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Coming into the present moment, remembering who we are

A botanical drawing of a lavender plume-like flower, close-up of a sugarcane stalk and leaves, and a drawing of the entire plant.

Sugarcane—a grass native to India, Southeast Asia and New Guinea—is also medicine, in the way of most of our plant kin. Sugarcane holds water so that, when overwhelmed by dehydration, the body has a greater chance of absorbing fluid. Raw sugarcane juice has many benefits including, ironically enough, preventing tooth decay. It’s the process of turning sugarcane juice into granulated sugar that leaches out the good properties.

Sugarcane was first domesticated across Asia as animal feed. Extracting the juice from sugarcane has been, for thousands of years, an arduous process and not considered worth the labor, especially since the raw juice from the cane spoils quickly. Sugar became a trade good only once the juice extracted from sugarcane could be crystalized into sugar, which first happened over 3500 years ago in northern India. As crystals, sugar lasts longer and can travel great distances. The spread of sugar expanded rapidly as part of the Arab Agricultural Revolution. European doctors began to learn of the medicinal properties of sugar from reading Arabic texts. Egyptian plantations were the center of the sugar industry until about 1350. Sugar production moved across the Mediterranean, reaching Morocco in the 800s and what is today called Spain and Portugal around 900.

Ending violence

Turning sugarcane into juice and then crystallized sugar is a labor-intensive process requiring many workers. For the majority of sugar's history, most of those workers were, and continue to be, enslaved.

During the Christian Crusades, knights learned about sugar while attempting to conquer Islamic lands and brought samples home, igniting European demand. This led to Christian control of sugar-production in southern European lands. People who were enslaved as a result of land battles were sent to work on the sugar plantations: primarily eastern European, Russian, Irish, Italian, English, and Arab people. The first recorded enslaved Africans in Europe were in Spain and Portugal in the mid-1300s, but the majority of the slave trade during this period was within Europe or between Europe and the Middle East. This changed over the next two centuries; by 1550, there were 100,000 enslaved Africans in Lisbon, Portugal, and almost that many in Seville, Spain.

A map shows sugarcane cultivation from pre-islamic era in South Asia to medieval era in the Muslim world to 1500s on the Madeira & Canary Islands

A word about plantations: plantations are enclosed and patrolled systems, agricultural forts. They are different from farms in that they have some form of surveillance to ensure that the workers–whether enslaved, indentured or free–continue working, and that the valuable cash crop is not stolen. The plantation system was primarily developed to grow sugar, as both Christian and Muslim colonizers established new plantations on recently conquered lands. These “military farms” also contributed to the expansion of the institution of slavery.

As land battles shifted the ownership of the European sugar plantations, plantation holders looked for new markets, establishing plantations along the islands off the west coast of Africa. When Henry the Navigator (Infante Dom Henrique), one of the first Portuguese colonizers, sent sailors to establish these plantations, he became curious about the warm Atlantic currents running west from Africa. Christopher Columbus was given a charter by the Queen of Spain to follow these same currents across the Atlantic Ocean towards Brazil and the Caribbean. On his first trip, he brought sugar seedlings with him, looking for new lands for new sugar plantations, as well as a new route to India.

Two black and white photos, identical, sit side by side showing farm workers cutting sugar cane in a tropical surrounding.

The first sugar plantation in the Americas was established about 20 years after Columbus landed in Hispaniola, the island that is now called the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Five years later, in 1520, six sugar mills were functioning and 40 more were in development. These sugar plantations were direct replications of previous plantations in the northern Mediterranean and the Canary Islands, and were designed to be run by enslaved workers. The workers forced to run the plantations were , at that point, a mix of enslaved Indigenous people and some enslaved Africans. In 1510, the Spanish King forced 200 enslaved Africans to the Americas, establishing the North Atlantic Slave Trade. In 1518, King Charles I of Spain sanctioned the direct transport of enslaved Africans to the American colonies, primarily to work on sugar and other plantations. At this point, sugar was the most profitable trade good for the Spanish crown.

Within 70 years of Columbus’ arrival on the island of Hispaniola, 34 plantations were established, with the largest forcing 500 enslaved Africans to work in the sugarcane fields. Sugar plantations continued to spread across the Caribbean and into Brazil and elsewhere on the eastern coast of South America and in central America. Sugar plantations were established in Puerto Rico in the mid-1500s, an industry that later set the stage for the US colonization of Puerto Rico.

Landscape view of several buildings next to a church building with a bell tower, trees, and passersby.

European colonizers used sugar plantations as part of their strategy to disrupt indigenous resistance: resistors were removed from their traditional lands and forced to work on plantations in far away locations. Soon, France, England and the Netherlands joined Spain and Portugal in sending ships to claim land for the same resource extraction and plantation system. In 1698, The British parliament opened the slave trade to all, including private companies. The scale of the Transatlantic Slave Trade exploded, the number of enslaved African people transported on English ships increased dramatically to an average of 20,000 people per year. By the end of the 17th century, England led the world in the trafficking of African people. In the "Golden Triangle," Merchant vessels carried rum distilled in New England to slaveholders in England, then enslaved Africans to the West Indies, and finally, West Indian sugar and molasses back to New England for the distilleries.

