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Sugar is ubiquitous. Our grocery stores are brimming with sugar-added products, both from the usual suspects like cereal, soda, and other sweet treats and from products marketed as “healthy” that can contain a whopping dose of the sweet stuff.
Likely though, if you’ve been following my work for a while, you already know this. But how did we get here?
The new book, The World of Sugar: How the Sweet Stuff Transformed Our Politics, Health, and Environment over 2000 Years, seeks the answer.
On this episode, my co-host, James Connolly is interviewing the author, Ulba Bosma.
Ulbe is a Senior Research for the International Institute of Social History. His research centers on labor and labor relations viewed from a social, historical, and geographical lens. Ulbe’s unique perspective brings to light how sugar production affected cultures worldwide through industrialization, labor migration, and human health.
During their in-depth conversation, James and Ulbe discuss:
- How sugar was “discovered” and the first methods of production
- Slavery and sugar
- The history of sugar dumping
- The impacts of industrialization on sugar production
- The current state of sugar
Rather watch this episode on YouTube? Check it out here: Episode 257: Ulbe Bosma
Resources:
Empire of Cotton: A Global History by Sven Beckert
Sweetness and Sugar: The Place of Sugar in Modern History by Sidney Mitz
Salt, Sugar, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us by Michael Moss
Documentary: El Susto
International Life Sciences Institute
Connect with Ulbe:
Email: [email protected]
Episode Credits:
Thank you to all who’ve made this show possible. Our hosts are Diana Rodgers and James Connolly. Our producer is Emily Soape. And, of course, we are grateful for our sponsors, Global Food Justice Alliance members, and listeners.
If you believe in making sure that people all over the world should have access to nutritious food, please join my mission through my non-profit, the Global Food Justice Alliance. All sustaining members get early access to ad-free podcasts plus free downloads, and you’ll be helping get healthy protein like meat, fish, and eggs to food-insecure kids. That’s sustainabledish.com/join.
Transcript:
Diana Rodgers, RD
Welcome to the Sustainable Dish Podcast. I’m Diana Rodgers, a real food registered dietitian, author, and sustainability advocate. I co-host this podcast with James Connolly, who was a producer on my film Sacred Cow. I also founded the Global Food Justice Alliance, an initiative advocating for the inclusion of animal-source foods like meat, dairy, and eggs for a more nutritious, sustainable, and equitable worldwide food system. You can check it out and join me at global food justice.org. Thanks again for listening. And now, on to our show.
James Connolly
Hi, this is James Connolly for Sustainable Dish. This is a really interesting book. This is a book that should be out pretty soon, actually, we just talked, it’s out now, I’d sort of come across it on the Twitterverse and became very excited about this. One of the interesting elements of this, and I’ve studied agriculture for now, for close to a decade. And if you’re growing up in the United States, you learn about the history of slavery in myriad forms primarily centered around cotton production, but you’ll hear about it within tobacco production. And then as sort of a side note, you sort of start to hear about it in terms of sugar production. I remember watching the film 12 Years a Slave, and it chronicles, Northern African American person who was actually stolen into the into the slave trade, and immediately ends up down in Florida, working the sugarcane fields and then ends up in the cotton production system afterwards. And I think it’s one of the first times I had seen in popular culture and movies, sugar production cane production actually being shown on TV. It probably was in roots in the 70s. I’m sure it was, but I was probably about four years old at the time. But I wanted to kind of start out… I have a Ulbe Bosma on here. And he just wrote a book called The World of Sugar: How the Sweet Stuff Transformed Our Politics, Health, and Environment Over 2000 Years. And I wanted to just kind of start out with I had just come back from a trip down to Florida into a place called Bone Valley. And it was in preparation for an interview I had done with somebody on the book, it’s primarily about phosphorus, one of the three primary key ingredients in fertilizer production. And 70% of it actually comes from this one place in central Florida. And the ecological cost of a lot of the production that is happening within that has had all of this sort of downstream effects within the waterways and river systems that are the sort of key components of Florida tourism. What you’re finding is massive algal blooms that are part of the process of phosphorus production, but then also secondary as a process of sugar production, which is a huge economic element in Florida alone. And so you have these $7 million homes that can no longer be sold because he got these horrible, smelly, you know, like vomit inducing water pollutants that are are part of our agricultural production system today. Sugar seems to be at the forefront a lot of that stuff, especially within places in and around that area, Florida, Texas Panhandle and everything like that. And so this book comes out at a time when I think I actually probably needed the most, because I needed sort of an overall landscape of the world of sugar as it’s been sort of commoditized and made into the modern industry that we deal with today. So thank you so much for coming on and reading this exactly when I needed this.
Ulbe Bosma
Okay, my pleasure.
James Connolly
So you had this quote in an article the written in before this book had come out, and I think it’s a really good lead in for this it says, “Sometimes what is most common is most remarkable. For those of us living in a city or suburb, a typical day starts with arising from cotton sheets, hopping into the shower for a quick wash with some palm oil based soaps, dressing in cotton shirts and pants, drinking a hot beverage coffee or tea and then eating a sugary cereal or jam, sometimes followed by a soy fed processed meat sandwiches wrapped in fossil fuel plastic.” So how did we get here?
