{"id":14335,"date":"2020-09-26T13:50:45","date_gmt":"2020-09-26T17:50:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/?p=14335"},"modified":"2020-09-26T16:11:30","modified_gmt":"2020-09-26T20:11:30","slug":"the-rise-of-big-sugar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/2020\/09\/the-rise-of-big-sugar\/","title":{"rendered":"The Rise of Big Sugar"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Once upon a time, sugar was little more than \u201can exotic spice, [a] medicinal glaze or sweetener for elite palates.” Then slavery changed everything and sugar went global.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cane harvested in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and eventually the Philippines and Hawaii was processed into raw sugar, poured into sacks weighing hundreds of pounds each and loaded onto ships bound for America\u2019s urban centers, where refineries<\/a> produced what came to be known as table sugar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
Pier 40 – South Wharves – Christian Street, Cargo of 8,700 tons of raw sugar on upper deck. Dept of Wharves, Docks and Ferries, Phila., March 23, 1916 (PhillyHistory.org)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cGleaming white crystals would eventually be served in sugar bowls, complete with silver tongs and spoons as part of refined table settings. wrote April Merleaux in Sugar and Civilization<\/em>. \u201cThe ensemble of material goods . . . together with rules for proper use of those items, signified that the eater was fully civilized.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Refined sugar \u2013 superfine and super white – symbolized an elevated social rank, an idea that goes back to the 1870s, when refiners \u201cwaged a public campaign to dissuade Americans from eating raw sugar.” We learn from David Singerman\u2019s article, \u201cThe Shady History of Big Sugar,\u201d\u00a0 that one advertisement \u201cfeatured a disgusting insect that supposedly inhabited raw sugar and caused an ailment called \u2018grocer\u2019s itch\u2019 in those who handled it.\u201d As racial theorist Ellsworth Huntington put it, we refined sugar \u201cnot only to tickle our palates, but to please our eyes by its whiteness.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“For middle-class people in the United States, writes Merleaux, \u201cto eat refined white sugar was also to internalize a colonial and racial division of labor.\u201d Protected by high tariffs, American sugar refiners enjoyed protections that \u201cmaintained the racial hierarchy encoded through the contrast between civilized and uncivilized, technology and nature, refined and raw, white and brown.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe government got hooked on sugar, too,\u201d writes Singerman, \u201cby 1880, sugar accounted for a sixth of the federal budget.” And sugar came to play a significant role in government policies. Annexation of Hawaii in 1898 helped guarantee the steady flow of raw sugar to refineries on the mainland. So did a temporary occupation of Cuba and the retention of Puerto Rico and the Philippines as U.S. territories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
Municipal Pier No. 40 – South. 8,700 tons of raw sugar on [—-] deck. Dept of Wharves, Docks and Ferries, Phila., March 23, 1916 (PhillyHistory.org)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

At the start of the 20th<\/sup> century, \u201cthe American Sugar Refining Company formed as a holding company, and grew into one of the nation\u2019s -largest industrial corporations. According to Merleaux , \u201csugar refiners were repeatedly the subject of antitrust investigations by the Department of Justice and muckraking journalists.\u201d Indeed, the \u201cSugar Trust\u201d became \u201cone of the most notorious and successful monopolies of the Gilded Age.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The City of Philadelphia did what it could to support Big Sugar, including the construction of several state-of-the art piers (including Piers 38 and 40 South) aimed at increasing commerce.  Philadelphia\u2019s refineries were able to ramp up production to more than 5.2 million pounds of sugar per day. Philadelphia ranked as the second largest sugar producing city in the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So it shouldn\u2019t come as a surprise that while politicians and industrialists were doling out advantages for Big Sugar, physicians and nutritionists were influencing consumers to believe that sugar consumption was, in fact, a \u201chealthy \u2018fuel-food,\u2019 necessary to proper nutrition and crucial for people performing heavy labor.” American per capita consumption more than doubled from 32 pounds per year in 1870 to 80 pounds per year in 1910.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSome years ago,\u201d recalled editors at the Inquirer<\/em> in 1916,  \u201cwhen the nutritive value of sugar came to be fully realized, an unrestricted use of sweets was advocated in many quarters.\u2026 Many mothers were so obsessed with the idea of \u2018nutritive value\u2019 that they were inclined to place sugar on a pinnacle, naturally to their children\u2019s delight.\u201d But American sugar consumption had gone too far, claimed the editors, observing that \u201cto a large extent nowadays among the poor classes\u201d mothers are enabling sugar consumption that previously \u201cwould have made our mothers\u2019 hair stand on end.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
Pier No. 40 – South Delaware Wharves. Cargo of 8,700 tons of raw sugar on upper deck. March 23, 1916 (PhillyHistory.org)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

American sugar consumption remained, then as now, very high, about twice the recommended daily limit. And the reason was more than the appeal of sugar\u2019s sweet taste.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the 1950s and 1960s, scientists had become aware of links between sugar and obesity, heart disease, diabetes and cancer. But, according to more recent revelations after a deep dive into archival documents, researchers found that the Sugar Research Foundation, a trade group set up to lobby on behalf of sugar, paid Harvard researchers to direct blame away from sugar and aim it specifically toward fat. Their article, published in the prestigious and generally venerable New England Journal of Medicine<\/em> presented results that \u201cexonerated sugar as a major risk factor for coronary heart disease.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

About the same time Big Sugar was manipulating what was known about the dangers of sugar, this writer was a middle school student in Mr. Donohoe\u2019s history class at Leeds Junior High School in East Mount Airy. After all these years, one specific, ahistorical claim still stands out in memory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAmerica is a sugar-eatin\u2019 country,\u201d declared Mr. Donohoe, in class, glowing with national pride.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Couldn\u2019t argue then; can\u2019t argue today. But all these many years later, with real history in hand, the truth has swapped patriotism with cynicism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[Sources: \u201cSweets Place Recognized.\u201d The Philadelphia Inquirer<\/em>, August 5, 1916; April Merleaux, Sugar and Civilization: American Empire and the Cultural Politics of Sweetness<\/em> (University of North Carolina Press: 2015); Kearns, Cristin E et al. \u201cSugar Industry and Coronary Heart Disease Research: A Historical Analysis of Internal Industry Documents.\u201d JAMA internal medicine<\/em> vol. 176,11 (2016): 1680-1685; Anahad O\u2019Connor, \u201cHow the Sugar Industry Shifted Blame to Fat,\u201d The New York Times<\/em>, September, 12, 2016; David Singerman, \u201cThe Shady History of Big Sugar,\u201d The New York Times,<\/em> September 16, 2016; Khalil Gibran Muhammad, \u201cThe Sugar that Saturates the American Diet has a Barbaric History as the \u2018White Gold\u2019 that Fueled Slavery,\u201d The New York Times<\/em>, August, 14, 2019]<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Once upon a time, sugar was little more than \u201can exotic spice, [a] medicinal glaze or sweetener for elite palates.” Then slavery changed everything and sugar went global. Cane harvested in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and eventually the Philippines and Hawaii was processed into raw sugar, poured into sacks weighing hundreds of pounds each and loaded […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14335","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14335","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14335"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14335\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}