HOW did an insignificant grass used for thatching in its native New Guinea come to dominate global cuisine, create great wealth for a few, and cause millions of people to be transported across the world under one of the most cruel and brutal regimes ever devised? Sanjida O鈥機onnell unfolds the complex story of the quest to satisfy our sweet tooth in this absorbing and illuminating history of sugar.
The story really begins about 2 million years ago, when as hunter-gatherers, our survival depended upon finding and enjoying high-calorie foods, which included sugar-rich fruits. Through the millennia our tastes did not change, so when the New Guinea thatchers found that the stems of their roofing material tasted good, they planted the sweetest ones to chew on at their leisure.
Once the secret was out, sugar cane became an essential piece of luggage for travellers, from sailors and soldiers to monks, who carried it throughout Polynesia and Asia. The Arabs improved sugar production and brought it to north Africa and the Mediterranean. But Arab dominance of sugar ceased with the arrival of the Crusaders, who introduced it to England, and used the Mediterranean countries they conquered to satisfy the resulting demand.
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To meet the growing domestic hunger for sugar, the Christian Crusaders developed a plantation system in which slaves provided cheap labour. When the Mediterranean sugar industry collapsed, partly due to the destruction of trees to fuel sugar processing, the European colonialists perfected the plantation system in the Caribbean and neighbouring South America. Millions of enslaved Africans were compelled to work under ruthless masters in barbaric conditions just to satisfy European cravings.
Today, the west perpetuates injustice and poverty through insane tariffs and subsidies for sugar beet farmers in Europe and the US that prevent much sugar from developing countries reaching its protected markets.
Sugar鈥檚 extraordinary properties have dramatically changed our cuisine, but our addiction to the sweet stuff is a major cause of obesity and ill health. The race is on to find alternatives that give us the sweet hit without the calories, and, more bizarrely, to develop additives that make sugar tasteless.
Meanwhile, scientists search for ever sweeter varieties of sugar cane. To some, this is madness, and a waste of a plant that is a highly efficient photosynthesiser. Why not grow cane for energy, with sugar as a by-product? But that is another story.
Sugar: The grass that changed the world
Virgin Books