Ulbe Bosma
Yeah, well, this article I wrote together with my colleague, Sam Beckert’s who wrote a well known book, The Empire of Cotton. So now I come up with my book about the world of sugar. I think it’s the same kind of philosophy, trying to understand our world, the workings of capitalism, through the lens of a single commodity, which has immense, immense advantage that we can cross national boundaries that we are across ages and still are able to to present a coherent story. So this is one commodity, which keeps everything together and connects the different nodes in world connects our own human bodies, the obesity problem with environmental destruction with gross exploitation of human labor. Slavery is, of course, a critical example here, critical case here, and two thirds of all people who were transported across the Atlantic from Africa and adapted super plantations. So this is quite a story that can be told to the lens of one single commodity. And of course, that was the attraction to me to write this book.
James Connolly
Yeah, I don’t want to jump too far ahead. But you have this remarkable quote in the book that I just found absolutely stunning. You make the case that in the way that the 20th century had become the oil and fossil fuel century, the 19th century was primarily run by sugar. And that’s a bold claim. And I think the, you know, I mean, you definitely go through this in myriad detail. But tell us how we got there. How do we get… how do we get from this grass that goes from that can be taken and harvested, and within 48 hours, it starts to rot. It can… sort of draw me a timeline, in some ways, from that sort of eastern direction of the production of this one set of grass, that maybe we can sort of work up until the 19th century. But I find it utterly fascinating.
Ulbe Bosma
Yeah, well, the whole story starts probably 3000 years ago or so in India, where farmers discovered how they can brush cane, get the juice out of it. Then boil the juice into a kind of thickened mass. It’s kind of dark brown, and even over black mass, which is not the nice crystalline sugar, which is our table sugar that we have today, until at let’s say, five hundreds after Christ, that people in India or in Persia, we do not know exactly, who discovered how to get crystallines out of this boiling sugar mass, this syrup. They had to put alkaloids in it, they have to do something with lime, or with egg whites, or whatever, to make this juice crystallize. So over time this whole process became more and more sophisticated. They invented all kinds of mills, all kinds of procedures to refine it further into a kind of white powdery sugar. And we talk about 1000 after Christ, and sugar was only available at that stage in China, in India, in Egypt, but not yet in Europe. Europeans didn’t know anything about sugar, at a time when the Roman Empire. So pure sugar was a product that was there but it was very expensive. It was very difficult to make something only for the highest aristocracy, for the emperors and the kings. And only over time during the European Middle Ages, you see that Europeans become acquainted with sugar. And but the problem with Europeans was that’s at Europe was too cold to grow sugarcane. It could only be done in the Mediterranean basin, so the island of Cyprus or Sicily or the southern coast of Spain. So what happens when Europe learns to love sugar was to say in my book, and Europe learn to love sugar, they had to go elsewhere to obtain it. Africa was not an option because the African soil and climate was not conducive to sugar plantations. So they went first to the islands off the coast of Africa, Medera, the Canary Islands, Zatomayo. And then with Columbus went… when he went to Cuba, his ships had already cane stalks in their hulls. And they started to plant sugar in the Americas. So in Cuba first and then Portuguese started sugar production in Brazil, and they’re all history, gruesome history of plantations, slavery starts and I think it’s important to underline that that’s half to two thirds of all peoples and said, transports from Africa ended up in the sugar plantations. And one of the reasons is that the sugar plantations, the conditions there were absolutely dreadful, were horrible. People had to work there for very long days. The conditions in field were very dangerous. The cane, rots indeed in 48 hours, so had to be harvested very quickly, and then processed very quickly. So the people in the mills had to work for another 18 hours per day to get the harvest done. People had to carry manure to the fields, which also caused all kinds of diseases. And then I have not yet mentioned, the pure citizen of the of seas. So the conditions of the sugar plantations were worse than all other plantations, including cotton or tobacco or rice.
James Connolly
Yeah, I mean, I think that the one of the things that you do a very good job of going through is the process by which you make this commodity, this transportable commodity that can then be used and transported all over the world. The two main problems meaning the rot that happens that very quickly, but then the fermentation that will happen to the juice as well. And so you’re talking somewhere at 18 hours a day that people are working, boiling this, turning it into a crystalline form, so that it can be transported and is transportable. Yeah, I think that there are so many elements of this, I had picked up Sidney Mintz’s book and picked it up years ago that had sort of gone through just reevaluating a lot of the stories from there. But the degree of terror involved, I think, within either the sort of chattel slavery elements of it, or even just the indentured servitude, which I just consider to be slavery itself, you know, there were so many elements of this that became integral to the production of this thing that then became, by the 19th century had become ubiquitous, could be afforded by middle class families and eventually by the poor. And the, just the level to which the numbers, the poundage of sugar, that ended up in Europe, it’s just so stunning to me.
