbles in natural springs, beer and champagne. Priestley constructed an apparatus for manufacturing the gas, and reports of his invention were sent to John Montagu, the fourth Earl of Sandwich (the same man credited with inventing the sandwich), who was then Lord of the Admiralty. He requested that Priestley demonstrate his apparatus before the Royal College of Physicians. Priestley did so; among the audience members was Benjamin Franklin, who was living in London at the time.
Other scientists constructed their own systems for producing soda water. In 1783, Johann Jacob Schweppe improved a process for manufacturing carbonated water and formed the Schweppes Company in Geneva, Switzerland. During the French Revolution and its aftermath, Schweppes moved his operation to England, where his soda water was approved for medicinal use by the British royal family.
By 1800, manufacturers had found they could make water fizzy by adding a solution of sodium bicarbonate to it. Carbonated water, however, was generally made under high pressure using sulphuric acid. Operators could easily be burned by the acid, and containers sometimes exploded. Various kinds of apparatus for making carbonated water were patented from 1810, but because of the complexity of the process, they could be operated only by trained technicians. Because the devices were expensive, and the beverages made with them were considered medicinal, soda water was generally dispensed only in drugstores. It was a small step from carbonated water to flavoured soda water. Ginger ale is generally thought to have been the first flavoured carbonated beverage sold commercially in America. It was probably first marketed in 1866 by James Vernor, a Detroit pharmacist, who created Vernors Ginger Ale.
Another early soft drink was root beer, which was traditionally flavoured with bark, leaves, roots, herbs, spices and other aromatic parts of plants. In its early years, root beer was a home-brewed, mildly alcoholic beverage. Later, extracts made from the flavourful ingredients were touted as a tonic – typical of herbal remedies of the period. By the 1840s, root beer mixes and syrups were manufactured locally and sold in confectionery and general stores. Soda fountains, which sold combinations of ice cream and drinks composed of fruit syrups, sugar and soda water, sprang up around America.
Soda companies produced a sugary syrup or extract and sold it to drugstores, where it would be combined with carbonated water. This began to change in 1892, when William Painter invented the crown bottle cap, which made it possible to seal bottles easily, cheaply and securely. At the same time, bottling technology improved: the new, stronger glass bottles could hold the ‘fizz’ without shattering during bottling.
Soft drinks got another major boost during Prohibition, when manufacturing and selling alcoholic beverages was illegal. It was also during the 1920s that fast food chains emerged, and virtually all of them sold soft drinks. When Prohibition was repealed in 1933, soft drinks and fast food outlets were already well-established American institutions and they continued on their upward sales trajectory.
Soft drink manufacturers spend billions of dollars on promotion and advertising. Marketing efforts are aimed at children through cartoons, movies, videos, charities and amusement parks. In addition, soft drink companies sponsor contests, sweepstakes and games via broadcast and print media as well as the Internet, much of it targeting young people. In its study Liquid Candy of 2005, the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) revealed that soft drink companies had targeted schools for their advertising and sales of their products. It also reported that soft drinks ‘provided more than one-third of all refined sugars in the diet’. Soft drinks, according to CSPI, are the single greatest source of refined sugar, providing 9 per cent of calories for boys and 8 per cent for girls. The CSPI study also reported that at least 75 per cent of American teenagers drink soda every day.
American soda companies have rapidly expanded abroad. Coca-Cola and PepsiCo sell more than 70 per cent of the carbonated beverages in the world. Worldwide, soda companies sell the equivalent of 1.3 billion glasses of soda every day, which works out to about eight teaspoons of sugar per glass of non-diet soda.
Energy and Sports Drinks
Added sugar is also found in many other beverages, including fruit juices, fruit coolers, coffee beverages and ‘energy drinks’. Sugar has been added to fruit drinks ever since they emerged as a mass-consumption processed product in the 1940s.
Manufacturers have used the word ‘fruit’ in their beverage names to persuade potential buyers of good nutrition inside the can or bottle, but many fruit drinks are just fruit-flavoured sugar water. Fruit coolers, for instance, typically have 16 grams of sugar. Other beverages have more. A 20 oz (600 ml) bottle of Vitamin Water contains 33 grams of sugar. A 16 oz (475 ml) Starbucks Café Vanilla Frappuccino has 67 grams per serving. A Costa Medio Tropical Fruit Cooler contains 73 grams of sugar – seven times more than a Krispy Kreme doughnut.
