‘Mass-produced sugar came from chemicals, corruption — and environmental destruction’

David Singerman teaches history and American studies at the University of Virginia. Speaking to
Srijana Mitra Das at Times Evoke, he outlines the long ark of sugar — and why this is so bitter-sweet:
What is the core of your research?
My work looks at the role science and technology have played in the modern global sugar industry. I am interested in how these relate to our ideas of what sugar is and how it should be valued. I’ve been researching the ways we started thinking of sugar as a chemical substance. It comes from plants like sugarcane and sugar beet — yet, the chemical substance of sugar, sucrose, is the molecule we think of as ‘pure sugar’.
This carbohydrate is extracted from diverse plants but the idea of molecules, chemicals, etc., is relatively modern — before the mid-19th century, when people thought of sugar, which has a history over 8,000 years, they imagined where it came from, how it tasted, how it felt crushed between their fingers, its medicinal properties, etc. Somehow, we moved from that world — where sugar was a very rich, deep, localised thing — to today where sugar is a bulk commodity, exactly the same everywhere, val-ued solely on its content of a chemical.

How did sugar go from being an elite luxury to a mass product?
In historical terms, sugar is as cheap today as it’s ever been — its price has consistently fallen over the last 500 years. Yet, further centuries ago, sugar extracted from sugarcane was expensive — it wasn’t considered a food staple like now but a condiment or med-icine, something used in small quanti-ties. It was a status symbol — if you could afford confections, that was a demonstration of your wealth.
The force that made sugar such a widely available item was its price being so high — that encouraged ruth-less and entrepreneurial Europeans to figure out ways to make it more cheaply. One of their innovations was the plantation system which used enslaved labour. This appeared mostly in the Caribbean, Brazil and parts of North America like Louisiana — but it started in the medieval Mediterranean, spreading first to the small Atlantic islands like Madeira, colonised by the Portuguese, and then to the New World colonies.

Europeans learned how to make these plantations larger, more technological — and more brutal. As the plantation system became more effec-tive and more inhumane, it also decimated natural environments. It takes a lot of fuel energy to boil sugarcane juice — that caused deforestation. Growing a single plant over time depleted what were once very fertile soils. This made the colonisers keep seeking new places to establish plantations, which kept expanding sugar production around the world.
Its problematic legacies have continued. Recent reports, for instance, find terrible labour conditions in sugarcane fields in India — 500 years of sugar in modern global capitalism show how making as much as we now demand means subjecting someone somewhere to a horrible working existence. Where this happens has moved around due to both environmental de-struction and the rise of labour rights — but the sugar industry has been very good at finding the most exploitable people and often working them to death to produce cheap sugar.

There is some awareness of such exploitation — British abolitionists started the first large consumer boycott for humanitarian reasons, protesting sugar produced by slave labour. Recently, it’s been found the office in New York which controls hundreds of millions of dollars in city employees’ pension funds owns massive stock in addictive food substance industries. They have been trying to use that leverage to make companies correct inhumane labour practices.
You’ve also written about sugar-fuelled corruption in the US government during its 19th century Gilded Age — could you elaborate?
In the late 19th century, the American government made a lot of money from taxes on sugar — but these were assessed on purity and there weren’t very good ways to measure this. The industry then offered new scientific techniques to the government, ostensibly to solve its tax problem. Earlier, people working in ports and custom houses doing such measurements were fairly easily bribed — the new techniques then shifted both expertise and corruption to sugar chemists who could also be bribed. This helped sug-ar companies make more money than their competitors, with chemists advising higher charges on rivals.

How did technology push sugar’s spread?
Around the 16th century, the plantation system produced a crop which was quite distinctive — early recipe books discuss a dozen different kinds of sugar and buyers were aware of which kind they wanted, which plantation it came from in Jamaica, Haiti, etc. By the mid-19th century, modern industrial technologies allowed the production of more sugar with far greater consistency. By the 20th century, sugar factories were much larger, powered by steam or electricity, with iron and steel equipment and chemists and laboratories, producing hundreds of times of sugar. The product became far more standardised — sugar from India, South Africa, Cuba, the Philippines and Hawaii was quite interchangeable and commodities futures markets allowing for speculation began to rise.

Alongside, so did our addiction — since 1750, our bodies have been conditioned to consume a huge amount of sugar. Consumption statistics in the United States show how towards the late 19th century, per capita sugar consumption was 80 pounds a year. As more sugar was produced, people bought it in more products, from jams and cookies to savoury sauces and processed bread. People had always liked sugar but we also became chemically hooked to it. Several illnesses are now connected to the overconsumption of sugar, diabetes being the most notorious. Children are special targets of the industry — a study shows the more sugar you eat in the first two to three years of your life, the more adverse effects this has later.

Interestingly, sugar is also linked to temperament and behaviour. It’s seen as a pacifying food — it can make people very happy for a bit, then lead to a crash. In ‘Cuban Counterpoint’, Fernando Ortiz, an anthropologist in the 1940s, juxtaposed tobacco and sug-ar — he emphasised tobacco was associated with rebellion and revolution while sugar was seen as lulling people into complacency. Importantly, the idea that sugar is bad for you is surprisingly recent. Even in the mid-20th century, sugar companies’ pro-motional material featured doctors saying sugar energises you and it’s healthy — it feels hallucinatory to read this now. There is evidence as well of how the sugar industry followed big tobacco’s model in actively disguising its role in health problems, paying scientists to deny its impacts in causing obesity, heart disease, etc.