Ulbe Bosma
Yeah, well, what’s happened was, that’s in the course of the 18th century, people discovered how machines could help to produce sugar. So the age of steam and steel, which we usually associate with Europe, and United States, was also there in the sugar plantations very early on. So what we see in the early 19th century, is that steam driven cane crushers entered the fields, with hundreds, I mean, huge numbers of cane crushers. So the industrialization of the sugar sector did not happen so much in Europe. In fact, it started at spot where the game was harvest this precisely because cane is rotting within 48 hours. Now, from then on, you can see that thanks to industrialization, and thanks to the fact that slavery continues throughout the much of the 19th century, that indentured labor came which means that workers were contracted in China and in India and brought over to the Caribbean region. That’s this huge amounts… is huge amounts of forced labor, enables sugar producers to produce increasing quantities of sugar for European markets. And the Dutch did their part by introducing it a forced cultivation system and Java was imposed a bigotry of forced cultivation of cane by Japanese peasants for European sugar mills, that enabled Java to become the second largest sugar producer after Cuba, and Cuba, slavery in Cuba was only abolished in 1886. So this is what 19th century shows us, the story of staggering volumes of sugar that came became available for European American markets, but much of it was based upon forced agricultural labor.
James Connolly
Yeah, I’ve been reading a little bit of work in terms of cotton production in the 19th century, there have been a lot of scholarship that’s happened over the past 20 or 30 years, that sort of push back against the sort of the mechanization of cotton production. And they talk a lot about how the Industrial Revolution created in some ways, then less of it less of a need, for chattel slavery, less of a need for industrial indentured servitude and stuff like that, because you had now you could make these things make all of these different parts of the production process mechanical. I think a lot of that scholarship has been pushed back on now, especially within black scholars who say that, really the cotton gin had very little influence on the need and the production increases that we saw in the 19th century. Most of it was terror. I wonder if you can kind of talk about that.
Ulbe Bosma
Absolutely. Because I think that’s a tragedy of industrialization in the early 19th century. People saw that industrialization make an ends to put an end to this artist manual labor. So did steel and steel will liberate you mankind from this horrible work. But the problem was that the industrialization increased the demand for sugar in industrial centers of the world dramatically. And the other hand, in the fields, it was completely impossible to mechanize the harvesting of cane, or to mechanize, the harvesting of cotton. So this mechanized… mechanization of cotton bores, cane harvesting, that’s something of the later part of the 20th century. So it’s only after the Second World War, that the mechanical cane harvesters entered the game fields. And then only in the wealthiest parts of the world. So the first part where the the first reason where they entered was in Louisiana, during the Second World War, which was a severe shortage of labor, on Hawaii, on Australia, but not in India, even today, in India or in Brazil, it’s quite a lot of cane cutting, which is still done by men. So the whole story of the industrialization, liberating mankind from slavery, from forced labor, from underpaid labor, from exploitation, that was a dream that vanished by the mid 19th century.
James Connolly
Yeah, and I think that there is we see that within our entire agricultural system, I think, the you know, I don’t know how how much you followed, the roboticazation that is sort of happening within agricultural fields, where they’re trying to develop technologies to be able to pluck strawberries and blueberries often provide sort of promises.
Ulbe Bosma
Well, this is quite important because it’s a kind of artisanal affair, this whole agricultural, apples, pears, strawberries, so you need cheap labor. And as usually immigrant labor, and the whole story of cheap labor and immigrant labor is the story of people coming from Mexico to go to California today. But there’s also started existed 100 years ago, in California, people from Mexico came to work in beet fields, or to work in the beet fields of Mexican, etc. So the whole idea that you need a lot of labor to do this manual work. But in fact, you don’t want this to lead these laborers to become part of your nation. There’s also parts of this book. So this is also a story about agricultural, seasonal labor. And the same tragedies that occurred with the Mexicans in the United States and beet fields, also occurred as Polish laborers in Germany, which were in fact, the kind of indentured labor, they were not allowed to change from employer. Let’s talk about Polish laborers in Prussia, or in Eastern Germany, they had was sent back off to the season to Poland. So they were really seasonally under control under the tutelage of their employers. And of course, they had not much of a negotiating power anymore in such a situation. So this whole idea that you can mechanize agriculture, it’s of course, to the certain extent, you can mechanize the whole issue, you can mechanize the processing of grain, and that has been done very, very successfully, or beets, for that matter, but mechanization of every aspect, for many agricultural products is was impossible. And for sure, it was only possible to do that, as a turn of let’s say, the later part of the 20th century.
James Connolly
And I think we’re finding that more and more. There is an article in preparation for this interview that I found on the… I’m unfamiliar with how to say their name, Fanjul, the Florida, the Cuban American.
Ulbe Bosma
Fanjul, Yes.
James Connolly
Yeah. The Fanjul family, primarily labor conditions in the Dominican Republic, where they have a lot of their agricultural production, just in absolutely horrific conditions, even in 2022.
