Sugar High: The Dark History and Nasty Methods Used to Feed Our Sweet Tooth

We love sweets here at Allison’s Gourmet, but the difference between using all natural sugars and the processed refined genetically modified stuff most common in junk foods and sodas is profound. We never compromise on how we sweeten our brownies, fair-trade chocolate, vegan cookies, and other confections, and you shouldn’t either as this week’s highlighted story illuminates the issues with refined sugar from how it’s sourced to its effects on your health.

Sugar High: The Dark History and Nasty Methods Used to Feed Our Sweet Tooth by Jill Richardson

Sugar is now 20 percent of the American diet, but it’s not just our health that suffers from its pervasiveness.
Americans think an awful lot about sucrose — table sugar — but only in certain ways. We crave it and dream up novel ways to combine it with other ingredients to produce delectable foods; and we worry that we eat too much of it and that it is making us unhealthy or fat. But how often do Americans think about where sugar actually comes from or the people who produce it? As a tropical crop, sugarcane cannot grow in most U.S. states. Most of us do not smell the foul odors coming from sugar refineries, look out over vast expanses of nothing but sugarcane, or speak to those who perform the hard labor required to grow and harvest sugarcane.

Of course, sugar can be made from beets, a temperate crop, and more than half of sugar produced in the United States is. But globally, most of the story of sugar, past and present, centers around sugarcane, not beets, and as biofuels become more common, it is sugarcane that is cultivated for ethanol. What’s more, some conscious eaters avoid beet sugar as most of it is now made from genetically modified sugar beets.

While I do not fool myself that sugar is “healthy,” if I am going to satisfy my sweet tooth, I prefer cane sugar, maple syrup, agave nectar, or honey over the other choices: beet sugar, high fructose corn syrup, and artificial sweeteners. Of the bunch, most Americans can find only honey and perhaps maple syrup sustainably and locally produced, but cane sugar is often the most versatile product for baking.

As a major consumer of cane sugar, I was disturbed to learn the realities of cane sugar production when I visited a sugarcane-producing area in Bolivia.

Sugarcane grew as far as the eye could see on the degraded soils of the deforested industrial agricultural area in Bolivia’s lowlands. At one point, the van I was riding in got stuck in a traffic jam of enormous trucks, each full of sugarcane, delivering their loads to a refinery. The area around the refinery smelled terrible, and the locals told us the smell came from oxidizing ponds that hold the refinery’s wastewater. When the refineries are washed out, typically once a year, the wastewater is dumped into local waterways, resulting in fish kills. This spurred me to learn more about how sugar is made, both in the U.S. and around the world, and how it impacts the land and the people who produce it. Sadly, the story of sugar is also the story of the African slave trade. Today, sugar production still uses exploitative labor practices and can cause serious environmental problems.

Read the entire article on Alternet.org