Sugar
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
How did sugar grow from prize to pariah? Acclaimed historian James Walvin looks at the history of our collective sweet tooth, beginning with the sugar grown by enslaved people who had been uprooted and shipped vast distances to undertake the grueling labor on plantations. The combination of sugar and slavery would transform the tastes of the Western world. Prior to 1600, sugar was a costly luxury, the domain of the rich. But with the rise of the sugar colonies in the New World over the following century, sugar became cheap, ubiquitous, and an everyday necessity. Less than fifty years ago, few people suggested that sugar posed a global health problem. And yet today, sugar is regularly denounced as a dangerous addiction, on a par with tobacco. Masterfully insightful and probing, James Walvin reveals the relationship between society and sweetness over the past two centuries— and how it explains our conflicted relationship with sugar today.
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.
