Not So Sweet
Sugar and Valentines Day seem to go together. But if we start putting sugar into its historical context, wemight want to find another way to symbolize sweetness.
(Originally written Feb 2021, slightly updated for 2022).
Let me start with a true confession: I sent my mother a box of chocolate cupcakes for Valentine’s Day.
Despite everything I know.
Despite that I know that she, along with well over 34 million Americans, has one of those chronic diseases in which any extra sugar is a Bad Idea.
Despite that I know the ugly, ugly histories of sugar.
I did it for the same reasons that candy sales and chocolate sales have spiked since the beginning of the various forms of Quarantine due to COVID: because in the midst of the many forms of denial of every-day pleasure, sugar symbolizes what I want for my mother but don’t know how to give her: pleasure, comfort, and “sweetness.”
I mean, duh, right? Is not “sugar” synonymous with “sweet”?
Not so fast. Sugar is not so sweet.
And if you are craving more of it these days, it’s not entirely your fault. You, as an individual, are not the primary entity to blame.
The real sweetness we crave is being denied to us.
Our conditioning to perceive sugar as a reliable indicator of and substitute for real sweetness is as old as is the modern age — and no older. This craving is far beyond any of our individual life times. Even pre-Pandemic, sugar was a common way to, well, “sugar-coat” the many interlocking reasons we aren’t able to live the lives we want to be living. To make us believe that because of what we eat, we have and we are something that we are not.
To really understand this, we have to look beyond the latest health discourse about the role of sugar in promoting acute and chronic disease, or how much is “enough,” and the large data bases pointing to the extent to which sugar infuses our lives, even when we can’t taste it. We have to get into the history of sugar itself: which is also a history of our relationship to our environment, our society, and what constitutes sweetness.
Which, given that February is Black History Month, is entirely appropriate.
Before there was sugar
As hard as it is to imagine, there really was a time before sugar — especially processed white cane sugar and corn syrup — was in everything.
Long before Valentine’s Day was a popular Hallmark holiday associated with a red box of chocolates, and even before the new Roman Church superimposed a celebration of St Valentine on top of Lupercalia, the fertility festival dedicated to Faunus, the Roman god of agriculture, at the ides of February in Rome (February 15), bees were recognized the world over as one of the great sources of sweetness. Heralded as sacred by ancient Egyptians and Minoans, revered by Essene priests (a sect of Judaism), and associated with Cupid during Renaissance paintings — how can we be surprised that the yellow and black insect has been so admired? Not only does their cooperative structure of living and working together speak to a intricate combination of dance, governance, and equity that has long inspired philosophers, but their societies create that most wondrous of substances, honey.
Long a prominent source of sweetening foods and beverages, it does not have the same impact on blood sugar as does refined cane sugar. Additionally, its’ antimicrobial properties can help treat stomach pains; it is useful for skin care and has anti-inflammatory and anti-septic properties.
Honey is not the problem.
From Ritual to Plantation Production
Nor, strictly speaking, is sugar cane.
Sugar cane (saccharum offcinarum) in its original, whole food form, has been chewed by for millennia as a small part of an overarching diet rich in other whole foods. It is rich in calcium, zinc, and B vitamins. As Korn and Ryser write, “When sugars are consumed as part of the whole food, the natural fibers, pectin, and gums slow the absorption process in the intestines and do not raise blood sugar quickly.”
Chewing on a palm-length of sugar cane is roughly comparable eating a small apple in terms of its effect on glucose levels. When used appropriately it, like other mood-altering plants such as tobacco and cocoa, can be medicinal.
However, when the plant is squeezed and squeezed, extracting and then boiling the fibers and in other ways “refining” the substance, it becomes nothing short of poisonous. Processed sugar is highly inflammatory, exacerbates pain, and depletes B vitamins, zinc, and other minerals, and can hamper glucose absorption. While highly processed white sugar is particularly dangerous, for those with diabetes, brown sugar and molasses and sugar cane juice are not much better.
Processed sucrose derives from sugar cane and sugar beets, with sugar cane being, by far the more accessible. Sugar cane was first domesticated in New Guinea in (at least) 8000 B.C.; boats carried it to the Philippines, India and possibly Indonesia. Our first references of sugar making — rather than growing sugar cane — are Sanskrit texts in India, detailing rituals to the ancient Hindu Mother Goddess of Creation and Destruction in India. Ancient Egyptians developed refined sugar.
