Not So Sweet (Part 1)
Sugar and Valentines Day seem to go together. But if we start putting sugar into its historical context, we might want to find another way to symbolize sweetness.
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.
It was in the midst of the Pandemic.
Candy sales and chocolate sales spiked since the beginning of the various forms of Quarantine due to COVID Since 2022, as various quarantines lifted, it has decreased…. consumption of sugar on Valentines Day in 2025 is expected to be “normal”, that is to say, about 67% of Americans will eat chocolate or candy on Valentines Day, and of those, 55% will eat more than 3 pieces. (I’m skeptical about that other 12 percent — maybe they were lying to the survey? How many people really just eat 2 pieces of chocolate on a holiday dedicated to chocolate?)
In the midst of the many forms of denial of every-day pleasure that those days of Quarantine epitomized, sugar symbolizes what I, living across the continent, 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 sugar around Valentines Day, 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 not much older, because for most of human history, processed sugar has not been a readily available option for our sweet-sensitive tastebuds. This craving is far beyond any of our individual life times. For a while now, sugar has been a common way to, well, “sugar-coat” the many interlocking reasons we aren’t able to live the lives that we may find ourselves wishing for, but not actually living.
Sugar, like so many really important food items, has many meanings. Meanings that have shifted and changed even as we have. Sometimes, it is associated with the belief that because of what we eat, we have and we are something that we are not. It is also associated with being “naughty” in a pleasurable way — and the ability to afford to not have sugar can be associated with a certain level of wealth, social class, and health consciousness.
To get to the multiplicity of meanings beneath sugar and how that influences cravings, consumption patterns, and ways of thinking about guilt, we need 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.
It’s helpful 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 (honey has a glycemic index of around 55 and white sugar is closer to 68). 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 to 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, sugar 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 Durga Goddess of Creation and Destruction in India.
There is speculation about how these rites happened: was it a coincidence that sugarcane was offered and burned, and in the burning, a sticky sweet liquid substance emerged, which was seen to be an indicator of the gods’ pleasure? Did an aesthetic receive instructions for such an offering in deep meditation? Or was it a village woman, who, whilst cooking, was visited by the Goddess who suggested such an offering of transmutation?
Did the tradition of offering sweets to the dieties, now common throughout the Indic continent, begin then? It is hard to imagine festivals such as Holi or Diwali without sweet treats. Sweet offerings — from honey to fruit to jaggery — is mentioned in the Vedas.
It should be noted that jaggery, sometimes called gur in India, is much less processed than white sugar; it still contains many of the vitamins of the cane plant and, as a complex carbohydrate, is significantly easier for the body to digest. So far as we know, it was ancient Egyptians who developed the process of refining sugar.
One of the oldest known sweet dishes in India is Payasam, a classic creamy dessert well-known in South Indian kitchens, is traditionally made with three ingrediants all considered to have holy significance: rice, jaggery, and coconut milk. It’s roots are associated with South Indian temples, where it was offered as a divine delicacy to deities at various festivals during the year.
As with so many ancient foods, payasam has many stories attached to many diverse family traditions, various dieties, poems, songs, traditions, memories, and ties to times that might feel hard to touch in a modern world.
It is worth pausing a moment on this particular dish, and some of how jaggery-sweetness was infused into sacrality of daily life in a culture that has had far more centuries of experience with various forms of refined sugar than have European cultures.
Keeping in mind that these traditions were honed before most people could even imagine spending most of one’s day behind a desk working at a computer, Payasam (known as kheer in Hindi and Panjabi), is often fed to infants, as the sweetened rice gruel is easy to digest.
While no longer as much of a popular practice, the order of a traditional South Indian meal entails sambar (a flavorful lentil-based vegetable stew often eaten with a rice/lentil mix such as dosa or idli); rasam (a thin, spicy, soup-like dish), payasam and finally tayir/moru (yogurt /buttermilk.)
Some say that order reflects the nature of the soul/ego over the course of life. The self (akin to ego) comes in first. One is then faced with a number of sometimes confusing challenges and gifts — this is sambar, with its multiple forms of vegetables, spices, and ingrediants.
According to Sai Kalyanaraman:
“When the mind settles, it becomes clear, like the rasam — which is served next. Pepper adds to the sense of direction & clarity of thought (piperine in peppercorns and capsaicin in hot peppers can trigger the body’s dopamine and endorphins, which might promote mental alertness).
This is then followed by the sweet payasam. Only when the mind is calm, the hunger and ego subsided — the happiness perceived could actually be sweeter.
The meal is then concluded with Curd/Buttermilk — which like the last stage of life, fulfills you. It neutralizes the heat, thereby aiding in better digestion. Thayir Saadam (Curd Rice) is indicative of ‘Enlightenment’, after which you just leave your ‘ilai’ (banyan leaf or plate) behind.”
The phrase that strikes me here is this: Only when the mind is calm, the hunger and ego subsided — the happiness perceived could actually be sweeter.
This is a striking difference to the way that so many sugary substances are consumed today: both that sugar is appropriate as an offering, and that it is to be included within and a part of a larger meal as part of enabling happiness, but only when hunger, and with it ego, subsides. This helps to maintain it’s position as, in modern parlance, a substance to be consumed in moderation.
Outside of India, which was cultivating sugar by at least 500 BCE, sugar produced from sugar cane was barely — if at all — known to much of the world, including Europeans, before 1000 AD. While humans do have a bio-chemical preference for sweet tastes (an evolutionary advantage), sugar was not a part of the diet of millions of people for most of human history
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 what we now call 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.
Its rise in popularity within European cultures and around the world has only occurred in the past 500 years. That is to say, refined sugar production and consumption at scale is intricately, even intrinsically, 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.
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.
Today, it is estimated that Americans consume between 60–80 pounds of sugar a day — which is 2–3 times as much as the American Health Association recommends. The AHA’s research finds that 24% of this is found in sugary beverages, from fruit drinks to sports/energy drinks to soft drinks. This is not consistent across the population: those with college degrees consume significantly less sugar. In 2022, India emerged as the world’s largest consumer of sugar (as a nation) at 29.5 million metric tons of sugar was consumed by Indians collectively. This is accompanied by more than a 100 million Indians live with diabetes (as per ICMR-INDIAB data).
Not So Sweet.
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: the ReMembering Course is her core offering that interweaves histories and contemporary practices. The larger histories opened her to the power of reconsidering the histoires of sugar. She designed her own course, co-designed the curriculum for Mindful Eating for the Beloved Community along with the Interfaith Public Health Network and BCA Global, and has guest lectured at the NYU School of Public Health on these topics. She has lost multiple family members to diabetes. In 2025, she is not sending her mother cupcakes.