Ulbe Bosma
Yeah. Yeah, there has been a lot of protests. And people have tried to expose this and as I wrote, one filmmaker who tried to do this was barred from the Miami film contest. Yeah, and he said on Instagram, so this is something which is really problematic. And again, they the Fanjul or if he needs another family, wealthy, sugar producing family in the Dominican Republic. They are facing low sugar prices, a race to the bottom of the sugar prices. So they have no… well, they can stop. They can do something else, but they don’t want to continue producing sugar in Dominican Republic. There is only one option is to squeeze on labor cost as much as possible. So, of course, they are morally responsible for what they are doing. But we also have to look at how the global sugar market is warped. I mean, there’s so much overproduction. On the one hand, there’s so much protection that the sugar world supermarket is severely distorted. It’s bit better now because European Union was stopped from sugar dumping by the World Trade Organization. But still, the International supermarket is warped and it has been more for the past 150 years.
James Connolly
Can you explain that term: sugar dumping?
Ulbe Bosma
Yeah, the sugar dumping. This is something which started when Europe began to produce beet sugar. And that started in the 19th century from the days of Napoleon. When cane sugar did not welcome in Europe. Some genius discovered how to extract sugar from beetroot. So this became a prospering industry in Europe and became even more important for Europe when steel ships with wheat from the Americas came to Europe and ruins the European wheat market. So the European farmers had to switch to another crop. And that was beetroot to produce here. But soon enough, within a few decades, there was tremendous overproduction of the issue. So what is the Germans and French Germans in particular, was to impose a tax on their own consumption. And with these taxes, they subsidize their exports. So what happened that was in fact that the Germans paid for the cheap sugar, which landed on the kitchen dishes of the British, and this whole thing of sugar damping became part of the common agricultural policies of European Union after the 1950s. So the idea was that European Union guarantee the fixed price for European farmers until a certain volume. And above this volume, there was no longer guaranteed price, no lower subsidies. But well-organized farms and well-organized factories could use the subsidies which they got for that allowed, quota to dump sugar against much lower price on the on the world market. And that’s what happened. So in the late 1990s, Europe dumped about, I think, 5 million tons of sugar per year, which has a severe downward effect, of course, the world’s sugar prices. And to add to this disaster, in the 1980s, the high fructose corn syrup came in becoming increasingly popular also among beverage industry in the United States, which is made from mush from corn, and is also sweetener, and led to another downward effect on the prices of sugar on a world market. So these two developments in United States and in Europe led to a fear pressure on the world silver prices, which ruins your industry and Cuba, for example, but that’s also severe consequences and sugar producing regions in Brazil, in India, in Thailand, in Australia. So it was only in 2005, that the World Trade Organization put an end to this dumping by the European Union, after litigations of Australia and Thailand and Brazil.
James Connolly
It’s amazing to me.
Ulbe Bosma
Yeah, well, it’s a story that I try to explain this. This is a story which is is not something of the past few decades, this story was really started in the 19th century, with, well, this is the globalization of food production, the fact that you can transport wheat and sugar across the globe in huge quantities, which leads to well, the kind of interaction of agricultural markets as such in a completely Smithian world in a beautifully equal playing field for everyone. We work very well and I think would be the best of all worlds. But as usually, governments are there also to protect the special interest groups, and particularly the special interest groups and compounds, hundreds of 1000s of farmers that grow sugar beets. So this is… this of course, foods production is something which is not a free market and which most national governments would not come to consider a free market because the population needs to be fat and needs to be fed. Again, stable and not too high prices because it’s the sufficient supply and stable supply of food is of course the basis of your economy and enables you to industrialize. So this is what we see now is a food policies of national governments that warp international food markets, hands, and also the case of sugar has led to severe overproduction. And well, there’s overproduction all ends up in our bodies. Right?
James Connolly
Yeah. So we often talk about this with friends, when you go to the supermarket are you in awe and also horror at what you see?
Ulbe Bosma
Well, you don’t need to go to the supermarket, you can go to your own kitchen and get stuff from shelves. Look at it. And you see that the sugar almost everywhere. Yeah. And the food industry and sugar industry are of course allies. In this food industry, sugar gives texture to the food items, is a way to conserve foods. You get to fibers out of the food and sugar in and you can keep it lower on the shelves. So this is a story of packaged food of food industry. That also starts in the late 19th century with urbanization, and the well, kind of delinking the production of foods and the consumption of food. There’s no law in the same place. You have people who are consuming food that is produced 1000s of miles away and have become of course increasingly so in our past 50 years. And interestingly enough, and that has seeped in Winston, his books Freedom and Power also details that sugar was one of the first items that were part of the European households and American households in the cause of the 18th century. Foods that came from 1000s of miles away. And there’s a really globalization of foods production and consumption. And it was already underway in the 18th century.
James Connolly
Yeah, you had, there’s a quote I wanted to throw out there and just get your sense of in here it says Gail Johnson, the prominent agricultural economist quoted in 1974 in his damning evaluation of the American sugar program – “The protectionist US quota system, that humanity’s sweet tooth is just only marginally based on old cultural traditions and overwhelmingly caused by high level of protection for what is generally acknowledged to be a high cost industry. Sugar, high fructose corn syrup and other bulk sweeteners are massively present in branded, heavily marketed food and beverages. Most consumers are unaware of the full extent of sugars present. Cigarettes, for example, contain sweetened tobacco first produced by Reynolds just before World War One, and it was blended into their Camel cigarettes to make it easier to inhale nicotine deeper into the lungs.” I mean, it’s just amazing to me.
