Sweet and Dangerous: A History of Sugar
Loading sugar cane in Hawaii, 1917 (Library of Congress)
From the triangle trade to labor struggles in Hawaii to the rise of high-fructose corn syrup, sweetness in America has always been politically charged. Why has sugar been so intimately linked to power over the centuries? How has our national sweet tooth shaped our political and economic priorities?
In this episode, the History Guys will explore sweetness in American history. The Sugar Act of 1764 helped feed colonial resentment of Great Britain, paving the way for protests and, ultimately, the American Revolution. A century and a half later, US tariff walls gave Puerto Rican sugar a ready market – but pushed the territory toward a one-crop economy that later collapsed.
Through the 19th century, sugar was intimately linked to slavery; free blacks in the 1830s boycotted slave-produced sugar in a stand against the “peculiar institution.” A century later, the sugar beet industry revolutionized the rural Midwest, bringing with it questions about the role of foreign migrant workers and urban factory workers. So where does sugar fit into labor history in the US? How has this tasty cash crop affected our environment and our economy? And what does it tell us about globalization before the 20th century?
Please help us shape this episode — post your ideas, stories, and questions below!
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Quote -- January 13, 2012 @ 4:09 pm
Arguments are made that we (the 13 colonies), won the American Revolution because British forces were busy guarding carribean sugar barons. Hoorah, we win, sort of! Todays sugar industry creates more than 420,000 jobs in 42 states and will contribute 26 billion dollars plus in economic activity annually. That’s good right? Although, sugar does have a direct effect on the health industry, obesity. Obesity claims more lives and drains more of the healthcare budget than smoking. Obesity is linked to diabetes, arthritis, heart disease, stroke and certain cancers. It inflates healthcare costs by 36 percent and medication costs by 77 percent. Sugar lowers the effectiveness of the immune system making persons more susceptable to illness.
QuoteFor most of the nation’s history, sugar was beloved, but sacred–rationed in war time and used for treats on special occasions. I’d love to learn more about how the price and availability of sugar affected recipes. I did some food history research on the 1930s and found a recipe for Apple pan dowdy, basically apple pie. What surprised me most about the recipe was that it used molasses, but not much sugar. So what changed to make sugar appear in even the most unlikely recipes and food items? (Side note: the pan dowdy was amazing and by far the tastiest research I’ve done)
Also, having lived in Vermont, I saw many recipes that used maple, apples, or honey (or a combination) as the sweetener. In addition to being delicious, the recipes can be quite expensive to make because maple and honey, especially, cost significantly more than refined sugar. While I longed to make maple walnut scones, I learned from one of my professors that maple sugar was originally a less expensive alternative to the more-desired white sugar. When Vermont went through the redefining of it’s image, it turned the maple industry–and it’s products–into an exclusive treat priced accordingly. I’d be interested to know that broader trends that occurred with sugar–and the recipes that use it–across the country.
QuoteLouis Nelson, Associate Professor in the UVA Department of Architectural History, would be a great person to talk to! He focuses much of his research on the sugar industry in the Caribbean context, and could lend a perspective on how it connects with the American sphere.
QuoteOne of the first books that fascinated me as a young history major was Stanley Mintz’s Sweetness and Power, which considers how the production of sugar transformed the European diet and colonial power. In passages that anticipate sugar’s modern role in diet and trade, Mintz notes that the ingredient moved from the domain of the rich to the cabinets of the poor in a few hundred years. Today, we’ve moved even farther, with government-subsidized corn production spurring the innovation (some would say, pestilence) of high fructose corn syrup, and the food products it enhances — a great many of them marketed to low-income consumers.
What led to these subsidies, and is there any connection between the support of corn, in particular, and the lack of large-scale sugar production in the United States? Did the collapse of the one-crop Puerto Rican economy inform farm subsidies in any way? And on a different note, how did the marketing of sugar to women — in the form of cookbooks and style manuals — shape demand on the homefront?
QuoteI just want to know: What’s the deal with high fructose corn syrup? How does it compare, nutritionally, with sugar?
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