Sugar produced from sugar cane was barely — if at all — known to Europeans before 1000 AD. While humans do have a bio-chemical preference for sweet tastes, sugar was not a part of the diet of millions of people for most of human history. Its rise in popularity within European cultures and around the world has only occurred in the past 500 years. That is to say, sugar production and consumption is intricately, even radically, linked with European colonization and the growth of the global capitalist economy, and the resulting ecological and human genocides in Africa, the Americas, and other parts of the world.
The gooey, sweet liquid inside of sugar cane starts to harden as soon as the cane is cut. To form the crystal, the cane must be crushed and the liquid boiled within 48 hours — optimally less. As a result, to produce sugar for more than small scale usage requires a massive and laborious process. Muslims in the Mediterranean were the first to develop sugar plantations. After the Ottoman Empire took over much of North Africa, the Middle East and Spain, they started planting sugar cane. Brilliant innovators, the Moors experimented with irrigation, labor, administration and technology; many varieties of sugar were produced. During the Crusades, Europeans picked up these techniques; when they conquered parts of the Middle East, such as Jerusalem, they supervised sugar plantations. By the time Christian monarchs reclaimed the Iberian peninsula, Europeans were adept at running sugar plantations. Christopher Columbus himself traded in this ”white gold” prior to his so-called “discovery” of the Americas.
Throughout this time, sugar was generally considered a spice, along with cinnamon and nutmeg. For medieval lords and royalty, elaborate sugar cakes and center pieces symbolized wealth. For the vast majority of the population, it was out of reach. Desserts — including fruit — were not part of the European diet. Even in the Arabic world, sugar was not a regular part of the diet.
By 1970, roughly nine percent of all available food calories in the world were in the form of sucrose. Ireland, Denmark, Netherlands and England all consumed 120 pounds of sucrose in a year; complex carbohydrates, such as grains, which for millennia made up the bulk of the European diet, have been steadily decreasing.
A monstrous transformation
The Taino people, who take credit for ‘discovering Columbus’, as with so many of their fellow indigenous peoples throughout north and south America, were significantly healthier than the Europeans who arrived on the islands the Taino called home for thousands of years. Theirs was a life of abundance. Their diet was one of fish, shellfish, luscious fruits, vegetables and game. Unquestionably, their diet was superior to the majority of the European populations at that time. Their homes were spacious and resistant to hurricanes, their technology (including the hammock) appropriate to their values; their agricultural techniques advanced, highly productive and largely resistant to erosion; their poetry and music was renowned throughout the islands; and their women held positions of leadership.
Living in the midst of a magnificent old growth forest, theirs was a largely peaceful society. From first to last, even Columbus was astonished by their gentleness and kindness. Indeed, he writes home that “in all the world there is no better people nor better country. They treat their neighbors as themselves.”
Prior to Columbus’ voyage, the Catholic Church and European monarchs had already started to conceptualize the people, plants and animals of the unknown lands into private property to be enslaved, evidenced in part through a series of papal bulls that eventually became known as the Doctrine of Discovery.
Columbus may have admired the Taino, but his own world view was so clouded that he could never see them as equals. His first diary entries detailed both his admiration for their gentleness and his desire to turn them into slaves. Unsurprisingly, the Taino did not approve. They killed the first Spaniards whom Columbus left on the islands because of the way the Spaniards treated their women.
In pursuit of gold and other forms of profit, which was associated with Godliness in an early variation of the contemporary Prosperity Gospel, the people were enslaved or outright killed or died from small pox and other diseases, the land stolen and the precious bio-diverse forests were clearcut for an early form of monoculture: the sugar plantation. Taino agriculture was dismantled. As Elizabeth Abbot, in her magnificent history, Sugar, writes, “As sugar production took root, it uprooted almost everything that had been there before: the peoples and their civilizations, and the agriculture and the very soil and topography of the New World.”
In 1516, the first (documented) sugar from the New World arrived in Europe. Columbus’ son, Diego, was a sugar planter who became the first Governor of Hispaniola. By 1518, a combination of slavery, malnutrition, brutality, despair and diseases wiped out 90% of Hispaniola’s remaining Tainos. The brutal pattern of torture and slavery, including the hacking off of ears and limbs, became the blueprint throughout the Americas. The Europeans enacted terrorism upon the native peoples, leading to a genocide and ecological destruction of epic proportions that the world has never recovered from.
