Sugar, an ingredient of Asian origin, began to be mass-produced in America during the 15th century. A complex web that reveals its connection to the start of a global restructuring of trade, framed in the transition from feudalism to capitalism, primarily utilising African slave labour and destined to be consumed, at least initially, in Europe. These systemic transitions, conceived through productive paradigm shifts and collective ethos changes also marked profound alterations in the dietary and consumption patterns of the societies involved. One of the reasons behind our contemporary diets can be derived from a careful examination of the history of sugar, simultaneously showcasing the intricate interrelation between history, society and nutrition. Which is just one of the possible, albeit paradigmatic, examples.

Having to start somewhere, any point can be a good beginning and any beginning is the continuation of a more extensive narrative. Commencing with a starting point as arbitrary as any, we begin with Christopher Columbus, who brings the first sugarcane plant to America — where it is said to have been a gift from a lover in the Canary Islands, who kept him delayed on the island for several weeks — the year is 1493.

The first Caribbean sugar plantation takes place on the island of Santo Domingo, famously the first European settlement in the Americas, now the capital of the Dominican Republic. From there, it was brought to other nearby islands becoming a product cultivated and processed on a massive scale. Its success can be paired with many reasons that include European profit incentives, the increasing sale of European goods, and the growing production of raw materials across cities. None are more devastatingly powerful than the constant human trafficking flow of African slaves.

Now, let's take a step back, tracing the origins of sugar production through a genealogical line that led to that first plant that landed in the Caribbean. Sugar is the result of extracting the sucrose naturally present in certain plant species that produce it through photosynthesis by combining carbon dioxide and water. Historically, the plant associated with sugar production is sugarcane, although from the 19th century, beetroot began to be exploited for similar purposes. The latter has the advantage of being produced in temperate climates and central European countries were its first major producers.

Sugarcane was probably domesticated around 10,000 years ago in the area of present-day New Guinea, and made its way to India a couple thousand years later. The earliest written references to something similar to sugar date back to the 5th century in a text by the Indian philosopher and translator Buddhaghosa. The work deals with a religious and philosophical discourse in which, through analogies, describes the boiling process to obtain molasses.

Later, through trade routes, it first arrives in the Middle East and later in Europe, but the European sugar production began when the Crusaders captured Jerusalem in 1099, for instance, when they took charge of supervising its production. It was also brought to certain places in Italy.  In the 12th century, Venice became the sugar distribution centre in Europe. It was also introduced into Spain through Moorish conquest and occupation. By the time Columbus arrived in America, production in Europe centred around the Mediterranean, which was failing to meet the market and the growing demand for a product considered simultaneously a luxury, a spice, and a medicine. Sugar production was soon surpassed and supplanted by Caribbean-based sugar centres.

Processes and Industrialisation

Sugarcane crops destined for sugar production are very particular. The cane must be processed immediately after harvest and milling since the resulting juice quickly spoils. The agricultural work needed to be completed in the same place — more like a factory, where the product was boiled and stabilised. Creating a hybrid structure that overlaid agricultural and industrial characteristics, something unprecedented in these times. Many authors propose that sugar crops in America were precursors to capitalist industry, both in terms of organised labour and the enormous profits they brought to European nations, primarily Great Britain, allowing for the ‘primary accumulation’ necessary for the paradigm shift into industrialisation.

In terms of its environmental impact, sugarcane cultivation requires vast amounts of water for crop irrigation, and these crops erode and impoverish the soil they are cultivated on. This partly explains the constant expansion and search for new territories for its cultivation. Historically, we can trace a line from east to west, starting in the Mediterranean — or earlier, in Arabia, or even further east, in Asia — and ending in the ‘New World’. They are also labour intensive — even to this day, most global sugarcane harvests are still done by hand.

