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Written by Ron Noon at 08:31 on Wednesday, December 17th 2008
“Our wish for sweetness runs old and strong. Bitter experience perhaps taught primitive man that sweet things were mostly safe to eat - but the instinct which preserved him in the jungle is slowly killing his modern descendants.” Hannah Wright ‘White Gold’ - and black consequences New Statesman 19.9.1980
It is now 28 years since that essay was published and what has changed in the crazy world of sucrose?
WHAT IS SUGAR? All edible plants contain in varying proportions, fibre, protein, fat, starch and sugar. All vegetarian and omnivorous animals including man, convert fibre and starch into sugar by bio-chemical means. Sugar is then made available in the bloodstream as a source of energy. Starch and sugar (in the form of fructose) occur in all fruit and vegetables and before the arrival of industrial cane and beet sugar, mankind managed well enough without refined sugar, which is pure or nearly pure sucrose. With the latter the stomach has less work to do and energy is assembled and used in a sudden sugar rush rather than slowly. The production of starch and fibre converting enzymes is inhibited once the body habitually gets its sugar requirements directly from sucrose, so the stomach finds it difficult to digest any accompanying starch and fibre. – The food processors take advantage of this and low fibre foods abound. This is the basis of what I call a “crowding out” thesis which can lead to vitamin and mineral deficiency. If you eat enough dietary fibre then there is no craving for sugar. “If”, as Graham Swift reminds us in Waterland is a sly insidious word!
The whole point about the history of “industrial” sugar is that wealth not health requirements have conditioned its growth and in fact the more recent PUBLIC HEALTH debate is the most serious threat to those hitherto guaranteed profits. The debate about sugar and health is ironically the biggest threat to the financial health of the powerful sugar lobby both here and in America. It is not going to lie down. Comments by “food faddists” prompt massive PR and dissimulation exercises to suggest that sugar will always be part of a healthy “balanced” diet! We even have a variation on that old theme of “s/he who pays the piper calls the tune”. It’s now called Affiliation Biased Science or ABS which has nothing to do with your braking systems.
ABS might also be conditioned by the need for “dissimulation” so that the total amount of SUGARS in foods is never known written in invisible ink! “If” people really knew the sweetener world that extends beyond sucrose then they’d not just talk about sugar but SUGARS.
IF you are scouring the ingredients list for added sugars, look out for the following:
• corn syrup - derived from maize (corn) starch. It’s known as High Fructose Corn Syrup or HFCS
• brown sugar
• dextrose - derived from sucrose
• fructose - found in fruits, but can also be made industrially from corn starch
• fruit syrups/concentrates - derived from fruit
• glucose
• glucose derived syrup - a mixture of sucrose and more complex carbohydrates
• golden syrup - made from evaporated sugar cane juice
• honey - a mix of glucose and fructose
• invert sugar - a mix of glucose and fructose
• lactose - derived from milk
• maltose - derived from barley
• maple syrup - produced from the sap of maple trees
• molasses - virtually unrefined sugar from sugar cane, with useful traces of vitamins and minerals
• sucrose - the chemical term for sugar
• treacle - less refined sucrose, with some traces of minerals.
OK NOW WE KNOW THAT THE QUESTION IS ABOUT SUGAR/S BUT WHAT ABOUT THIS FOR DISINGENUOUSNESS?
“Sucrose is a basic carbohydrate and has occupied a central position in human food for centuries. Sugar contributes to the pleasant taste and physical structure of many foods. The history of cane and beet sugar development and processing…show that sucrose has been an important agricultural commodity and food for centuries. Although the number of specific sugar products is more numerous in today’s world, refined sucrose is essentially the same today as in past centuries. From its formation during photosynthesis through its refinement to a high quality product, sugar is an essential ingredient in a wide range of foods and an important source of food energy.” Neil L Pennington & Charles W Baker (Eds) Sugar: A Users Guide to Sucrose 1990
“Gerry Hagelberg one of the world’s leading experts on sucrose economics describes what the “industrial” process of refining is about. “Though we speak of sugar factories, what actually takes place there is not a manufacturing process but a series of liquid-solid operations to isolate the sucrose made by nature in the plant.”
