Carbs That Enslave
What’s the minimum support price of sugar? Not a question you want to ask historian James Walvin. He can connect the obesity epidemic with the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the destruction of the Brazilian rainforest with tooth decay, shifts in geopolitics and culinary trends with the production of rum, and leave you wondering which has a more pernicious grip on our world: hydrocarbons or carbohydrates?
His latest book gazes into crystals of sugar and reflects on the myriad consequences of our sugar addiction. Walvin spent three years in Jamaica in the late 1960s, researching a book on the trans-Atlantic slave trade (he’s written several books on it since). There, he found how sugarcane plantations boosted slavery. That needled his curiosity about the dramatic effects on world history of the cultivation of sugarcane and consumption of sugar. Christopher Columbus worked for a company that dealt in sugar. Queen Elizabeth I had a sweet tooth, which gave her terrible teeth. Walvin busts the myth that ancient peoples had bad teeth; turns out our dental woes exploded with the growing use of sugar.
It’s not merely history, either. Walvin brings the story up to date, exploring the link between sugar and the obesity crisis. The focus of public health concern has shifted from fat to sugar, especially since American journalist Nina Teicholz’s path-breaking book The Big Fat Surprise. ‘Sugartax’, unlike the salt tax of yore, does not sound like a repressive government scheme.
Walvin’s research wades right into that debate, adding to it the heft of social and environmental arguments. He compares sugar with a more proven public health threat— tobacco. The class action lawsuits, which brought the US tobacco industry to its knees, alerted the food and drink industry. The industry lobbied the US Congress to get the ‘Cheeseburger Bill’ passed in 2005, which protects it from the kind of litigation that damaged the tobacco industry. “Whatever short-term victories of the sugar-food lobby, and however obstructionist their political allies in Congress, the tide had begun to turn,” Walvin writes; by the time the bill was passed, the health impact of sugar was already being widely compared to that of tobacco.