Not So Sweet, part 3.
Sugar as naughty and nice: reproducing social hierarchy in the 21st century (both in real life and symbolically)
In the first two parts of this series, I looked at some of the early dynamics of the history of sugar, including its earlier sacred origins, and, in particular, the way King Sugar led and shaped the colonial economy and subsequently the industrial economy. Here I continue these histories, bringing us closer to the modern day, and, in the process, with the question of how we engage with sugar today and the multiplicity of meanings that this simple food has yielded. As I do so, I find that an honest look at how sugar has shaped our culture today means that we have to widen our gaze to not only look at sugar, but also the wider culture of food, eating, and… dieting, which has become a huge part of our food culture. I go deeper into thinking about diet culture, sugar, and possible ways forward in Part 4 of this 4-part series.
A society out of balance
Sugarcane, the fastest growing grass in the world, rapidly transforms sunlight into energy. It’s quite a remarkable plant, in a lot of ways. 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?
After the enslavement of people and the slave trade was banned, sugar plantation owners began what would become a classic global corporate move: they went looking for someone, somewhere else to work. The British started bringing indentured servants from India to the West Indies. More than 150,000 worked in Trinidad and Tabogo; within a century over half a million people were brought over to work on the sugar plantations. They were at the bottom of the social hierarchy and poorly paid.
British sugar plantations were in other parts of the world as well, including, perhaps famously, in South Africa. In 1893, Gandhi arrived in South Africa to work as a lawyer for an Indian immigrant. His witness of the harsh conditions of the sugar plantations, where Indian workers were treated as indentured servants, directly impacted his political formation, and was pivotal to his subsequent involvement in the Indian freedom movement.
Even today, sugar production is renowned for horrific (even semi-enslaved) working conditions, and the economy infused with it crushes millions into poverty and its close associate, poor health. In 2016, nearly one-third of UK sugarcane was produced in countries that had documented child labor.
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.
Not that America’s own revolutionary tendencies around sugar led to them not replicating the British empire. In the case of Hawai’i, Big Sugar — run by Americans who lived in Hawai’i and used U.S. connections to plot against the Queen — contributed to the downfall of the Kingdom.
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.
Today, Big Sugar pumps millions of dollars to political candidates and parties to preserve the sugar program that has, since 1934, protected cane and beet sugar producers, millers, and refiners from operating loses. It maintains a high minimum price for domestic sugar — by controlloing how much is produced, preferential price support loans, and limiting imports of foreign sugar through the Tariff-Rate Quota…. essentially knocking foreign sugar out of competition.
So much for a free capitalist market economy.
As Abbott points out, Big sugar finds many ways to bend the law to its own advantages. It markets through cooperatives, which means it can avoid U.S. anti-trust laws. It often finds ways to be except from some labor regulations — especially paying overtime wages, and also, in the 1980s, Reagan’s temporary amnesty for sesonal agricultural workers — depriving thousands of people a chance for legal status in the U.S. When, in 1986, West Indian cane cutters engaged by the Fanjul family (one of the biggest beneficiaries of Sugar, and one of the most prominent lobbyists in Washington as well as the Dominican Republic) stopped work to protest being cheated of their wages, the Fanjuls sent in Palm Beach County police in riot gear and used attack dogs to force all the cutters and other plantation employees, rebellious or not, onto Miami-bound buses. It became known as the Dog War. Later the Fanjul family admitted to mishandling the situation, but a few years later when a class action suit for not paying back pay was filed on behalf of 20 thousand Jamaican cane cutters, the Fanjuls simply settled in court…. and then replaced the laborers with cane-cutting machines, meaning the cutters lost their jobs. The list goes on. In the Dominican Republic, the 1930 Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo took power and scapegoated the Haitains as a menace to the Dominican “race” and culture, leading to a massacre of Haitian peoples and, subsequently, to a practice of enforced labor in Dominican’s cane fields. Hundreds of thousands of Haitaians still cut Dominican cane, are considered “illegals” (including the half a million born on Haiti, have few to no civil rights, can be deported at will in sporadic raids, work from dawn to dusk, and are forbidden to garden, meaning they must buy their food from (the company) stores. The Fanjul family, based in America, bought significant land and now produces half of the Dominican Republic’s sugar: they benefit from permits (which the Sugar Lobby helped put in place) that import half the Dominican sugar quota free of the punishing tariffs mentioned above. The 2005 Canadian documentary Big Sugar highlights some of these things, as did the 2007 American documentary The Sugar Babies.