Not so sweet.
But the people — the people did not disappear. Despite centuries of narratives of extinction, in recent decades, the Taino people have been reclaiming their identities and correcting history. In the process, they are turning a victim narrative into a survival narrative. They are reclaiming their own histories, reworking traditional crafts, revitalizing songs, dances and other dynamics of culture. This is true for the diaspora of peoples from Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and the Lesser Antilles. In the United States, there is a Taino National Library and Museum, exhibits in the National Museum of the American Museum, speakers and organizers such as poet Bobby Gonzalez in New York City and the Bronx-based activist and entrepreneur Ramona Freyerra, who is supporting cultural dialogue across the diaspora through creating onesies uplifting Taino symbols at Ojala Threads. Amidst this violent history of social and environmental brutality, their survival offers a hope that new narratives and with them the constitution of new relationships, habits and behaviors can emerge.
And imagining a different world is so critical to this task: the task of releasing ourselves from the hold of Sugar. This is, at its heart, a task of decolonization. And our world is so deeply entrenched in the legacies of colonization, that our global markets, which enabled sugar to become the soft drug that it is, are notoriously difficult to re-imagine.
And yet if we don’t at least try to imagine what once was, we are left bereft of the imaginary capacity to conceive of what might be. In the case of sugar, to know what we actually want, it helps to know what we have been deprived of.
American environmentalist Kirkpatrick Sale, in his book, Christopher Columbus and the Conquest of Paradise, argues that Columbus’ encounters with the natives (was) instrumental in the development of “everything of importance in the succeeding 500 years: …the triumph of capitalism…. The establishment of a global monoculture, the genocide of the indigenes, the slavery of people of color, the colonization of the world, the destruction of primal environments.” We could also add: global change of taste, disease-causing diets, fatal damage to flora and fauna, the global mass consumption of sugar and the creation of a racial metric that continues to shape people, disease, and spatial configurations.
Racism: strengthened by sugar production
Between 1600s-1800s, sugar drove the entire economy between Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas. As it did so, racism became embedded in the economy. We can call this the beginnings of “structural racism.” For various reasons, white indentured servants and, overwhelmingly, African people forced into slavery came to replace Native peoples on sugar plantations. Estimates are that around 12 million Africans were forced into the slave trade. 1–1.5 million died in the horrific Middle Passage. Over 4 million Africans were brought to the Caribbean, where most lived and died on sugar plantations. Upon arrival, 2 out of 7 died from disease and despair even before they started the “real work.” White bodied people were surrounded by those they both needed and oppressed to obtain prosperity.
In the colonies, white prosperity was built on sugar — especially but not only white sugar. The capacity to control the production of sugar became associated with wealth. The wealth accumulation of a small group of people was a direct result of the enforced poverty and terrorized lives of millions and continued ecological destruction. The American economy was built on sugar — from slave trading to rum production — in both the South and the North. Cotton and tobacco plantations were far more common as mono- crops, but it was “King Sugar” that shaped the economy, including the structure of plantations and the international trading routes that tobacco and cotton followed.
Understandably, resistance was everywhere. Slaves urinated in the Masta’s food, set fields on fire, committed suicide and spit in the vats of sugar. A unique culture and with it a set of spiritual beliefs and ceremonies that both confounded and terrified the whites developed. Music and dance developed within and around the confines: despite horror upon horror, the human spirit prevailed.
It is difficult if not impossible to quantify the extent of ecological destruction yielded by the mass production of sugar. First there was the destruction of the old growth forests and its millions of inhabitants. Then there was the subsequent soil erosion; water tables brought down; and the influx of European cattle which ate the indigenous grasses and trampled the soil, causing erosion that never existed in the more ecologically conservative Europe or the prior indigenous patterns of living with the land. Rats from Europe contributed to the challenges — to this day rats consume 40% of farmers’ crops in Haiti. Indeed, recently, the World Wildlife Fund estimated that “growing sugar cane may have done more damage to wildlife than any other crop.”
This new kind of “sweetness” practically unknown at the level of quantity and production, came at a sickening price. Sugar production facilitated a loss of such epic proportions that we have forgotten it.