Food and Power

A wounded white deer with an arrow embedded in its flank, small enough to fit on a tray, and when the arrow is removed, red wine-like blood spills through. In the midst of a 16th century banquet of European royalty and elite we have been served a ‘subtlety’. These were sugar figures mixed with ground nuts, oil, and some vegetable gum, forming a malleable and stable paste. Used as decorative yet edible intervals between different stages of a banquet, they replicated figures from nature and even religious or historical passages. They increasingly carried a distinctly political and symbolic meaning as they were used by kings and the nobility to validate their power, hierarchy, and to convey public messages or warnings. As Sidney Mintz puts it: “The value of the ingredients and the large quantities required initially restricted these practices to the king, the nobility, the knights, and the court (...) Being able to offer their guests such an attractive food, which also embodied wealth, power, and the status of the host, must have represented a special pleasure for the sovereign. By eating these strange symbols of his power, his guests validated that power.”

Different foods, varying throughout history and societies, have fulfilled the role of making social hierarchies or positions visible. Following Pierre Bourdieu, a relationship can be postulated between the place individuals occupy in social space, linked to the possession of various forms of capital (cultural, economic, symbolic, social) and their tastes concerning specific foods or ingredients. Sugar, during this period, was still an exotic and expensive ingredient exclusive to the upper classes who could afford it. It served as a status marker — a symbol of social distinction.

As sugar gradually became cheaper and more available, the practice of presenting ‘subtleties’ during banquets or parties spread to the wealthy classes and business settings, and from there continued its expansion, each time with a reduced symbolic power to the lower classes. Even today, echoes of subtleties remain in the figures and decorations used at weddings, birthdays, and celebrations.

Another possible scene across the Atlantic brings us to a dockyard. Imagine a large ship arriving at the coast, but this time it's an English ship. Yes, we see the flag billowing in the wind against the blue sky. It's a ‘guineaman’:  a rowed wooden vessel capable of transporting between 200 and 600 men. What cargo is it carrying? Rum and textiles, the wonders of European goods. It also brings some men in it, eager to do business. What is it coming to find on these distant shores? Slaves. The fundamental pillar of exploitation in the ‘New World’. We are on the ‘slave coast’, in the Gulf of Guinea, two centuries after Columbus's arrival and sugar in America.

The production of sugar could not have developed as it did in the colonial era without the constant and massive influx of west African slaves, hunted and traded as commodities against their will. Enslaved Africans served as the necessary workforce base for plantations and mines in America. The first African slaves arrived in La Española in present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic in 1501. The last slave ship reputedly landed in Alabama in 1860. It is estimated that around 12.5 million people were displaced from Africa to America during this period.

People sold as slaves on the western coasts of sub-Saharan Africa usually belonged to small African tribes that were captured after wars and raids by other more powerful tribes later to be exchanged for goods such as rum or other European goods. Over time, slavery became a reason for conflict rather than a consequence of it. This deepened the differences among groups within Africa, undermined the possibilities of a broader cultural identity, and having serious demographic and economic consequences that profoundly marked the course of the continent's history.

If slavery provided the necessary workforce for exploitations in America, sugar drove trade and energetically financed the industrial revolution, eventually giving rise to the masses of proletarian workers who became the main consumers of American sugar and, with their labour put into service of manufacturing, completed that famous British ‘triangular trade.’ A last and concise explanation of this circuit, Sydney Mintz notes: “Millions of human beings were treated as commodities. To obtain them, products were shipped to Africa, wealth was created in America by the power of their [commodified] labour. The wealth they created returned mostly to the English; the products they made were consumed in Britain, and the goods manufactured by the British — clothes, tools, torture instruments — were consumed by the slaves, who, in turn, were consumed in the creation of wealth.”

We can then link sugar with different exercises of power. On the one hand, through its consumption, sugar acts as a vehicle for symbolic power — that of the upper classes capable of acquiring and flaunting it — and, at the other end of the chain, that of production. We see the connection with concrete, direct power over the bodies and freedoms of people used as slaves deemed necessary for its development.

We can find links between slavery and sugar production as early as the 14th century, in Europe on the islands of Crete and Cyprus. It can also be linked to the economic development of earlier civilizations such as the Roman Empire with their widespread use of slaves — essential in their agricultural exploitations. However, it is worth noting that it is only from the exploitations in America that the buying and selling of slaves developed into a lucrative industry with an extension and reach that is deeply intertwined with the course of the history of Western societies. As Mark Bittman puts it: “The impact of slavery can hardly be overestimated. What began as a brutal way of producing food for the rich helped establish a pattern of global food production that became the norm. Food was no longer something you grew next to your house to feed your community. It was produced in distant lands, through forced labour, overseen by strangers, and then shipped in previously unimaginable quantities to supply huge markets.”

