Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History

"This book is extremely interesting. It’s very, very nice to read, if you have the time. I chose it for two reasons. One is that the concerns about sugar are far older than we think today. Nowadays everybody is talking about sugar being ‘the new smoking.’ The other is that it’s another lens, the lens of one product, which is complimentary to the other books. I really put some thinking into these books. So Mintz looks at sugar. We know sugar, even the Babylonians knew sugar. Sugar cane, and somewhat later sugar beet, are among the oldest domesticated crops. However, everything changed in the aftermath of Charles Mann’s Columbian Exchange because then, for the first time, there was room for plantations of sugar cane, and the slave trade made cheap labour available in great climates to grow sugar cane. This meant that the price of sugar from sugar cane came down rapidly and made sugar suddenly available. Sugar is so interesting because it is a chemical compound that only plants can make. We can change it, but our bodies cannot make it. So we are completely dependant on plants. Even the sugar that is in honey—which was the only source of sweetness in the Middle Ages—comes from plants. It’s not the bees making the sweetness. What happened in the 17th-18th century is that sugar became cheap, and what really led to the dissemination of sugar was the advent, at the same time, of coffee, tea, and, to some extent, cocoa. Here you have drinks that start to replace the barleys and the beer, which was the normal drink in the late Middle Ages. You had a drink, suddenly, that was available to the lower classes, which was made palatable with sugar. The idea of not having sugar in your tea is quite a recent idea. Sugar was an extremely important and cheap source of calories. People who want to ban sugar do not realise that for many parts of the world, sugar is still an important source of calories, and it is one of the cheapest sources that we have. Yes, a lot of sugar is bad for you, and a lot of sugar, and a lot of food, including sweetened food, leads to obesity and insulin resistance. But originally, sugar was quite essential. England’s Industrial Revolution wouldn’t have been the same without sugar because the poorer classes wouldn’t have had enough energy. The other thing about this vehement opposition to sugar today is that it disregards completely that even babies in the womb, before they’re born, already like sweetness. When the mother drinks or eats something very sweet, that comes to the baby through the placenta, and you can see babies reacting. There’s no way we are going do away with sugar. “There are lots of misconceptions. And because it has taken on such moral connotations, it has become very difficult to even talk about GM.” So the bottom line is that, when it comes to individual food intake, it is about moderation and diversity and being part of a healthy pattern rather than focusing on individual food stuffs. And when it comes to society, we have to start learning to trust our food system because it has brought us healthier and cheaper foods than ever before. We have these excesses here and there, but trade and factory foods, when they are part of a healthy diet, are a blessing because a thousand years ago, you and I—apart from the fact that we would probably already be dead—would be spending 8 to 10 hours a day just trying to get our food. And we would still experience shortages! So the fact that others produce our food in such abundance, at such low prices, is what makes us free to sit here… I have a whole chapter on this in my book and I tried very hard to give a measured statement there. I do know a lot about genetics, and where I work today, in Wageningen , we have some of the best plant and animal geneticists in the world. I’m pretty sure of what I say in the book because it is so important that we get the facts right. You know, with food, or genetic modification, or sugar, it’s like with everything: you can use a knife to kill a man, or you can use it to delicately carve a beautiful wooden statue. Or to cut up food to feed your child. The things we develop always have different uses, and it is the context of usage that determines what it is. No, I wouldn’t say that. That’s a generalisation, and I don’t think generalisations are right. A lot of the confusion comes from generalisations. It is not right or wrong for a start. That’s those moral categories again. We should look at risks, and at objective and purpose. So, is the technique of changing the genome of a plant or an animal in itself acceptable? Well, if you look at it from an evolutionary point of view, yes, it is. You and I, as human beings, wouldn’t exist otherwise. Our genome consists of bits and pieces of bacterial genome. So, in itself, the process of introducing strange genes into another genome is a natural evolutionary process. From that perspective, GM is something that is part of the evolution. The difference, of course, is that we do it and we do it with a certain purpose. As I explain in the book, the tragedy is that Monsanto started this with all the wrong things around it. It was for large-scale agriculture, for herbicide resistance, it was feed for animals. It was associated also with tractors and killing forests and so on. That was all wrong. “I think, or at least hope, that 10-15 years from now, organic and non-organic will converge.” But if you look, now, at some of the applications, say for example, in Hawaii. Hawaii depends a lot on papaya production. Papayas had been wiped out by Papaya Ringspot Virus and there was no solution. They introduced a gene that helps the plant to resist this particular virus, and now there is papaya production again. So it depends on the purpose, and it depends also on who has access to the technology. But the science in itself is not right or wrong. There are lots of misconceptions. And because it has taken on such moral connotations, it has become very difficult to even talk about GM. That’s one of the real tragedies, I think. Europe is becoming extremely conservative, and the rest of the world is going ahead. My fear, as a scientist, is that we won’t know what it’s all about because we’ve lost all the scientists who work on it, and we are not allowed to work on it ourselves. There’s a lot to be said on the subject of GM. It is one of the examples of extreme confusion. And the problem with organic is that the end product—say an organic apple—is not chemically different from a non-organic apple. So all the claims about it being more healthy are very difficult to substantiate. Also, if you do organic, it means using more land. That, in itself, is a problem because you won’t have land for other things, particularly for nature. Also, you don’t particularly want to have low yields in countries where there are food shortages. You want to use fertilisers because some soils are just too poor to produce anything.I think, or at least hope, that 10-15 years from now, organic and non-organic will converge. The best practices nowadays in modern agriculture—in the UK, or in the Netherlands, or in France—are really very low on chemicals, so in the comparison between organic and non-organic, you have to be very careful what you’re comparing. There are no absolute truths."