Nearly every description of the “New World” by early European explorers depicts a sense of wonder and awe at the sheer physical beauty of what they referred to as “paradise,” a phrase that had explicit spiritual and religious connotations. In Paradise, you don’t need to rush, for you know that all is well. In Paradise, you are loved. In Paradise, you are safe.
Within a few generations, “paradise” as experienced by those early explorers was largely destroyed. The pattern of destruction continues. The sentiment behind Joni Mitchell’s line, “Tear down paradise and put up a parking lot” has at least a 500 year old history.
What does it mean to loose paradise? To loose traditional ecological knowledge developed by indigenous peoples in both Africa and the Americas? Knowledge that, today, is considered invaluable for combating climate change?
While the indigenous peoples in either Africa or the Americas most likely had not read Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost, which was penned even as they themselves through no fault of their own were loosing their own home in Paradise, Milton’s famous phrase spoken by the humans as they left the Biblical paradise might well have resonated:
“Farewell happy fields,
Where joy forever dwells: hail, horrors!”
Except, of course, that the Satanic creature that entered their Garden did not take the guise of a snake. It took the shape of conquistadores, missionaries, soldiers, and those who carried King Sugar.
In ReMembering the Story of the Anthropocene Age, I argue that we need to re-originate the history of climate change into the history of colonization, explicitly the Doctrine of Discovery. Part of the reason for that is that in order to confront the multi-faceted social and ecological crises that we are facing today, we need to return to their origins and see the roots of the intersections that continue to confound funders, governments, investors and other self-designated “problem solvers” today. If you don’t accurately address the roots of a problem you can hardly begin to create appropriate responses. Or even to know what you are grappling with.
These histories have been purposefully dis-membered from our collective knowledge.
From the beginning, sugar in coffee houses and factories in Europe was critically disassociated from the production process. Indeed, the abolition movement was successful because it re-connected the human being (including making Africans human again in the mind of Europeans) who was making the sugar with the sugar itself in the minds of the consumer who was also a voter and decision maker.
The violent separation of people and place not only led to colonization but it was part and parcel of the mass production of white sugar. “Wealth” came to mean something horrifically narrow: financial profits, material comforts, and a habituated internal disassociation to both ecological and human suffering.
In place of real wealth and the possibility for real health, sugar (and with it, rum) became a readily available “soft” drug. A habit of disassociation became normalized into the foundation of modernization. It would be centuries — until now — that white societies began to fully question this narrow meaning of wealth.
To realize that the paradise they thought their wealth could buy was actually destroyed in the very creation of that “wealth”.
Not so sweet.
Sugar: a “cheap” fuel
The social and ecological changes in the Caribbean and other parts of the Americas were echoed in England and Europe as short-term material wealth from slave labor emboldened financiers, land lords, and inventors. Land was divided, the commons divided, peasants forced into landless poverty, and factories developed to mass produce products that were sold to, of all places, plantations throughout the Americas.
The lives of the factory workers were horrific, and sugar — in tea, possibly bread, and porridge — became so intertwined with both the caloric and the psychological make up of British labor forces that one can hardly imagine the industrial revolution with out it. Sucrose manufactured by slaves became a cheap, if tear-and-blood-soaked, fuel that quite literally energized the people who made the industrial revolution possible.
Sugar literally fueled factory workers on their pre-labor laws work hours — from 6am to 8pm or later, with few breaks. The afternoon tea break — with a lot of sugar in the tea — helped the workers through the day, though it is questionable how significant the caloric increase was. It certainly was a solace. Most factories were fearful, filthy, and violent places, supervised by brutal men who beat their underlings for talking, being tardy, or making small mistakes. Child labor was common.
In this massive societal shift from people growing their own food and feeding their own families to having to fully rely upon an income, child mortality sky rocked to nearly 50% before the age of 5. Poor nutrition and cramped, usually filthy living conditions were part of this new “modern life.” So were the newfound requirements for survival: both parents working long hours, usually at a factory far from home, instead of caring for their children closer to home. Wage-earning income as the sole means of survival forced the family-time -vs-income equation into a daily reality. The traditional foods of oats, barley and vegetable broth were no longer possible to make for time-strapped families to feed themselves or their children. Today, millions of the world’s poor continue to be forced into such horrific choices. Sugar becomes both one of the only available “treats” to a cash-strapped, time-strapped family; it became a symbol of consolation and the sweetness of a life that was being denied to them.