Ulbe Bosma
Yeah. This is a horrible story. In the end, I think what Gail Johnson said, I found that so true, when I was as an historian, of course, is quite well known and reputable economist that in Europe in the 19th century, we already see that governments are struggling with the question how to get rid of their beet sugar, reduction of beet sugar, and how to get into the consumer markets, and that they design all kinds of tricks to do so. So they may have advertisements with sugar gives energy. They put sugar in the rations of soldiers to make them endure more and longer days in the battlefields. So all these things are done in the course of the 19th century in the early 20th century, to make people accustomed to a higher level of sugar intake. And that, in addition, of course, come the beverages for the United States is a particularly interesting story, because the beverage is sweetened beverages are replacing the alcoholic drinks with becoming increasingly banned in the early 20th century. So the sweetened beverage become a substitute for the alcoholic drinks. And so one problem is solved. But another problems emerged that so this is indeed this is not… and I really admire us immense, but I think that’s he stresses the innate taste for sweetness, where I will say it’s, of course people like sweet stuff, but people get accustomed to ever higher levels of sweetness. And this is a result of how our food industry functions. So this is indeed as Johnson said, this is really thrown upon us and at the expense of the taxpayer, at the expense of our healthcare system, which has to cope with obesity. So this is really something which is not I think a culturally or kind of organically part of our human existence.
James Connolly
I remember reading, I think at one point it was maybe it was Michael Pollan, but he was talking about how it took the cola industry, somewhere around 30 years of sort of small but aggressive marketing in Italy, to get people to because primarily at mealtimes, you would have either water or wine, you would have cocktails, or you would have more water, and it took them 30 years, they knew they had to branch into this market, but they didn’t… they knew will also take a long time to push into the Italian sort of food market. But they… this generation of kids are the first generation of kids who are having sodas with their meals. And that’s a huge success. It’s a win for them, you have this established culture that is very hard to move. And you know, but they have this long game of like 30 years where they’re like, alright, well, we can upend the culture, it’s just not going to happen overnight. It’s stunning to me.
Ulbe Bosma
Yeah, that’s what happened in southern Europe and sugar took from the 18th century onwards, we can see that sugar took a long time to conquer markets in southern part of France, because people had grapes, there has enough sweetness, but a mild type of sweetness, of course, and pure sugar, and was only over time that people got accustomed to sugar. So what you see in the late 18th century is that the people in Paris already consumed a couple of kilos of sugar per year per annum, which is quite a lot for these days. Whereas the countryside would have 50 grams mind this is a huge discrepancy. And when the cause of the 19th century, people from the countryside of France came to Paris, they were not used to consuming sugar. They didn’t like it, they thought it was a feminist. It was not what sturdy guys from the countryside. So do they have their own food items. So this is what what happens in the overtime, consumption patterns… patterns had to be changed. And this is what happened in the course of the 19th century. And what we still see very much see today. The challenge, of course, for governments is to bend the course and to go in the opposite direction. And to get people from the sodas and sweetened beverage to water again. In some cases, there’s different difficult because the case of Mexico with a severe obesity pandemic, severe cases of overweight, children drank Cola, rather beverages for breakfast, because there was no clean tap water. So in many cases, many positive words, these sweetened beverages keep you healthy, in a way. So it’s not very easy in those cases to change consumption patterns. So it requires indeed, a change of food consumption of drinking patterns, to improve our health and to get rid or to least to conquer the obesity epidemic, which is now going on. And what makes it even more difficult is the fact that is packaged and mass produced food items and beverages are part of them. And much cheaper to produce there. For example, strawberries, which had to be plucked one by one. So this expensive for apples or pears where everything was is healthy, is often expensive, because more expensive than what is unhealthy. So this is what we know the conundrum we are now in I think.
James Connolly
Michael Moss, his book, Sugar, Fat and Salt actually kind of talks about he has one story in there where it was the head of marketing for Pepsi. And they were… they had a new division that was trying to work its way into Brazil, into some of the poorest districts in Brazil in the favelas, where where kids are living on less than $1 a day. And so they had invented a, I don’t know, like six ounce Pepsi that they could sell that, you know, that they were trying to market to these children and this guy just couldn’t do it anymore. You know, they had rice and beans. They could have something else but they they consider this to be a new market. There was a documentary called El Susto, that had come out that talks about the level to which Pepsi and Coca Cola had taken over a lot of Mexican culture i- nvented ways of getting into quinceañeras and very, very, like seminal moments in people’s lives to sort of start to associate their beverages with those moments of moving into womanhood or into manhood and all of that stuff. I mean, it sounds like, you know, Vincente Fox, who was the CEO, you know, what are the head of Coca Cola became the president of Mexico, right? Yeah, I mean, I think it’s it’s definitely one of those things. Where I wanted to kind of move a little bit into where are we today? What is the… because over the course of the 21st century, we have started to see a push back against the level of sugar consumption at its height. We in America, I think we’re in about 150 pounds of added sugar a year per child, we have an obesity epidemic, and, you know, even among children, but adults, I think we’re 85% of us are metabolically unhealthy, we are starting to see some level of sort of pushback against all of this stuff. The one of the interesting parts of your book that you go into is in some of the sugar cartels that have had enormous influence on directing policy, then give to both sides of the aisle, especially in politics, because it really doesn’t matter to them. It’s about just having their influence on the what we talk about when we talk about healthy futures. So I wonder if you can talk a little bit more about that.