Food and Culture

A change in diet is also a change in culture which is driven and intertwined by social and productive transformations that can be traced by changes in ways of living, working or simply enjoying within a society as well as reorganisations in its internal structures. The power, symbolism, production processes, and the diet of societies are constantly interconnected.

Our pre-Paleolithic ancestors were primarily vegetarians. The transition to omnivorism 2.5 million years ago — that is, the incorporation of meat consumption, and the subsequent organisation it required for hunting animals — involved greater socialisation of food with well-defined roles when it came to obtaining, processing, and distributing it. This is the era of hunter-gatherers, which continued until about 10,000 years ago when, after a series of global climate changes — the end of the ice age, the advance of forests over plains, the extinction of species — humans began to ‘domesticate’ other species, both plant and animal. In short, it is the beginning of agriculture, the rise of cereals and animal husbandry which included milking animals, that created new foods such as cheese and yoghurt. This second transition deepened social hierarchies and social organisation with the development of more populous settlements. The abandonment of nomadic culture and the ability to produce and accumulate food, gave rise to different and  unequal  ways of distributing it. Palaeolithic cultures are generally considered to have been egalitarian, with minimal hierarchical distinctions and a solidary distribution of goods and food. In contrast, the emergence of agriculture is linked to more pronounced social stratification, the creation of new professions — as not all people needed to be involved in obtaining food — and the rise of private property.

The third and final dietary transition begins in the colonial era with that first group of plants Columbus disembarked with when he landed in the Americas. The sugar era is also the era of slavery as an industry, of increasingly extensive global circuits of food production and distribution, the development of capitalism and the emergence of the proletariat, the growth of agribusiness, the culture of fast food, and supermarkets among many other things. There are historically traceable connections that lead to the first cup of tea enhanced with sugar that an English worker drank and the way in which contemporary Western society redefined its relationship with food, work, and leisure. Among other things, what the French sociologist Claude Fischler called ‘gastro-anomie.’ A play on words that draws on Durkheim's ‘anomie’ and refers to the ‘lack of form’ in our current eating habits, the loss of rituals and communal culture in our meals, and the flexibility of collective norms when it comes to feeding ourselves. In contemporary Western societies, a pattern of snacking prevails, eating at all hours, often while working or studying — perhaps in front of a computer, or while relaxing, for example, in front of the television. These dietary patterns are governed by more individualistic logics: eat exactly what you want, at the moment that suits you best. This logic, driven by advertising messages and the constant pressure of the market to create new needs and niches, leaves aside more traditional collective patterns around food. We increasingly eat alone, not only nutritionally poor foods, but also governed less by social encounters that encourage sharing.

As Patricia Aguirre, a national reference in food anthropology in Argentina, explains: “The norm of our time is to eat alone, unknown products (in their origin), in individual packaging, and at all hours. This food crisis is a product and producer of social relationships and has health consequences, but also ecological, social, political, and demographic consequences.” Although this ‘crisis of commensality’ is not solely a consequence of the increase in sugar production, some of the factors that drove its growth and led to its early mass consumption are closely related to those that have now culminated in the culture of supermarkets and processed foods. For example, the need to adjust eating times to the workday, the pressure to eat more outside the home, and to eat quickly, cheaply and obtain energy that is easily processed by the body — necessary to work continuously. From the producer’s perspective, the interest in generating and expanding what's available to the market, which ultimately involves treating products as commodities rather than as food, extends as a productive logic that exclusively benefits the dominant food production and distribution businesses today.

Analysing the history of sugar leads us to read between the lines of the economic and social paradigm changes that have led us from one type of society to another. This includes our own understanding of the individual, shifting work patterns, time as a changing concept, and our ever evolving food systems. Understanding history a little more deeply means understanding the present in which we are immersed with a bit more clarity, opening up dialogues that allow us to question our past, present and future. 🐟