And sugar — especially as it became increasingly less expensive — became the perfect food to mix in with other foods, from dairy to alcohol to bread to fruit (and thus jam). It wasn’t just the bitter drinks that became staples and symbols of progress. It increasingly became part of every meal.
A sugary world: not so sweet
Social change, dietary change, economic change, and a shift in people’s palettes coincided. Food anthropologist Sidney W. Mintz argues in his classic book, Sweetness and Power, that this was a key part of the development of a consumption-based society where identity was associated with what (and how much) you ate and where time became the ultimate scarcity.
What an irony: that in the sugar-fueled shift to an industrial society with its endless amounts of time-saving devices, people do not experience that they have enough time. The mass production of sugar takes enormous speed: once produced, sugar acts as a carrier, transferring that speed into the bodies of any society which consumes it. The means become the ends: a cheap fuel that can destroy the bodies which consume it, never providing actual satisfaction. We become the hungry ghost, always wanting more.
Sugarcane, the fastest growing grass in the world rapidly transforms sunlight into energy. When crushed and boiled and refined the crystal substance gives short-term energy and long-term crashes. Can we be surprised that it yields a society out of balance with itself and disconnected from nature?
Even today, sugar production is renowned for poor (even semi-enslaved) working conditions, and the economy infused with it crushes millions into poverty and its close associate, poor health. Sugar is ultimately a poor substitute for what we have lost. It acted and continues to act as one of the most powerful opiates for the masses, as evidenced by its ubiquitous presence and the difficulty of withdrawing from it, even when one really wants to.
All of this has been maintained by the powerful Sugar Interest, sometimes referred to today as Big Sugar.
One of the early forms of corporate lobbying, the “sugar interest” was a combination of politically powerful forces including West Indian planters, slavers, ship-owners who transported sugarcane, bankers who underwrote its production; the insurers who insured it; the importers, wholesalers and grocers who sold it; the factors, longshoremen, bakers and confectioneries who dealt in it. It often included the East Indies Company, one of the first global corporations whose major commodities — tea and coffee — succeeded because of and influenced the success of sugar.
As Abbot argues, West Indian interests consistently succeeded in protecting the plantation economy, including imposing duties, influenced global politics including the American revolution and, regardless of their own production costs, convinced Parliament that the Empire was in their debt and they thus should be given special treatment.
All of which was done at the continued cost of Black lives, even after the abolition of the slave trade in Britain and the abolition of slavery in the United States.
In our modern world, power is signified in large part through the ability to entice consumption, especially by the middle class and the working poor, and to manipulate the other network of entities to maintain both the production and consumption. Sugar was one of the first “interests” to declare and promote its own interests above that of a particular nation, including one as supposedly powerful as the British Empire. Of course, all Empires are only as strong as is their capacity to connect, control, and effectively trade with different components of its own Empire. When the Americans refused to pay their sugar tax and threw their tea (from another part of the Empire) overboard, it was the beginning of a revolution. Yet the sugar interests are cunning. If they loose one part of the world, they simply move somewhere else. When slavery was outlawed, sugar plantations moved. At this point, sugar planters and those who fight for them, siding with their interests over the interests of the people, have disrupted and devastated the hopes and dreams of people and places from Fiji to India to Hawaii to Australia, impacting a global Indian, Pacific Islander and Chinese diaspora.
Not so sweet.
If you are eating too much sugar, it is not just about you.
Obviously, this was and continues to be an intricate, global system. Our world is not only addicted to sugar, it depends upon it. When we take this macro perspective, we recognize that the problem locus is at the level of the collective. Not the individual.
Thousands if not millions of articles exist on the evils of processed sugar. Most act as if the first step is “building awareness”, as if the problem posed by sucrose arose from a lack of awareness. This is a false premise. The problem arose because of a desire for “wealth” narrowly defined; one which depended upon the active, purposeful destruction of Paradise and which arose from all of the disassociation that must be present to destroy an old growth forest and to torture kind and gentle people.
It is not fully accurate to say that individuals are addicted to sugar. That puts far too great a burden on the individual.
Our society is made up of it. And our society, sugary as it is, is not so sweet.
