The Globe and Mail Criticizes Society’s Fear of Sugar
National Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail has traced the history of sugar from its roots as a luxury to its current incarnation as a “forbidden fruit, the momentary pleasure infused with a lifetime of guilt.” Author John Allemang argues that the human taste for sweetness is natural and that “when we denounce sugar, we are defying our nature.” He describes sugar’s history, from its inclusion in recipe collections dating to about 1300 that extolled its ability to relieve illness to its use in creating plates and sculptures as a model of early conspicuous consumption. From there, it took on negative overtones through its association with slavery, colonialism and environmental degradation; later, sugar consumption became a moral failing. “[Early nutritionists] understood it to be seductive,” Elizabeth Abbott, author of Sugar: A Bittersweet History, told Allemang. “This prompted moral outrage: When you ate it, you kept wanting to have more.” The Industrial Revolution brought sugar a new reputation: energy provider. “As a shortcut to instant energy, it allowed men and women to work harder than they were able to do in a sugar-free world,” notes Allemang. It then became associated with public eating, fun and festivity—something a 1950s “good wife” would provide her family after dinner or during a visit to the ice cream shop.
Now, however, sugar has become “a pervasive dietary placebo,” Allemang writes, and its use has been demonized. “Normally in human history, taste told you what was bad for you by being bitter and inedible,” Harvey Levenstein, author of Fear of Food: A History of Why We Worry About What We Eat, told Allemang. “But now with modern nutritional science, there’s almost a glee in exposing the pleasurable things as bad.” Allemang notes that sugar served as an equalizer, sweetening tea, coffee and chocolate from their naturally bitter states to becoming habits that cultures enjoy together. He criticizes the coupling of guilt and pleasure in North Americans. “Guilt breeds unhealthy eating and compromises our readily available pleasures,” he says. He cites a study that apparently found in a free-association exercise that Americans thought of “guilt” and “fattening” in association with chocolate cake, while the French thought of happiness and celebrations. Allemang opines, “Who are the healthier people in the end?” See The Globe and Mail, August 8, 2014.
Issue 534