Really, really Not so sweet.
Nor is the complex meaning that sugar has come to have.
“Sugar and Spice Everything Nice”: the feminization of sugar … and its association with sin
You might know this nursery rhyme:
“Little boys are made of snips and snails/ and puppy dogs’ tails’ and ‘little girls are made of sugar and spice/ and all things nice.’
The metaphor here is quite obvious and straightforward: girls are innately sweet.
And, like refined sugar, they might lack substance, being frivolous and perhaps even impractable, such as candy. And the way to a woman’s heart? Through chocolate, of course.
Sugar, as its price declines and the less privileged incorporate it into their daily meals as well as their ritual occaisions, undergoes a cultural demotion and as this happens, sugar shifts from being associated with male economic power to becoming feminized.
As Wendy Woloson points out in Refined Tastes, women were one of Coca-Cola’s first targets. 1907 ads featured “Mrs. Cheerful’s” ‘wonderful secret’ of successful shopping: a glass of Coca-Cola to keep her ‘nerves quiet’.
Woloson argues that sugar’s feminization shifted how women were perceived, as well as how we perceive sugar — the consumer and the consumed become conflated. This is part of a larger observation of many anthropologists of modern cuisine: there has grown in the modern era a strong link between what you eat and who you are: between eating and being.
Sweet — yes. And, following that age-old dichotomy of the feminine in Western-Christian culture: “nice” is right next to “naughty”; “sweet” is often accompanied by “sin”, and women are either angelic mothers or devilish temptresses.
Sugar is both sweet and something to be desired — and sinful.
Sugar is both in every homecooking book, helping you make the perfect brownie for when your kids/husbands get home from school/work…. while you (somehow) baking/houseworking …. but if (especially poor) mothers feed their children the (easily available) candy, they would be led into “intemperance, gluttony and debauchery”, magazines in the 1840s warned. This was true in both publications geared to white audiences as well as those geared to Black audiences. As Abbott references in her book, in 1836, The Colored American, the most influential African American newspaper from its inception in 1836 to its demise in 1841, denounced candy shops as “hot beds of disease” that were “filled with putrid rottenness.” Childhood addiction to candy was seen to easily, if not inevitably evolve into adult alcoholism. If a mother fed her children “too much” sugar (which is how much, again?), such as putting sugar into cereal, she was blamed with causing their children’s sugar cravings — and was seen as being a “bad” mother.
That this was happening as early as the 1840s, including clear links to dental decay in children and adults, tells us both how strong the association between feeding children sugar and “bad mothering” was, as well as how relatively ineffective that kind of messaging has often been — except in making probably already-stressed mothers feel guilty and shameful for opting for what was usually one of the easiest options before them.
Notice here that the blame is on the individual mother, with little fault falling at big industries who benefit (very) richly from her choices.
It doesn’t take much to see that not only are mothers being blamed, but poor mothers, who might not have access to very many other sources of food with such a high level of calories for their children, are particularly harshly blamed.
Sounds a lot like blaming the person who is actually the victim of a much bigger system that is fully and elaborated geared against her.
Not so sweet.
And I’m sure that many a mother, poor or not, was either confused about what was right to feed her children (so many conflicting messages!) or blamed herself for not being able to do “better.”
Certainly that’s often true today.
Advertisers certainly understood that casting sugar as “naughty” and “bad” only seems to make it more seductive — and furthers the pre-existing message, which we can easily see in the long history of Christianity, that women, in particular, are unable to resist sweet temptations.
Just open a women’s magazine today and you will probably find some similar messages. Chocolate is often accompanied with temptress/sexy images, side-by-side with weight-watchers or other offerings from the diet industry, alongside another advertisement for a delicious meal — with sugar.
