The case for sugar
There is a hideous injustice overwhelming the world right now. I’m speaking, of course, of the war on sugar. Many books and studies are asserting that sugar causes or contributes to multiple fatal illnesses, costing billions of dollars in health care each year. I dispute none of this. But I would like to add that sugar tastes really, really good.
My results can be termed anecdotal, since my research was conducted primarily in my own mouth. Let me ask this: Which would you rather eat, a best-selling 800-page book outlining the evils of sugar consumption, or a Snickers bar? Whom would you rather listen to, a scientist with impeccable credentials, or the green M&M, the one with the little legs and arms that are probably every bit as delicious as the rest of him?
I began my comprehensive inquiry into the benefits of sugar as a child in New Jersey, where sugar was voted our State Addictive Substance. I diligently sampled Hostess products, the entire Mars and Hershey product lines, and that canned frosting sold with an attached plastic container of rainbow sprinkles as a booster. I can report that all of these items caused the following symptoms: tooth decay, parental horror, occasional nausea if devoured in bulk while riding a Ferris wheel, and complete and utter happiness.
As anyone who’s ever experienced a romantic breakup, a fruitless job interview or an unfortunate election will testify, sugar can heal. If Three Musketeers bars were handed out before each session of Congress, there would be instantaneous bipartisan cooperation on all matters. I have it on good authority that the more sane Supreme Court justices all conceal boxes of Ring Dings beneath their robes, which they’ve offered to share with Clarence Thomas, who has refused, which explains so much.
Have I been handsomely paid by Big Sugar, by members of any number of insidious global sugar cartels, for these remarks? Never. My belief in sugar is a moral and spiritual concern, untainted by bribery, although I did once receive a Hershey bar so large that it arrived in its own tote bag filled with dry ice. I think that God wants us to enjoy sugar, otherwise the Almighty would never have allowed me to fill a wafer cone with sprinkles, add ice cream, and then dip that ice cream in additional sprinkles, creating a form of heavily sweetened cement that could also be used as a grenade. If there were an 11th Commandment, it would insist that while honoring thy mother and father is all well and good, at the end of the day, they’re not Mallomars.
Sugar doesn’t need to be studied, resisted or replaced by something that will inevitably be found to cause suicidal impulses in mice. I don’t even want to think about some poor lonely mouse deprived of sugar and reaching for a tiny bottle of pills. As a nation we need to accept a basic truth: The phrase “sugar substitute” is an impossibility. The only substitute for sugar is, for example, sugar from another country, in the form of a Cadbury bar or anything foil-wrapped from Switzerland. And is there anything sadder than a Brooklyn-raised toddler who, at a friend’s birthday party, spurns the layer cake and asks, “Have you got any celery?”
Happily, I don’t feel the need to formulate any further defense. If you’re an American you’re already 90 percent sugar. If the Twinkie factory were ever to run low on cream filling, it could just transfuse any employee. One of my fondest childhood fantasies involved putting my mouth directly beneath the mechanism that extrudes the frosting squiggle onto the glossy chocolate surface of a Hostess cupcake. Fulfilling this fantasy would undoubtedly cause my death by choking, but I know that you’ll join me in responding: So what? I would die happy. Which is what sugar is all about. Paul Rudnick is a playwright, novelist, essayist and screenwriter.