Bittersweet (23 page)

Another public demonstration showed deformed chickens which had been injected with cyclamates, when injections of salt, water or even air would probably have had the same effect. These were stunts aimed at stampeding the American public, and it is not too hard to see which part of the marketplace might gain from such a scare campaign. Not that I am making any such allegation, but it bears thinking about.

The science journal
Nature
commented after America banned cyclamates that ‘it would be all too easy for public apprehension to be raised to the pitch where a fever of vegetarian faddism drives everything but mothers' milk from the market'. Others called it bad science, and strangely done, but it was enough to bring in a ban in the United States, although Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Canada all allow the product in some forms, as do many other countries. The American ban persists, and to this day nobody can quite see why it was imposed, or why it is maintained.

Accident 3

James Schlatter's accident came in 1965 while he was studying compounds that might be useful against ulcers. The target was a tetrapeptide, a chain of four of the amino acids that are found in all proteins, which was being made from two dipeptide intermediates. One of these, aspartyl-phenylalanine ester, is what we now call aspartame. Schlatter accidentally spilt a few drops of aspartame on his hand; when he later licked his finger to pick up a piece of paper, he tasted an intensely sweet taste. Schlatter and his colleague Harman Lowrie, knowing that the compound contained nothing that did not occur in other proteins, tried a small amount of the chemical in black coffee, noted the absence of a bitter after-taste, and wrote up their discovery.

Aspartame is currently under attack because of the breakdown products it supposedly yields. In particular, it is a popular target for those claiming Gulf War syndrome problems, since aspartame breaks down at high temperatures. There is nothing in the literature of science to back this at the moment, but claims such as this, along with assertions that aspartame is ‘RNA-derived', are generally thought to be enough to damn it forever.

Accident 4

The most amazing tale is also the most difficult to confirm, and it is still unconfirmed. In this story, Shashikant Phadnis, an Indian student in London, was working on halogenated sugars, which are sugar molecules with chlorine atoms substituted. He was told to
test
a compound, misheard this as an instruction to
taste
it, did so, and discovered sucralose.

All my attempts to track down any of those involved at the time have proved fruitless. There is no trace of any Shashikant Phadnis on the Internet, but a person of this name appears on the patent for sucralose. Tate and Lyle, who funded the research and who profit from sucralose, do not answer any queries that are directed at them. One can only conclude that the public relations department at Tate and Lyle maintains a fond belief that the questioner will go away and say nothing about this.

The problem with sweeteners is that there are always scare campaigns going on, and just as those two interest groups known as the East India Plunderers and the West Indies Floggers misused political power in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain for economic advantage, so it seems some people have misused science for economic advantage. Most of the ‘science' we hear about rival sweeteners seems to have come from the spin doctors, rather than from the medical doctors.

OI L PASTE BLACKING

Take oil vitriol, 2 ozs., tanners oil, 5 ozs., ivory black, 2 lbs., molasses, 5 ozs; mix the oil and vitriol together, let it stand a day, then add the ivory black, the molasses, and the white of an egg; mix well, and it is ready for use.

Daniel Young,
Young's Demonstrative Translation
of Scientific Secrets
, Toronto, 1861.

EPILOGUE
THE COSTS AND
BENEFITS

M
uch of the history of sugar of the past four centuries seems to involve the jostlings of various European countries: the Dutch with the Spanish, Portuguese, English and French, Germany with everybody, England with America and, most famously, England with France. The history of sugar also involves the predation of those countries on the nationals of many other lands, either by deliberate enslavement or in the more polite guise of indentured servitude, barely a notch above slavery.

In these more enlightened times sugar slaves are often replaced by machines, but there are still parts of the world where the back-breaking task of hand-harvesting sugar cane goes on, and the lot of the sugar worker today is little better than that of the slave of yesteryear.

Sugar has caused the mass movement and death of millions of humans. It has resulted in the large-scale clearance of land and the destruction of soil and whole environments. On the plus side, it has provided us with many taste delights, and had a beneficial effect on the economies of many nations.