Ulbe Bosma
Yeah, it is. It’s a mixed picture. On the one hand, you see that sugar companies and also, of course, we have to include now also the corn producing regions in the United States, because they produce the high fructose corn syrup. So the beet sugar industry, and the corn sector had now united and they are very powerful in the United States. And of course, their policy is to protect the American market against imports from Brazil. So even if we would stop protecting all United States would stop protecting the sugar producers in the United States, the Brazilian sugar would come in so there’s so much sugar in the world that eliminating part of the sugar industry would not would not solve the problem. I think. So what can be done? I think that’s this, I think, a sugar tax is of course, an important mechanism. It has proven is value already in the 19th century in Germany, because there was a sugar tax and consumption was rather limited compared to for example, Britain or the United States. We see it now in Mexico was it’s in some places in Europe. And you see that that many governments are still reluctant to impose a sugar tax precisely because the power of the sugar industry, but I think this is something that needs to be done. So this test would only be the first step. Rather, developments, one of the most foremost sugar producers in the world, Tate and Lyle, is a British company, which went big and was fostered during the heydays of British Empire in year 20 century, became big in the Caribbean region was a cane sugar produced became one of the largest sugar producer, one of the largest molasses transporters in the world. It switched over the past 20-25 years to artificial sweeteners. So this is what they did. And they now advertise themselves as a company that helps with non-caloric sweetener solutions. So they see what’s that the times are changing. And indeed, as you said, the sugar consumption in most of the wealthiest countries is already slightly bending down – not in the United States I think. But in European countries, you can see a slight, slight bending down of this curve. But it doesn’t go fast enough. So your question about where are we now? Well, is the obesity pandemic going on – about 40% of the United States population is obese, we don’t have the time to wait for this curve to come down to the 20 kilos where it should be. So we’re now in the United States 60 kilos per year per person, you’re 40 kilos, many other countries is 40 kilos as well. So it means to half sugar consumption, it requires quite drastic measures. And if they are not taken, we will have a tremendous problem with our hand because our healthcare systems will simply collapse I think the coming decades.
James Connolly
Yeah, I remember talking to somebody had been focused on this for a very long time and he had a conversation with one or two members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sort of the military, sort of, you know, the really upper echelon of that dealing with recruitment rates, because really, for the most part, recruitment rates are down primarily because most people can’t pass the weight limit, or the exercise limit for US, you know, for the US military. And we talked about this close to a decade ago, in essence a while ago, but you see this sort of them dealing with the issue in and of itself, but then you see the complete sort of start to move over and transformation of the military towards robotics, because they’re like, we can’t deal with the US’s problem. Seems like, you can’t fit into the tank anymore. But we’ll just mechanize the tank, and we’ll just the robotisize it. So yeah, I mean, I look at what, what Mexico has done. I think a lot of it is marketing towards children, they have tried to remove a lot of that stuff, to remove the characters, the advertisement, the culture of marketing to children, which the FCC here has tried to do – failed in the 80s, failed in the 90s. And even within Michelle, Michelle and Barack Obama’s presidency, when they sort of set up their Let’s Move program, they asked for voluntary participation from the soda industry and the processed food industry, which never really had any intention of changing anyway, you know. So I’d see, for me a lever to change would be sort of starting to remove some of that stuff from every single element of childhood, you know, in whatever way that seems reasonable at this point.