Both the descendants of the factory workers in Europe and the descendants of slave plantations continue to struggle with chronic diseases associated with sugar — from diabetes to cardiovascular diseases to obesity to certain types of cancers. Our sugary society is one where convenience and choice is paramount. Sugar both requires speed and speeds up our lives; sugar subsequently becomes the “self-medicine” of a life that is too fast, and far too many people literally don’t have time to cook the nourishing food of their ancestors.
Indeed, the basic relational patterns that knit humans to land and to family systems — from farm to table to families to composting — are being consistently eroded by the sugar-enabled convenience of foods, from Lay’s potato chips (2 grams of sugar per serving) to on-the-go meals to the Starbucks Frappuccino or the Dunkin’ Donuts latte that are being substituted for home-cooked meals where we sit around the table. Common meals are not just more convenient — they require one to adhere to social norms that are less adjustable to individual wants and schedules. That is, after all, part of the of social gatherings such as meals: we are not only individuals. We are part of a whole. Wholeness arises from community. Wholeness arises from eating together.
The very thing that first colonization and subsequently the modern world is making increasingly less common.
In terms of health, the peoples of Paradise — including but not only those of the Caribbean islands — were far healthier than their European counterparts when they stumbled, hungry and lost, upon their shores in the fifteenth century. Today the region, while not nearly as malnourished as it was 30 years ago, is a hot spot for chronic illnesses, most of which are exasperated by both sugar and (most recently) fat increases. Fruits, vegetables, roots, tubers and legumes — all of which were significant parts of the pre-colonial diet — are less than 50% of recommended intake for adults. And, as anyone who has spent much time in the Caribbean knows, sugar is prevalent — from Sugar Cakes to Tamarind Balls. So are pesticides, fertilizers and GMOs. All of which can be summed up in one phrase: colonial dietary legacies.
Most dietitians, health gurus, and others will point to the need for greater awareness. And yes, that is critical. But don’t let anyone guilt-trip you. There are so many social and corporate and economic factors — sometimes referred to as “social determinants of health” by public health officials — that knowledge alone about how much sugar is in your average corn chip is helpful but insufficient.
The need is to unravel the economic and cultural knot we have tied ourselves into. In a way that is otherwise surprising, this is as true for dietary human health as it is for climate change. Individual change is, while not an illusion for that individual, insufficient given the scale of the problem. Corporations, investments, and the notions of wealth itself needs to shift. In particular, our relationship to time, comfort, and the notion of the “good life” needs to change.
“Diabetes develops from the disruption of traditional and natural ways of living. The disease is made worse by the historical and contemporary traumas individuals and communities experience.”
— So writes Leslie E Korn, PhD, MPH and Rudolph C Ryser, PhD, in, Preventing and Treating Diabetes Naturally: The Native Way, a book aimed towards indigenous communities as part of the Center for World Indigenous Studies.
Their statement is, in knowing this history, an obvious statement. But it is not the way we usually talk about diabetes — or the many other deadly chronic illnesses associated with the mass-production of sugar. We may refer to these chronic diseases as a result of the “modern lifestyle” with its excessive amount of sitting and fast-food lifestyle.
But when we say, “modern lifestyle”, we are, simultaneously, saying, the lifestyle left to us by colonization and its child, industrialization.
Modern lifestyle = legacies of colonization.
And this matters, because memories of colonization are memories of a violent reshaping of the world; it was the active dis-membering from families and rivers and mountains and ways of living that were, in so many ways, far better at enabling holistic health.
The basic recommendations for preventing diabetes are well known: eat whole and unprocessed foods, stop eating sugar and highly processed white flour, de-stress, and exercise more. All of these are easier in community and if our entire society was not trying to make us do the opposite. All of which are far, far easier if we shift our relationship to time.
Another way of saying this is to say, “eat more like your ancestors,” almost regardless of where your ancestors come from. Which is one part of what decolonization is about: untangling from the absolute mess that is the “modern lifestyle” and returning to something far more authentic, preferably in a way where justice — including food justice — becomes not only an ideal but an integrated part of every community.
Fortunately, today, a myriad of alternative approaches are increasingly available in all communities. Indigenous peoples throughout the Americas are reclaiming pre-colonial diets and foodways and regenerative practices. North American traditional indigenous food systems (NATIFS) is one such organization that is working to support that process. Black people are reclaiming their own foodways and access to land, from farming to the Black Church Food Security Network to Women Advancing Nutrition Dietetics and Agriculture (WANDA) which supports the African diaspora.