In the larger Christian milieu, this goes multiple ways. Google, “sugar as sin” and you will still get a wide host of Christian articles and testimonies about the sinfulness of sugar. Sometimes that’s “sugar is really bad for your health.” Sometimes its more metaphorical: “the devil coats his offers to us with sugar.” Us humans are (obviously, it seems) not expected to have much capacity to resist.
Again — the fault of indulging in this “sin” is laid at the feet of the individual, especially the female head of household, usually a mother, who is supposed to keep her family from such “corruption.”
All of which continues to give a lot of room for the larger forces at work — what progressive theologians often refer to as the “structural sins” of a particular institution — to continue making a lot of money.
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 economically and to a certain extent politically depends upon it. When we take this macro perspective, we recognize that the problem locus is at the level of the societal, 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 with sugar arose because of a desire for “wealth” narrowly defined and then the creation of an economy and a society where sugar is everywhere. This so-called wealth 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, enslave, and do many forms of violence to a lot of people.
There’s some similarity here between oil and sugar. Would we ask people to stop driving cars because oil is hurting our common home without trying to provide a viable alternative?
OK, yes, this has been tried — at least in the environmental movements I grew up in.
And, you might have noticed that while some people are able to/want to do this, many people do not/can not. We’ve had much more success in shifting behavior from oil to electrical cars than from asking people to stop consuming oil at all.
Our society is entrenched with sugar.
And our society, sugary as it is, is not always so sweet.
Both the descendants of the factory workers in Europe and the descendants of people who were enslaved on 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 so-called 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. Wealth is increasingly associated with “wellness” — and the financial ability to not eat sugar.
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.
Which is the very thing that first colonization and subsequently the modern world is making increasingly less common.
Change of taste and gastronomy indicates a change of society — and of change
Anthropologists and sociologists of food and eating have long noticed the patterns and correlations between changing tastes and changing social structures.
As one of the foremost anthropologists of food/sugar, Sydney Mintz, writes: ““Development,” as it is called, has meant among other things a relatively steady increase in sugar consumption since perhaps the mid-ninetenth century… with development comes a higher percentage of sucrose use in prepared foods… including in the food habits and choices…one of the clearest being the replacement of complex carbohydrates with simple carbohydrates….. the connection between fat and sugars is associated with the increasing tendency to eat outside the home… cook less, eat together less, and have maldeigestion more individualized and non-interactive; they have desocialized eating. Choices to be made about eating — when, where, what, how much, how quickly — are now made with less reference to fellow eaters, and within rangers predetermined, on the one hand by food technology and, on the other, by what are perceieved as time constraints.”
Time constraints, Mintz points out, are part and parcel of modern society. People experience a shortage of time — something of a paradox given the vastly more productive (time-saving)technologies available to vastly more numbers of people.
Do we decide how much time growing food, preparing food, and eating food “should” take, and then “fit it in”, or do we look at what the food invites us into?
Sugar — as a source of fuel, a source of pleasure, of source of sin, a source of confusion — often makes these bigger questions about eating and drinking quite confusing.
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 those Europeans stumbled, hungry and lost, upon indigenous peoples’ 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 today 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. But this is missing a bigger picture.
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 only a little bit helpful. If at all.
After all, it didn’t take too long for the rise of the diet industry to help us (again, so often women) become more “health conscious” and engage with this “sin” in a market-kind-of-way, which is to say, in a way that they get rich and you get, well, guilty. And sometimes, for a while, there might be some “healthiness” (associated with “goodness”) as well. Maybe its one of our current variations of extra money for the priests to absolve our sins.
Diet culture, which just loves to paint sugar as “bad”, is itself a multi-billion dollar industry that is, as nutritionist and podcaster Christy Harrison writes, a “Life Thief” in that it sucks peoples attention, emotions, and energy into a way of relating to food and our own bodies that is usually awful for us as people — but great for the diet industry! Labelling any food as “bad” often perpetuates the problem, and misses the point of finding ways to shift the bigger picture.
