Think about the last time you put sugar in your coffee or tea, a teaspoon, maybe two. Perhaps you avoided it because someone on the internet told you sugar was poison.
Sugar helped build the British Empire, financed fortunes on both sides of the Atlantic, and contributed to the enslavement of millions of Africans. It made tea palatable to the British, encouraged the development of an extraordinary global trading network, and eventually gave British dentists plenty of work.
It was so valuable that Napoleon made the sugar beet famous, because he didn’t want to import from the UK. . Sugar interests helped bring down the Hawaiian monarchy. And long before the United States was worried about communism in Cuba, American businessmen were deeply interested in Cuban sugar.
All of this from a plant that is essentially an overgrown tropical grass.
A grass worth more than gold
Sugarcane was first cultivated thousands of years ago in what is now New Guinea. It was brought through Southeast Asia and into India, where we converted the sweet juice into something we would recognize as sugar granules.
Sugar was not the first sweet taste homo sapiens encountered. We had honey, ripe fruit, and sweet plant juices. Our attraction to sweetness signals a source of energy.
India is where sugar extraction improved. From India, Arab traders brought sugar to the Middle East, North Africa, the Mediterranean and Europe.
The European wealthy household offered sugar as a sign of its importance. Ordinary people had little access to it. The pattern is something we’ve seen before with both spice or salt. is fashionable first in the royal court. It becomes a trickle down phenomenon, as production drives down the price or improved trade routes come online.
The empire in a teacup
That cup of tea, so famous in Britain, was imported first from China, then from India. Likewise, the sugar came from the other side of the world, and even that cup, porcelain, from the East.
But going to London, I do what millions of tourists do, I find a place for “high tea.” That is far from the traditional high tea. High tea was originally a working class supper, featuring meat pies, not cucumber finger food. But still sitting in a fancy hotel, being served some Jing second flush Darjeeling tea, with sugar, seems so British.
As an aside, what we are participating in is actually a version of “low tea.” Invented by a Dutchess because dinner was served after 8 pm, she became hungry at around 4 pm.
Plantation Life
If you go to the Virgin Islands or anywhere there were sugar plantations, you will probably buy a straw hat, drink some rum drink, and find someplace to get away from the humidity. It is a sultry, pleasant vacation. While there, visit a plantation where sugar was harvested, and see how brutal conditions were.
Similar to the slavery in the Southern states, sugar plantations were only good to the owners. The slaves toiled in dangerous conditions, where the cane had to be cut, crushed, boiled, and refined. The slave labor was needed due to the growing European taste for sugar.
In the British acquired colonies of Barbados and Jamaica, merchants made fortunes from sugar, while slaves’ lives were cut short from the horrific conditions. Industries spawned from sugar included shipping companies, insurers, investors. Taxes from sugar benefited the treasuries of Britain.
We cannot forget Rum, even though a night of Rum might want you to forget. Rum comes from Molasses, a byproduct of sugar production, which was fermented and distilled.
By the nineteenth century, the increased supply of sugar drove down its price to where the working class could afford sugar. The sweetened tea, jam, biscuits, and other foods that would once have been considered luxuries became common.
Increased sugar’s first health issue appeared first in the mouth. The British began losing their famous association with dentistry. Sugar helped build the British Empire. It also did wonders for the future of dentistry.
Fossil records of early humans show many died from tooth infections. The widespread use of sugar in the diet began to show up as a chronic disease, spawning yet another industry, dentistry. Other chronic diseases from sugar would follow.
When refusing sugar became a moral decision
In 1791, a group of British abolitionists began organizing a boycott of sugar because of the brutal conditions in the British West Indies. This might have been one of the first consumer boycotts of note, because the year after organizing the boycott, an estimated 400,000 British consumers participated.
Women couldn’t vote for members of Parliament, but they could influence what their households purchased. They encouraged people to buy East India sugar as an alternative to sugar produced by enslaved Africans in the West Indies.
In museums, you can find sugar bowls bearing antislavery messages. Imagine that. Your sugar bowl telling visitors something about your moral convictions. Today we have bumper stickers.
Sugar Beets
Sugar beets are the alternative to cane sugar. To be clear, your body doesn’t care where the sugar comes from, corn cane, or a beet, but it became important to Napoleon.
Imagine being at war with Britain, something France does as a pastime, and having to import sugar from the place you are at war with. Sounds like oil doesn’t it?
In 1801, sugar beets were harvested, and the first factory was established to extract sugar in Prussia. When Napoleon occupied Prussia in 1807, he noted the industry. In 1811, Napoleon promoted large-scale beet sugar cultivation in France to replace imported cane sugar.
This also led to the proliferation of beet salads, something useful for composts and Californians. Okay, I live in California, but I find beets taste like dirt, and that is a hill I shall occupy.
Lest We Lose our Humility
I enjoy making fun of the British, even though I love London. But we Americans have our own bad relationship with sugar on the political side. And certainly, our proliferation of hyper-processed foods would have been nothing without sugar. And while Britain has dentistry and tooth problems, we took to sugar with our own chronic diseases, obesity and diabetes.
Hawaii became a state not because we liberated the Native peoples, but because we wanted sugar cane. We overthrew a recognized government, not because we wanted a lei, but the sugar. That was our Marines backing up an industry like the East Indian Company, which had their own military.
Now, while some blame sugar entirely for obesity, and have elaborate explanations of the carb-insulin hypothesis, I will have another article about this later this week about sugar and what it does.
Suffice to day - the carb insulin hypothesis is a model that is simplistic and incorrect. And while I normally would attach a paid section to this, going through the chemistry and biochemistry of sugar, I will instead have an entire article for the paid members coming out this next week.
Until then, listen to sugar on my podcast FORK U.