Love Lane Lives
The history of sugar in Liverpool and the effects of the closure of the Tate & Lyle sugar refinery, Love Lane
February 2011 is the 10th annniversary of Marie Brenner’s IN THE KINGDOM OF BIG SUGAR.
Written by Ron Noon at 15:52 on Monday, February 28th 2011
On November 27th 2008 I finished off my first “assignment” on this website and concluded:
“So that’s my first blog entry, somewhat incomplete and certainly leaving a good deal more unfinished sugar business to be blogged. Remember all you sugar lobbyists who may gain access to this site that ‘the only completely unbiased sugar historian is the recording angel, whose works are as yet unpublished and who according to Mark Twain had opinions which to Satan might appear like prejudices’!”
I’m an historian but I’m not the recording angel when it comes to writing about Tate & Lyle or American Sugar Refining Inc. I do contend however, (aka Mark Twain), that many of the practices and activities of these companies are “very much further south of heavenly veracity”.
When I first started blogging on Love Lane Lives, it would have taken a sheer feet of counter-factual, post-modernist imagination to have envisaged a Tate & Lyle world entirely devoid of sugar! That said on July 1st 2010, it was announced by Reuters that American Sugar Refining (ASR) had bought T&L and a “perpetual license to use the Tate & Lyle name”! ASR is the new Sugar Giant on the block, owned by Flo.Sun Inc down in Florida, a private company which in turn is owned by Cuban Americans Alfy and Pepi Fanjul! They had acquired Tate & Lyle Canada Ltd. (Redpath Sugar) in 2007, so there is a definite familiarity and “kinship” between the old and the new kids on the sweetener block.
So much for the 2010 variation on truth being stranger than fiction. What about the February 2001 case study examined in a stunning essay by Marie Brenner in VANITY FAIR?
|Here’s the full essay.