Ulbe Bosma
Yeah, the problem is, was commercial television, commercial broadcasting is very difficult to accomplish that and people will, of course, point to the First Amendment that you’re free to advertise stuff. So there’s a lot of and people say, Well, there’s a kind of tutelage. And yeah, we’re not toddlers, and parents can decide for themselves, and so on and so forth. So this is, of course, I think, in a couple of European countries, seriously consider to ban the sweetness and candy advertisements from the television before eight o’clock in the evening, something like that. And that’s, of course it is. And we have to realize that how we got here was precisely because of advertisement. So how it gets back to normal is also by taking on the advertisements. So vending machines, that entity, the schools, for example, abandoned from schools, and that is something which is already ongoing for for decades, and medical doctors are propagating the ban of bad food from schools and the introduction of healthy foods at schools. But the point is that we as academics, and I’m an academic, like a medical doctor, we do not have the means. We don’t have the funds to advertise our source as the beverage industry and food industry do. So they have massive funds to do the advertising. And they see the needs to advertise because they know that they are on public pressure, that they know that people are making podcasts about this, this kind of issue that newspapers are writing articles and some concerned politicians want to talk about this. So they’re pushing back. And that’s exactly what you see this whole history of sugar. In fact, this is something which already happened in the 18th century when the British Quakers, this racist denomination society of Quakers wanted to stop the consumption of slave sugar. That’s the slaveholders who’s back with his parliament, they created their own lobbies, and they were very powerful and they succeeded in postponing the abolition of slavery by a couple of decades. So, this is what we see now, that we will see postpone and we will see the sugar industry that will show confusion. We will see a lot of advertisements still ongoing about beverages which are delight and perfectly compatible with move your body kind of convinced. But in reality, of course, you grow fat because of this, the sugary waters. And this is really a problem. It goes to the root of our societies, it goes to a root of our consumption society. Where consumption is something which makes you happy, and which makes you feel good and the advertisement industry, of course, has become very sophisticated and appealing to people. Then even rationally we say this nonsense of course you ask people that most of the advertisement nonsense, but there’s still a stick somewhere you have that status, nice pleasure giving etc, etc.
James Connolly
Yeah, I mean, they’re studying the same things that everybody else is studying the neuroscience is the understanding of how the mind works. So your capacity for making decisions and healthy decisions over the course of a very stressful eight hour, nine hour workday, they know there’s a certain point where you’re going to get a reward. And if they’re there at that time, that’d be the reward that you seek. Yeah, remember, El Susto had an interesting statistic, they said, the Robert Wood Johnson spends about $100 million a year working on childhood obesity, the science. And they do some really good work, especially on advertising to children. But the processed food industry spends $100 million within the first month of that year. You know, I mean, we’re talking about a billion, at least, I think it’s between one and $2 billion on advertising. And a lot of that is geared towards children. Yeah. And I think, you know, I’m nearly 50, I’ve been around long enough to kind of see the sort of level change to which, as a father in and of myself, the degree to which all of this food is everywhere, and ubiquitous, you know, these were the level of cultural pressure. You know, I’ll go to, you know, a seven year old or eight year old soccer game – football in Europe, a football game, and the amount of calories that are given to these kids who are running around for 40 minutes. The juices, the candy, the doughnuts, and all of that stuff he couldn’t, if they ran for three days straight, they can’t burn off the calories that they’ll eat after 40 minutes of running around. Yeah. Yeah. And there is a lot of societal pressure to make sure that these kids are getting that but then their blood sugar doesn’t go down. The intern, what is it, the International Lifestyles Institute, which was a subsidiary paid for by Coca Cola, and Pepsi, that tried to obfuscate the role of sugar in diets, tried to say that all of these things are part of a balanced diet, but really pushed a lot of the science around exercise as being a lever for change. When they knew all along that it wasn’t,
Ulbe Bosma
Yeah, that’s the same, of course of all these industries, the oil industry or the sugar industry, they all face the same problem. That’s they really have to fight against the common knowledge that what they’re doing is not not healthy, or is environmentally devastating. So but they still have a lot of means to fight as to lobbying, to advertising, etc, etc. That’s not something which just started 21st century, I mean, that’s, you can see this throughout history of past centuries. And what we can also see, and then that respect, the sugar does not about food industry developed, how capitalism develops, it is a story of increasing concentration of power of industrial power in few hands. And that allows these industrialists to increase the margins of profit, which allows them indeed to spend lavishly on advertisement and on political influencing. So this is an important thing to recognize. And for me, it’s also an historian, of course, I don’t need to solve every problem in the world. I also find it fascinating to see how these conglomerates emerge of past few centuries, how they cope with death. And I can also see that competition, the circumstances under which this production to place starting to feel 14th to 15th century 16th century, the circumstances were very, very difficult. And only the stories and the most unscrupulous entrepreneurs survived and made the companies bigger and bigger and bigger, and which which you see in the early 19th century, that from those companies that started at that time, in the early 20th century, only a few were left. And some families like indeed the Fanjuls. They’re already in sugar for one half centuries. They came from Spain, they built a huge enterprise in Cuba. They were expelled from Cuba after the revolution by Fidel Castro. They came to Florida, they start again, and then are still there, again, the biggest super producers in the world. So this is something and also story of resilience of entrepreneurship of trying to create monopolies in fact, to assemble as much economic power as you can. If you don’t, you will be wiped out. That’s what capitalism is about. I mean, this is not about a lot of nice companies it free competition and they have kind of the Smithian world or an agricultural Jeffersonian world of all kinds of middle, large farmers producing in responsible ways. This is not how it works out. So I’m a little bit restrained in accusing individual capitalist, individual producers or individual companies from doing things. Because that doesn’t solve the problem. It is systemic. It’s how world economy functions. And there’s also world economy was able to still able to feed eight to 9 billion people in this world.