One of the greater needs is to unravel the economic and cultural knot into which we have tied ourselves. It’s also about how much we do (or rather don’t) get much physical movement in an overly-stationary society. It’s about how we think about and engage with time. It’s about where our food — not just sugar — is coming from and how we relate to the need for soils that help entire ecosystems and cultivating processes of food systems that help people and planet.
In a way that is otherwise surprising, this is as true for dietary human health as it is for climate change. Individual health is deeply and intricately tied to ecological health, from our soils to our waters.
Individual change is, while not an illusion for that individual, insufficient given the scale of the problem.
What are we striving for in the “good life”?
“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 mess of 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 many 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 also finding ways of 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 individualism. These are attempts to re-ground into a sense of self not informed by consistent insufficiency and depravation.
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 sometimes fills us up. But does it actually relieve that core sense of depravation?
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. One of them is around mindfulness. I need to be clear here that mindfulness, when conceptualized purely 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 ESGx 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.
In 2000, I worked 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.
Investors, especially those interested in social impact, can here 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 — often 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… and our relationship to time.
Which is not a promo for Diet Culture!
“Sugar — both its production and consumption — is bad. Don’t consume it.” That’s the most obvious conclusion of this kind of history. But that itself is missing a much more important point — about how we come to construct and enforce notions of both what and who is “good” and “bad”.
Indeed, it would be all too easy for all of this to lead to some kind of promotion of diet culture, or the “healthy lifestyle” that social media intones, using the same arguments and basic belief system that made SlimEtc diet industry millions all the while keeping millions of people chasing some kind of physical ideal that is almost always out of grasp.
Too often, the mindfulness community is visually and socially encoded with the same message as diet culture: you only belong here if your body looks a certain way. And that way manages to discount a lot of people.
For these histories to be used as yet another tool in diet culture, or its many variations, would be a grave misunderstanding of the history itself, and a continuation of the problem at hand, taking us away from the deeper and in some ways simpler human-earth connection that might be able to sustain us.
To understand this, and to avoid slipping into an argumentative fallacy that is way too easy to do, we need to widen our gaze beyond sugar and into the bigger picture around society and eating that the fast food of sugar helped to create.
We need to tease out a thread that I’ve not been focusing up till now: body size, eating habits, health, and the real dangers of self-hatred.
It’s one of the ironies of the histories of sugar: as it became increasingly part of common people’s life, it also became increasingly demonized… and in the, “you are what you eat” school of thought, those who eat sugar have become associated with a lack of awareness/education (aka being ignorant/stupid); a lack of willpower/self-discipline; and, sometimes, “bad genetics.”
As I move into this next section, I need to get honest about something else that, if you don’t know me personally, you probably would not have guessed from reading what I’ve written so far but that influences what it means for me, of all people, to be narrating this story: I am not a skinny woman. I rarely have been.
Which, for most of my life, is something that the outside world has told me is “bad,” “my fault,” and akin to some kind of moral failure.
And utterly at odds with my work as (for lack of a better word) a healer and an unconventional minister.
To which I can now (and really only quite recently say): that’s not only untrue (and unkind), it is part of the same argument of body-discipline and moral highground-ness that is part of the larger colonial attempts to control bodies and to perpetuate larger patterns of depravation. Especially the feminine body (across races and even species) and to define what is “good” and “bad”, “healthy” and “unhealthy”, and that who we “are” is defined — usually by someone else — by what we “eat…” a concept that, while sometimes exquisitely beautiful, can also be fraught with inappropriate judgement.
Which is to say — I’ve thought as much if not more about body image and eating than sugar per se, and I know how complex these questions are, both in how we walk in our bodies, as well as in how we relate to other bodies and to our shared socio-ecological body.
The next part of this article takes deeper into the fallacies of diet culture and how it intersects with sugar — and then into the complexities of moving towards different ways of thinking not just about sugar, but about good and bad, and our human-earth body.
Sara Jolena Wolcott, M.Div., is an unconventional eco-spiritual 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 and includes some of the histories of sugar. She has taught on the histories of sugar through Sequoia Samanvaya as well as other organizations, including NYU. She has lost multiple family members to diabetes. She currently lives with her partner in the Mohican territories, now known as the Hudson Valley.
