“We should remember that we found the island full of people, whom we erased from the face of the earth, filling it with dogs and beasts.”
So wrote Las Casas, summing up the damage inflicted upon the Caribbean by white Europeans. Although we will never know the exact number of people living in the Caribbean when Europeans first appeared, apparently the most accurate figures suggest that there were around 2 million living in the region, “within a century, all had vanished.”
From cavity ridden royals in 17th Century Europe, to obese 21st Century North Americans amped up on HFCS (High Fructose Corn Syrup), Walvin takes us on quite a heart breaking yet compelling journey through the modern history of sugar. From Sao Tome and Principe to Brazil across to Australia, the Indian and Pacific Islands, he illustrates that, “Wherever sugar plantations took root, they brought about massive changes in their wake. They changed the local ecology, altered local demography and transformed the politics of society at large.”
Walvin shows how the popularity of caffeinated drinks in major, western European cities like Amsterdam, Paris and London and eventually North America, greatly increased the demand for sugar and decreased its price, eventually making it an essential ingredient for even the poor majority. It was interesting to see that initially tea drinking was more popular in the Netherlands than in the UK, due to the Dutch having direct trade links with China. Tea was sold in London by the 1650s and at the time coffee was initially cheaper than tea. Apparently in 1700, Brits consumed ten times as much coffee as tea. Twenty years later they began to change.
As well as sugar’s relationship with caffeinated drinks, he also shows how it gave birth to rum, and he demonstrates the importance of rum as a currency and tool around the world, and how it’s widespread love and use, lead to it being seen as a vital part of a soldier’s rations. Apparently the Royal Navy were still given it in their rations as late as 1970.
This is very much two different books, the first half focuses on the slave trade and sugar plantations and the emergence and growth of sugar in the western world. The second half, Walvin looks at sugar’s impact from the second half of the 20th century, up to the current day. It’s in the second half, where it starts to find it's flow and get really interesting. It’s here that he pulls out all the big facts and stats. In one sense the story of “big sugar” adheres to a depressingly familiar template as seen in any other “big” multi-national conglomerates. As he says, “Although sugar is rarely lumped together with railroads, steel and petroleum, its cartel arrangements followed a very similar path-and with similar consequences for the way the industry was run.”
Some lesser known facts emerge, such as, “In Britain, in a five year period, the NHS spent £7 million adapting equipment to cater for obese patients-bigger beds, wheelchairs and mortuary slabs. And more than 800 ambulances have been designed or altered to cater for obese patients.” He also cites examples elsewhere, like the building of the new Yankee stadium, which contained 4000 fewer seats, to cope with the increased average size of fans.
Other facts have been known and aired for long enough, but this doesn’t make them any less shocking, “More than two thirds of the current US population are overweight. Not a single state in the Union has an obesity rate below 20%. By 2030, there will be a predicted 65 million more obese people living in the USA.” And what about, “57% of African-American women were obese in 2011-14.”
In the US, “In 2004-05, the US House of Representatives approved a bill with a curious but revealing title: ‘The Personal Responsibility in Food Consumption Act’. The ‘Cheeseburger Bill’, as it became known, was designed to absolve the fast food industry of all the blame for people who became overweight via their diet to shield the food industry from being sued.” (deep, exasperated breath…) only in America!
He gives plenty of attention to the often cynical and manipulative role the media played, citing all the billions of dollars that have been ploughed into marketing and advertising nutritionally redundant, sugar loaded products, that are often no more than glorified poison, but still, they are routinely protected and free from genuine regulation by lobbyists, lawyers, politicians and paid off scientists.
Walvin mentions the recent case of the (now deceased) Harvard professors, who were exposed in 2016, as having taken money to manipulate their findings to favour the sugar industry. If this is what is happening at the elite levels of the scientific and education community, what else is going on elsewhere?...Also, when you have a company like Nestle, who enjoyed a revenue in 2012 that was larger than the GDP of all but seventy of the world’s nations, what chance or hope do we think that there is of any meaningful and consistent regulation being implemented in the US?...
This is one of those books that will have you shaking your head in frustration and disbelief. It is also really well researched, highly informative, genuinely interesting and raises awareness of a problem that has arguably never been more dangerous or relevant, than it is today. Walvin shows that although the game has very much been rigged in favour of “big sugar” and other behemoths like them, he also dangles just enough hope, suggesting that there are ways that this obesity epidemic can be tackled and that change, in whatever form is on the horizon.