Sidney Mintz’s 1985 book Sweetness and Power:The Place of Sugar in Modern History is a magnificent read. He’s an anthropologist who went over to Puerto Rico in January 1948 to start this amazing study of a grass that has changed the world. “All the time I was in Barrio Jauca, I felt as if we were on an island, floating in a sea of cane. My work there took me into the fields regularly, especially but not only during the harvest (zafra). At that time most of the work was still done by human effort alone, without machines; cutting ‘seed’, seeding, planting, cultivating, spreading fertilizer, ditching, irrigating, cutting and loading cane - it had to be loaded and unloaded twice before being ground - were all manual tasks. I would sometimes stand by the line of cutters who were working in intense heat and under great pressure, while the foreman stood (and the mayordomo rode) at their backs. If one had read about the history of Puerto Rico and of sugar, then the lowing of the animals, the shouts of the mayordomo, the grunting of the men as they swung their machetes, the sweat and dust and din easily conjured up an earlier island era. Only the sound of the whip was missing.”
When we reflect on the sugar bateyes in the Dominican Republic today and the two films that have aroused so much controversy and conflict in the last 18 months, THE PRICE OF SUGAR narrated by Paul Newman, and THE SUGAR BABIES produced and directed by Amy Serrano, “only the sound of the whip” is missing!
Anyway back to the script: Sidney Mintz sums up the story of sugar in a few sentences.
‘In 1000 AD few Europeans knew of the existence of sucrose, or cane sugar. But soon afterward they learned about it; by 1650, in England the nobility and the wealthy had become inveterate sugar eaters, and sugar figured in their medicine, literary imagery, and displays of rank. By no later than 1800, sugar had become a necessity - albeit a costly and rare one - in the diet of every English person; by 1900, it was supplying nearly one-fifth of the calories in the English diet.’
There are several types of sugar. The ubiquitous “natural” product comes from a diversity of plants, and in the wider world of artificial sweeteners there is an extended variety of molecules and laboratories involved in commercial production. Historically sugar cane and sugar beet represent the two most important commercial members of the sugar and sweeteners family despite the recent easing of their hegemonic grip. They are however very different plants with distinct histories and temporalities although after processing and refining, the sugar produced from both is actually identical.
The cane thrives in tropical or semi-tropical climates, predominantly in the Third World, whereas sugar beet can only be grown in the world’s temperate and largely First world zones. “Sugar cane is a grass of the genus Saccharum which grows in the tropics, roughly between latitudes 35 N and 35 S. In certain places it grows outside that belt, but it is usually found within the area where palm trees grow.” Ironically, sweetening tea or coffee from a bowl on the table without knowledge of the packet it was in, would make it impossible to know where the granules had originated from. They could have originated in the exotic sounding Lesser Antilles islands where Christopher Columbus introduced the crop on his second journey to the Caribbean, or in East Anglia; from the sugar cane brandishing “its sword like leaves in the tropical sunshine” or the drab “mangel-wurzel” sugar beet in wet Fenland England. Beet sugar processing has now been around for nearly two centuries. Import substitution of the beet for the cane was given a major boost by the British blockade of trade with France during the Napoleonic Wars. Its production grew rapidly then throughout Europe in the nineteenth century. According to Mintz (and this is a key point when we reflect on the world of sugar today) it represented “the first important seizure by temperate agriculture of what were previously the productive capacities of a tropical region”. Despite advances in the wet milling of maize and the production of HFCS, (High Fructose Corn Syrup) the basic business fact remains that cane and its rival, beet sugar, are still the two most important sources of sweetness today.
So to repeat a recurring theme in these blogs, mankind did without this refined empty calorie for millennia. There is no biological need for a pure chemical that contains no protein, minerals or vitamins.
Mother nature’s laboratories continue that wonderful experiment in photosynthesis which unlike the Temples of Applied Science sponsored by the various sugar “associations” reflecting the Producer interests, provide natural sugar in combination with fibre and starches. As every nutritionist and concerned parent know however, fruit and vegetables are not sexy and unlike the achingly addictive “white stuff” come up against the very finite limits of their children’s stomachs. Perhaps this is another reason why the Cuban anthropologist, Fernando Ortez described sugar as “the favoured child of capitalism”?