Sir Eric Williams, a Marxist scholar and Trinidad's first Prime Minister, argued first in his doctoral thesis, and later in his book
Capitalism and Slavery
, published in 1944, that the sugar and slave trade had provided the pump-priming, the finance, for the Industrial Revolution in Europe, although this is now generally regarded as an extreme viewpoint. Sugar slavery probably did no harm to the European economy in providing working capital in Britain and France, but Germany managed to industrialise without colonies, slaves or cane sugar.

Sugar was never the friend of socialism. When the British Labour government planned in 1949 to nationalise the sugar industry, the main British producer, Tate and Lyle, fought back, sending sugar out in bags labelled ‘Tate not State'. Sugar had a great effect on Marxist Cuba after Fidel Castro's 1969 announcement that the country was to aim for a 10 million ton sugar harvest in 1970, to earn money to fund industrialisation. While the harvest was a record at 8.5 million tons, the sugar-led recovery failed, for the Cuban economy was in tatters because of the over-emphasis on one product. Cuba returned after that to a more normal Marxist economy based on the Russian model.

One of the most unusual effects of sugar is seen in the Great Boston Molasses Flood of 15 January 1919. According to some accounts, there had been a rush to import as much molasses as possible in order to make and sell as much rum as possible before Prohibition came into force. The flood was caused by an overfilled storage tank bursting and flooding the streets with a two and a half metre wave of molasses that killed 21 people, crumpled the steel support of an elevated train, and knocked over a fire station. The story has often been told since, usually with a wry comment about the victims meeting a sticky end. It is another example of the way sugar products can be dangerous, though the main problems have been environmental.

Sugar cane is a tropical crop and, like coral animals, does best in the tropics. In Florida, the Caribbean, Australia and Mauritius, mangrove swamps, seagrass beds and coral reefs are all under threat from increased sediment and fertiliser run-off from the fields of sugar cane, moving down the rivers and into the sea. The main nurseries supporting new generations of life in the sea are under serious threat because of the way sugar is grown on the land. Part of the problem is that consumers do not pay anything like the true cost of sugar, any more than they did in the days of slavery. The costs of environmental destruction cannot be readily converted into dollar amounts, and so they are largely ignored.

Yet there are solutions, and some of them are simple, like ‘green cane trash blanket harvesting', which leaves a cover of organic material on the cane fields that minimises sediment movement, which can be significant during heavy rainfall. This can be done because mechanical harvesting does not require that the cane fields be burnt as they were previously to prevent the cane-cutters contracting leptospirosis, the germs of which are left on the cane by rats. If the cane stalks are left on the soil after harvest as a trash blanket, the headlands, the strips around the outside of the cane fields that are used for machinery access, will be the only remaining major sediment source.

All farming results in a steady run-off of pesticides and fertiliser, but the location of the cane fields makes them a particular problem. In some places the environmental damage is even worse. Liquid waste from sugar mills and refineries, material called
vinasse
, is discharged directly into the sea on Guadeloupe, for example, causing a serious breakdown of the marine environment. If we need sweetness in our food, perhaps we should seek other ways of finding it, because right now our joint human sweet tooth looks set to cause a nasty abscess in the environment.

ÖSTERMALMSGLÖGG

500 mL vodka, 330 mL strong beer, 750 mL Madeira, 3 dried figs, 150 grams raisins, 20 peeled almonds, 3 bitter orange peel, 1 cinnamon stick, ginger, 300 mL sugar, 6 cloves, 10 cardamons. Chop the figs into four pieces. Mix all spices except the sugar, add the beer and boil it. Add the sugar and boil until the sugar has melted. Let it cool, then add the vodka, and reheat gently—no more than 55°C (130°F) or the vodka will evaporate. Let it stand for an hour, add the Madeira, and let it stand for another hour. Pour the glögg through a mesh (but keep almonds and raisins) into bottles. Warm to no more than 55°C before serving.