James Connolly
Yeah, I mean, I think of for us, a lot of the study of agricultural history is centered around that, you know that we’ve primarily focused on the early part of the 20th century, as industrialization had moved into the agricultural sector, mechanization and industrialization. I think that thing that really worries us in the documentary that we’re working on right now, is centered around this, I think the need for fundamental change in the way that we feed ourselves, has created a mechanism by which these large multinational corporations are now they’ve essentially geared the conversation in their favor. And so for us, sustainability means consolidation. You know, efficiency means consolidation. And so a lot of the smallholder farmers, agricultural producers are sort of being sucked under by this sort of the wave of this, the large farm commodities movement around the world. And I remember I was talking to a Malaysian farmer, who had started a foundation that was primarily focused on that he had noticed he had seen a lot of farmer suicides in the place that he had grown up and he said, the long term cost of the commoditization of our entire food system means that people are producing more and more food, but it’s all being excised to the global north, remanufactured and then resold back to these farmers, and they’re never feeding people anymore. They never feel like they’re feeding people anymore. And that to us is very worrying, because I think even the UN, when it’s being hyperbolic still says about 70% of the world, that is feeding the world is still smallholder farmers.
Ulbe Bosma
In this respect, of course, the sugar story is also a story of smallholders and of plantations and industrial sugar production, we tend to forget that in Latin America, and in India, much of the sugar production is by small holders, and there’s a kind of raw darkish sugar, which is not industrially refined, and they are resisting the onslaught of capitalist sugar production until this very day, because it’s part of their, the agricultural cycle. So in India, they can harvest the cane after other crops have been harvested, it’s part of their consumption pattern, because the people liked the taste of this raw sugar, which they like much better than the refined sugar. So and of course, a nice way of keeping their autonomy because this is a product but you can grow yourself. You can mill it yourself – small mills, or small cooperatives. And you can sell it on your in the regional markets, or sometimes even farther away than regional markets. This isn’t the case in the US – can sometimes be hundreds of kilometres from where you live. So yes, there are pockets of alternative production, but at the same time, at the working conditions in these traditional sugarr producing regions are not very good. So that’s factories does… the factories can offer better conditions to their workers than they say the traditional sugar makers. So that’s one of the things. So, we cannot idealize that said smallholder production. Whereas for example, the largest sugar producing companies in Indonesia or in Thailand, fully mechanized, that said, they use machines into the fields. So, only a few people are involved in it and they… these people are obtaining nice wages. Meanwhile, of course, the environment is destroyed, I mean, this goes with complete utter disregard for ecological conditions, that are has to be respected, to make a sustainable. So this is what we are now in a very difficult situation that on the one hand, we want to have as much food as we can, as much calories as we can obtain from nature against the lowest possible price to make this world turn around. With 9 billion people, on the other hand, we know that there are more responsible, socially responsible and ecologically more responsible ways of producing. And we do not know, I think this is how we get from A to B.
James Connolly
I don’t see that conversation happening a lot.
Ulbe Bosma
But no, no, that’s probably can’t… You can’t turn the clock back. And particularly not because the clock back would not improve conditions for people because the conditions weren’t very pleasant, five, 600 years ago.
James Connolly
Yeah, I mean, I think that, yeah. I mean, I guess the hard part I have is the dumping. When we started, we were talking about phosphorus mining, the downstream cost of that isn’t really factored into it. And I think you make a very good argument in your book about the downstream effects of sugar dumping. So we will call it the amount of sugar that is in our system, we don’t I don’t think we factor in a lot of the calculations to the the ecological damage or to the human health damage of that. And I think that that is something that has to be a frontline focus if we’re going to talk about ecological sustainability. And what makes for, you know, like this human zoo that we’ve created, like, what is … what should we eat? Right? Yeah, I have a friend who’s always reticent about talking about the good old days, we studied enough history to know that there wasn’t a point where we’re… that seemed great. But I think, you know, it’s definitely an interesting sort of conversation. So I want to sort of drive people to the book. The book is coming out. I’m hoping this is part of a larger form conversation that people are going to have. I’m going to send it to as many people as I possibly can. I think it’s a really important discussion and sort of, has been sort of obscured throughout history, I think, because you can’t sort of anecdotal sort of, you know, sort of thrown in, you know, people blackening their teeth during the British monarchy, sort of the level of tooth decay that was associated with wealth back then. You sort of see them as but I don’t think we understood or, nor did I understand the level to which sugar is part of the developments of the development of Western civilization. And I think this book is absolutely integral to understanding. So thank you so much for coming on. This has been a really wonderful discussion. The name of the book is The World of Sugar: How the Sweet Stuff Transformed Our Politics, Health and Environment Over 2000 years. Ulbe, thank you so much for coming.
Ulbe Bosma
It’s a pleasure. Thank you, everybody.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Thanks so much for listening today and for following my work. If you believe in making sure that people all over the world should have access to nutritious food, please join my mission through my non-profit, the Global Food Justice Alliance. Visit sustainabledish.com/join and become a sustaining member today. All sustaining members get early access to ad-free podcasts plus free downloads, and you’ll be helping get healthy protein like meat, fish, and eggs to food-insecure kids. That’s sustainabledish.com/join. And thank you.
