About ten thousand years ago, people in New Guinea discovered a stout perennial grass that tasted sweet when they chewed it. They liked its sweetness so much that they brought it on canoe journeys, spreading the plant east and west across the Pacific.
In 500 BC, people in India discovered they could intensify the sweetness factor if they pressed the juice out of the cane and boiled it into crystals.
It wasn’t long before Alexander the Great encountered this “sacred reed,” and the Western World’s 2,500-year love affair with sugar began.
Sugar seizes the Old World
Sugar remained exotic in Europe for hundreds of years after Alexander’s men reported seeing this “honey produced without the intervention of bees” in India.
All that changed during the Muslim Agricultural Revolution, when Arab traders adopted and refined production techniques from India. By 700 AD, sugar was cultivated across the Arab Empire and much of Western Europe.
At this time sugar was still an expensive import, so its consumption was minimal and limited to the upper class.
Columbus spreads his sweetie’s sugar
Fast forward to the fifteenth century, Christopher Columbus is on his maiden voyage to the Americas and stops at an island in the Canaries to stock up on supplies. That quick layover ballooned into an extended booty call when he met Beatrice de Bobadilla, a beautiful island governor. When Columbus finally tore himself away 30 days later, Beatrice gave him a gift almost as sweet as her love.
She gave him cuttings of sugarcane, the first to reach the New World.
When Columbus slapped those cuttings into the hot, wet earth of an island in the Caribbean, the fate of sugar changed forever. As he later reported to Queen Isabella of Spain, sugar grew faster in the West Indies than anywhere else in the world.
To European elite already hooked on sugar from their colonies to the East, this was good news. Sugar production became one of the primary motivations for expansion, colonization, and control in the New World.
Slaves for sugar
There was just one problem with producing sugar on a mass scale: It involved a ton of backbreaking labor. First you had to grow it, then transport the bulky cane to a processing plant, crush it to extract the juices, and then boil the juice into concentrate. Each of these labor-intensive operations took hours.
Most European estate owners couldn’t be bothered with all that work, so instead they came up with a tragic solution: bring in slaves to do the work for them.
By the middle of the 19th century, more than 10 million Africans had been forcibly removed to the New World to cultivate and process sugar.
Before long, this method of farming was so profitable that people referred to sugar as “white gold.” But at what price?
While no longer grown and processed by slaves, sugar from developing countries has an ongoing association with workers earning minimal wages and living in extreme poverty.
Sugar for the masses
All the same, Europeans were hooked on the white stuff. They lost no time in tuning their diets to accommodate their collective sweet tooth. They developed jams, candies, cocoa, and processed foods and began to sweeten tea and coffee.
In 1700, the Dutch East India Company imported around 100,000 pounds of sugar into Holland; in 1725, that number rose to nearly six million pounds.
As Europeans found ever more uses and ways to consume sugar, the plantations found cleverer ways to increase production.
This ingenuity continued during the Napoleonic Wars, when, cut off from Caribbean sugar, France refined a method of extracting sugar from beetroots. Because beetroots grew well in the temperate climates of Europe, sugar consumption swelled all the more. By 1880, beet was the main source of sugar in Europe and later in the U.S.
1902 New York Times article. Click for full text.
Sugar’s legacy today
In 2002, worldwide production of sugar reached 134,1000,000 metric tons, equivalent to the weight of 18 Sears Towers.
According to the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics, the average American now eats 40 teaspoons of added sugar every day, or 135 pounds annually.
Which is to say we eat about 75% of our bodyweight in sugar every year.
And that number doesn’t include all the high fructose corn syrup and artificial sweeteners we eat.
So how does this mountain of sugar affect our bodies? We’ll delve into it next time…
http://www.essortment.com/all/historyofsugar_rzow.htm
http://www.britishsugar.co.uk/RVEe24abbb33b93496a9b07a5dee9c82270,,.aspx
http://www.livescience.com/history/080602-hs-sugarcane.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_sugar
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_weight
The Development of the British West Indies, 1700-1763 By Frank Wesley Pitman
This is part two in a seven-part series.
This is a blog about triumph.
