![Sugar](/assets/artwork/1x1-42817eea7ade52607a760cbee00d1495.gif)
![Sugar](/assets/artwork/1x1-42817eea7ade52607a760cbee00d1495.gif)
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Sugar
The World Corrupted, from Slavery to Obesity
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
'Shocking and revelatory . . . no other product has so changed the world, and no other book reveals the scale of its impact.' David Olusoga
How did a simple commodity, once the prized monopoly of kings and princes, become an essential ingredient in the lives of millions, before mutating yet again into the cause of a global health epidemic?
Prior to 1600, sugar was a costly luxury, the preserve of the rich. But with the rise of the European sugar colonies in the Americas in the seventeenth century, sugar became cheap, ubiquitous and hugely popular - an everyday necessity.
As recently as the 1970s, very few people suggested that sugar posed a global health problem;
yet today, sugar is regularly denounced as a dangerous addiction, on a par with tobacco, and the cause of a global obesity epidemic. While sugar cosumption remains higher than ever - in some countries as high as 50kg per head per year - some advertisements proudly proclaim that their product contains no sugar. Sugar, while still clearly much loved, has taken on a pariah status.
Sugar grown by enslaved workers - people who had been uprooted and shipped vast distances to undertake the gruelling, intensive labour on plantations - brought about revolutionary changes in the landscape of the sugar colonies while transforming the tastes of the Western world.
Only now is the extensive ecological harm caused by sugar plantations being fully recognised, but it is the brutal human cost, from the first slave gangs in sixteenth-century Brazil, through to indentured Indian labourers in Fiji, the Japanese in Hawaii or the 'South Sea Islanders' shipped to Australia in the late nineteenth century, that has struck us most forcibly in the recent past.
We can only fully understand our contemporary dietary concerns with regard to sugar by coming to terms with the relationship between society and sweetness over a long historical span dating back two centuries to a time when sugar was vital to the burgeoning European domestic and colonial economies. This is exactly what Walvin helps us to do.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
British social historian Walvin (Crossings) charts the evolution of sugar from prized global commodity to the culprit behind the modern obesity epidemic, showing how a foodstuff once so ubiquitous that it was deemed "the general solace of all classes" came to wreak environmental and social havoc. Sugar's inexorable rise began in the plantations of the 16th-century Caribbean, where the cheap labor of African slaves made it available in large quantities for the first time. The substance was soon all the rage in Europe, where both elites and ordinary citizens succumbed to its pleasures as well as to the previously unknown phenomenon of tooth decay a symbol, for Walvin, of the ecological damage, moral degeneration, and public-health disaster sugar would cause in the centuries to come. Walvin's tone is brisk and informative, particularly in chapters on the gradual intertwining of sugar and sociability through such institutions as caf s and factory "tea breaks." But the book's final section on sugar and obesity feels unconnected to its historical argument, and many themes here have been explored in greater depth elsewhere. Descriptions of sugar sculptures and breakfast customs only take Walvin so far: the rise of sugar was so relentless and unstoppable that the book feels devoid of sustained conflict or complexity.