Did you know that the entire sugar industry in the Americas, until the mid-nineteenth century, was based on slavery?
Slaves were acquired from Africa and transported to the Americas to be exchanged for sugar. Sugar was then exported to England (and other parts of Europe). From there, the ships would carry goods to be exchanged for slaves in Africa. And then from Africa, the slaves were transported to America (the Caribbean) to work on sugar plantations. This became known as the ‘Triangle Trade’.”
I found out about this while reading Sugar: A Global History by Andrew F. Smith. The way we consume sugar all the time, even when it’s bad for our health*, fascinates me. And that’s why I felt like digging up some history books on this topic (haven’t found any worth recommending).
Honey, by the way is a relatively healthier option compared to refined sugar. But as we all read in news this week, most brands have apparently been cheating us!
Let me share one more history trivia (gathered from the same book). It’s about tea.
A random Bri-Tea-sh trivia!
During mid 17th century in England, tea was not common in houses (it was expensive). The well-to-do would visit coffee-houses to have tea there (same for coffee / chocolate). The lower classes would typically drink beer in taverns.
Only once the British East India Company began to import tea in bulk (annual imports increased from just a little over hundred thousand Kg in 1725 to almost 11 million Kg in 1800), did the price of tea fall below that of chocolate and coffee, and it became affordable for the middle class. So yeah, that’s how tea became England’s hot beverage of choice!
Now, here’s a quick question: for the not-so-well-to-do Britishers of the 18th century, what was their preferred sweetener for tea / coffee? Honey or sugar?
Right answer: Honey.
Yes, back then, honey was six to ten times cheaper than sugar!. Of course with time, the price of sugar kept falling (thanks to cheap slave labour / triangle trade) and its consumption rose from 2 kg per capita in early 1700 to 10 Kg per capita by beginning of 1800.
How much is the sugar consumption in UK today? Around 30 Kg per capita. What about India? 20. Not so sweet, right? That’s it – that was the blog.
*A quick summary of how sugar damages your health (this is not from the book; this is just basic knowledge that I have via reading, and discussions with folks from the fitness field).
Your body needs both calories and nutrients, for all the internal organs and muscles and other such things to be healthy and functional. Now technically you can consume pure sugar for calories and take all the required nutrients from different supplements but the thing with nutrients is that, there are just too many of them!
So it’s pretty much impossible to consume all that’s needed by your body, through tablets. The best and easiest and cheapest and full-proof way to supply all kinds of nutrients to your body is to just eat food that has less sugar (or carb – which gets converted to sugar) and more nutrients (vegetables > whole grain rice and wheat > maida > sugar).
When your body converts the vegetable you eat to sugar, it also ends up absorbing all the nutrients in that vegetable and you stay healthy. But when you eat just sugar, you end up providing calories to your body without nutrients. See the issue?
Even when you eat both sugar and vegetable, your body will ignore the vegetable and rather take the calories from sugar directly (nobody wants to work hard, you see). So the vegetable gets wasted. And doing this as a habit (offering the option of sugar to your body) leads you on a path of cumulative nutrient deficiency. Over time, your organs get unhealthy and you die. So yeah, in short, this is the primary way sugar fucks you up. There are other ways it harms too (by making you diabetic for example), but let that be for some other time!