One of the commonalities I see between the different organizations aiming to build a sweeter and justice-oriented food system is that those who are successful are building their own internal strength and often drawing from some kind of spiritual awareness, though it is described in many different ways. I don’t want to associate this with individualization. It is a re-grounding into a sense of self not informed by consistent insufficiency. That of course is what the sugar economy that became the global capitalist economy is based on: a continual sense of lack. Sugar in the high doses we now consume fills us up — to the point of explosion — and never actually relieves that core sense of lack. For many of us, that sense of lack is connected to ancestral histories of trauma and abuse; of being torn from people and places; of being thrust into a world not of our making which does not support a relationship to time and space that enables easy breathing. We are so used to rushing we don’t know how to slow down enough to re-center ourselves. To find that inherent connection to all beings and to what some experience as Divine Love that was always at the heart of Paradise. Of what was lost.
That act of re-centering has many pathways. Prayer. 12 step programs. Agro-spiritual, earth-honoring practices. Faith communities that know how to interpret scriptures to support healthy eating and living, and who can use small groups to enable better health. Communities — sometimes as part of faith communities, sometimes part of advocacy groups, sometimes part of health clubs — that can reinforce a different narrative. Mindfulness. Awareness that is re-enforced by community and support systems. These days, for most of us to be healthy, we need serious life-support systems.
Mindfulness when conceptualized in an individual framework is insufficient for the level of change we need to see if we actually value the health outcomes — SDGs, MDGs, global goals or personal fitness — that we want to see. To shift the global dynamics is to shift the global sugar interests and make them, well, sweeter.
That includes divesting and significantly shifting Big Sugar. And Big Food and Big Agriculture. What if ESG investment portfolios need to be looking at sugar, especially in packaged foods, with the same level of suspicion and wariness as we look at fossil fuels? We need movements at all levels: investment, corporate shifts, economic shifts, health programs, nutrition programs, mindfulness programs…. etc. It’s not hard for me to imagine a world where Church services offered foods other than cookies after a Service, or sugary beverages were not part of your average nutrition conference.
Recently, I’ve started working with Chef Alex Askew, who started the Black Culinary Alliance, now BCA Global, to design an online curriculum around Mindful Eating for the Beloved Community, integrating mindfulness and social justice. He is certainly clear that while increased nutrition education, simple recipes and greater health awareness is necessary, so is mindfulness. And part of mindfulness is tackling the larger food companies who are continuing to push national and international policies that make it far too easy to eat a hamburger and a milkshake — despite all the ecological, social, and nutritional damage that causes. This is a place where investors, especially those in social impact, need to take note: to shift the legacies of King Sugar, we need to stop fueling sugar plantations and the mega food corporations that continue to benefit from people and planet’s poor health.
And — particularly hard — we need to slow down. If sugar (and fossil fuels) sped up our society, then it makes sense that to untangle ourselves from them, we need to shift our speed.
My mother absolutely loved her box of sugar-infused flour and chocolate. She sent me multiple emails expressing how excited she was to eat them for several days. In those emails, she also told me that her chronic illnesses were worsening. She is going to have to “do something.”
Does she see the connections?
Of course she does.
But what she craves is that sweetness that her life doesn’t have enough of.
I want what any daughter wants: to know my mom is cared for. To know she is well. To know that, even though she is alone, she is not alone. I want for her to have so many things that it is so hard for me to actually give her.
Our desires, really, are very simple.
Let us be more honest with ourselves about what they are. And find ways to fulfill them — ways that are more than a short term “fix” that actually makes things worse. And into the gifts, meals, and livelihoods that can be regenerative.
Sara Jolena Wolcott, M.Div., is a spiritual entrepreneur, legacy advisor, minister, speaker, and healer. She founded and directs Sequoia Samanvaya, an international learning community, which includes designing and teaching courses on the intersections of climate change, spirituality, family histories and (de)colonization. She co-designed the curriculum for Mindful Eating for the Beloved Community along with the Interfaith Public Health Network and BCA Global. She has lost multiple family members to diabetes. In 2022, she is not sending her mother cupcakes.