Swedish recipe (modern)

Glossary

bagasse
the fibrous material left over after sugar cane has been through the rollers, and all the juice has been squeezed out.

claying
a method of trickling water through raw sugar to whiten it.

creole/Creole
depending on the context, a
lingua franca
that develops where cultures meet; a member of the plantocracy of some Caribbean islands; a person of mixed racial origins; the sterile sugar cane used in the Mediterranean which was taken to the Americas.

defecant
material added to the boiling sugar juice to precipitate impurities.

eddoes
a form of food found originally on the Gold Coast of Africa, and taken to the New World. It is used for the root of various plants, including
Colocasia esculenta
and
Colocasia
macrorhiza
(taro).

guinea grass
a grass used as feed for the animals that operated mills and hauled cane.

gur
a sticky sweet ball of dark sugar, obtained by boiling cane juice.

isinglass
a form of gelatin, originally made from the swim bladders of sturgeons, and sometimes used to clear sugar juice.

Jamaica train
a system of pans used to heat sugar juice over a single fire, with the juice being moved progressively down to the final pan. It was known to the French as ‘the English train' and to the Cubans as ‘the French train'.

lime
calcium oxide, prepared by lime burners, who roasted shells, coral or marble.

molasses
the sticky brown liquid that is left after sugar crystals have been taken from a batch of juice.

ratoon
a later crop of sugar cane, growing from previously planted roots left in the ground after an earlier crop has been cut. Usually the cane was replaced after two or three ratoon crops.

rind
the outer layer of the sugar cane, surrounding the soft pith that actually contains the sugar juice. The forms cultivated in the Pacific, where they were used mainly for chewing, generally had been selected for a soft rind.

sett
a cut piece of sugar cane, usually with two or three joints, used to start new cane growth.

three-roller mill
the form of mill which was most efficient in crushing the cane and extracting the juice.

vinasse
the fluid left after rum has been distilled from the fermented sugar juice, and which can be a major pollutant of rivers if it is dumped.

References

S
ome of the authors listed here have been directly cited, others have merely been consulted. In some cases the facts I have given may contradict one or more of the sources. This will be because the references themselves have been at odds, and I have elected to trust one source over another.

Agnew, John R. (ed.),
Australian Sugarcane Pests
. Indooroopilly: Bureau of Sugar Experiment Stations, 1997.

Allen, Richard Blair,
Slaves, Freedmen, and Indentured Labourers in
Colonial Mauritius
. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Anonymous pamphlet,
Case of the Refiners of Sugar in England
, c. 1695. Original in the Goldsmiths'-Kress library of economic literature, microfilm copy at the State Library of NSW.

Anonymous pamphlet,
Reasons Against Laying an Additional Duty on
Muscovada Sugar
, c. 1695. Original in the Goldsmiths'-Kress library of economic literature, microfilm copy at the State Library of NSW.

Anonymous pamphlet,
Reasons Humbly Offer'd, Why a Duty should
not be Laid on Sugars
, c. 1744. Original in the Goldsmiths'-Kress library of economic literature, microfilm copy at the State Library of NSW.

Anonymous pamphlet,
The Irregular and Disorderly State of the Plantation
Trade
, c. 1695. Original in the Goldsmiths'-Kress library of economic literature, microfilm copy at the State Library of NSW.

Aykroyd, W. R.,
Sweet Malefactor
. London: Heinemann, 1967.

Banks, Sir Joseph,
The Endeavour Journal
, edited by J. C. Beaglehole. Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1962, now more readily available online as text.

Barnes, A. C.,
The Sugar Cane
. Aylesbury: Leonard Hill Books, 1974.

Barton, G. B.,
History of New South Wales from the Records, Volume I
. Sydney: Charles Potter, Government Printer, 1889.

Beachey, R. W.,
The British West Indies Sugar Industry in the Late 19th
Century
. Oxford: Blackwell, 1957.

Beckles, Hilary McD.,
White Servitude and Black Slavery in Barbados,
1627–1715
. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1989.