Energy drinks have become pervasive and most are filled with sweeteners. An English pharmaceutical company developed the first energy drink, called Glucozade, in 1927. It was a fizzy liquid filled with sugar, and was mainly used to help children recover from illness. A British pharmaceutical picked up the formula, renamed it Lucozade, and promoted it with the slogan ‘Lucozade aids recovery.’ In 1983, the company decided to reposition the product as an energy drink using the slogan, ‘Lucozade replaces lost energy.’
Red Bull, consisting of caffeine, sucrose, glucose and other ingredients, was launched in Europe in 1987. It was introduced into the United States a decade later, when it became America’s first popular energy drink. Red Bull started a frenzy of copycat beverages, such as Jolt, Monster Energy, No Fear, Rockstar, Full Throttle and a myriad of other brands. Large companies jumped in: Anheuser-Busch’s 180, Coca-Cola’s KMX, Del Monte Foods’ Bloom Energy and PepsiCo’s Adrenaline Rush. These drinks boast caffeine levels of up to 500 mg per 16 oz (475 ml), and they are often loaded with various forms of sugar. By the early twenty-first century there were more than 300 branded energy drinks on the market in America alone – and most were filled with high-calorie sweeteners.
Sugar is also a major ingredient in many sports drinks – beverages that are designed to enhance athletic performance by fostering endurance and recovery. The first such beverage was Gatorade, formulated in 1965 by Robert Cade and Dana Shires of the University of Florida. Gatorade is a noncarbonated drink that consists of water, electrolytes and a heavy dose of carbohydrates (in this case, mainly sugar – 28 grams of which are in 16 oz of the drink). Gatorade launched the sports-beverage industry. Intended for athletes participating in serious competition or intense exercise, sports drinks do increase energy levels (as do all sugar-sweetened drinks) – but most sports and energy drinks are consumed by non-athletes, who often end up gaining weight.
That sweetened products sell well has been known since the early twentieth century. Manufacturers wanted to know how much sugar should be added for maximum sales. The research started in the early 1970s, when the psychologists Anthony Sclafani and Deleri Springer engaged in an experiment to induce obesity in laboratory rats. They found that rats did not overeat or gain weight when they were fed only Purina Dog Chow, but became obese when given Froot Loops, a high-sugar breakfast cereal. Sclafani and Springer repeated their experiment using other common supermarket foods – peanut butter, marshmallows, chocolate bars, sweetened condensed milk and chocolate-chip cookies. The rats preferred sweet food – and, if given the opportunity, continued to eat it until they became obese. Other experiments subsequently proved that when obese rats were exposed to non-sweet standard rat food, they declined to eat it.
About the same time, Howard Moskowitz, a researcher in the U.S. Army labs in Natick, Massachusetts, was searching for ways to make military rations more palatable for soldiers in combat. His experiments showed that soldiers’ preferences for foods increased as sugar was added – up to a point – but beyond that point, additional sugar made the food less appealing. Moskowitz is credited with coining the term ‘bliss point’ to describe that peak in the appeal of sweetness (bliss points were also established for fat and salt intake). The conclusion of these and other studies was that a love for sugar was inborn, and that humans were hardwired to prefer sweet foods. In 1981, Moskowitz left the Army labs and opened his own consulting firm in White Plains, New York, where many American food companies were headquartered. His company helped food corporations find the ‘bliss point’ for their products. He was extremely successful and so were the companies he advised.
Yet another set of experiments was conducted at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, an independent non-profit research facility funded by governmental agencies and large corporations. Researchers concluded that children, in particular, preferred sweeter foods than adults. Later experiments at the Center found that a preference for sweet flavours was a basic part of children’s biology, and allowed researchers to determine the exact bliss point for sugar in children’s foods and beverages. Further studies around the world, such as at the London-based – and corporate-funded – ARISE (Associates for Research into the Science of Enjoyment), confirmed these studies and concluded that the taste for sweetness was inborn.
These studies helped food manufacturers figure out how much sugar to incorporate in their products in order to stimulate sales. Candy and cereal companies, bakers and soft-drink manufacturers throughout the world raised the levels of sweetness in their products to the scientifically identified bliss point. The consumption of sugary foods and beverages rapidly expanded – as did the waistlines of consumers around the world, generating considerable criticism for the processed and fast food industries.