In the 1790s, abolitionists attempted to boycott “slave-grown sugar,” and worked to build interest in maple sugar instead, or in varieties of “free sugar.” Shortly after this, in 1795, a New Orleans sugar planter named Étienne de Boré created a faster sugar processing system. The price of sugar dropped and the demand went even higher, despite abolitionist strategies to shift consumption away from these plantations. Sugar plantations spread across Louisiana Territory, accompanied by an increase in the slave trade.

When the institution of chattel slavery legally ended in the United States, many of the sugar plantations closed. Sugar production was no longer as profitable when labor had to be paid for. The only places where sugar plantations continued in the US were in parts of Louisiana during the Jim Crow era. But as the institution of (legal) slavery ended, sugar companies looked for land elsewhere where they could make the same kinds of profits.

Remains of a brick chimney amongst trees, a grassy field, and an overgrown tree stump.

When James Cook landed in the Hawaiian islands in 1778, he saw the sugarcane that had been growing there for thousands of years and recognized it as an opportunity to get rich. In 1835, the first permanent sugar plantation was established on the island of Hawai’i. Within less than 30 years, at the same time as chattel slavery was supposedly ending in the United States, sugar plantations began to cover the islands. The land division law of 1848, or the Great Mahele, attempted to solidify Indigenous Hawai’ian hold on the land, but opened up the possibility of private land ownership in the process. It wasn't long before much of the land was sold to a cohort of large sugar plantations called “The Big Five.” In 1850, the Masters and Servants Act was passed, legalizing a range of work structures including apprenticeships and indentured service, aimed towards people working on sugar plantations. The Act legalized strict punishments for workers who broke their contracts and prevented unionization and any other worker-protection strategies.

Refined sugar has taken away the medicinal magic of raw sugar cane juice. It swiftly triggers the reward center of the brain, making us feel good for a quick moment and then sad, tired, or depressed when the sugar burns through, leading our brains to ask for more. Regular intake of sugar increases incidents of depression. It hurts your teeth, your liver, your heart, and your skin. Sugar can also be very pleasurable. Weaning off of it is similar to weaning off heroin or alcohol. Within the colonized world, sugar has become a strategy for social control, as our bodies have become dependent on a substance we must make money to buy.

We do not mean to contribute to any of the shame heaped upon people for what they do or don't eat. Foods are not inherently good or bad. This is a conversation, a moment of sitting together at the table, a bowl of white sugar between us, and noticing it, talking about it, remembering what it does and what it means in our particular context.

In 1837, sugar beet production grew from a small industry and began to rival the sugarcane industry. Shifting views on enslavement globally brought more critical attention to the still-labor-intensive industry of producing sugar from sugarcane. Nevertheless, it continued. Between 1830 and 1855, as the price of sugar fell, the American appetite for sugar doubled. Each American ate over 12 pounds of sugar a year in 1830 and over 30 pounds by 1860. By 2005, that number became over 100 pounds of sugar a year.

In 1870, The United States claimed the kingdom of Hawai’i. In 1893, sugar plantation owners conspired with the US government to overthrow the Hawai'ian monarchy. With plantation owner Sanford Dole as their leader, an all-white group of planters called the Committee of Safety organized a coup. They worked alongside the US military and forced the surrender of Queen Lili'uokalani. This led to the annexation of Hawai'i as a US territory. The US seized more Indigenous land for sugar plantations and outlawed traditional healers and healing practices.

In 1887, eight leaders in the American sugar industry formed the American Sugar Trust in the attempt to reduce production and increase profits. They acquired more companies and changed their name to The American Sugar Refining Company (ASRC), closing facilities they deemed inefficient, and essentially fixing the price of refined sugar. In 1900, they created the Domino Sugar brand, bringing all their production under the single name. By 1907, they controlled 97% of all sugar production in the United States.

After the Spanish-American war, the US seized sugar production in Puerto Rico and the Philippines. Sugar grown in both places was allowed to enter the United States duty-free, thereby increasing profit for the industry and keeping prices lower for the consumer.

Several men in hats, some smiling at the camera. In the center, one man carries a protest sign. "Huelga!" (translation: Strike!)

In 1930, after just 30 years of US occupation, 80% of Puerto Rico's sugar farms were owned by US companies. These farms covered half of the island’s arable lands. In 1934, sugarcane workers in Puerto Rico went on strike against US syndicates and won for the first time. The FBI organized round the clock surveillance of strike leaders.

In 1942, The American Medical Association's Council on Food and Nutrition suggested that it "would be in the interest of the public health for all practical means to be taken to limit consumption of sugar in any form in which it fails to be combined with significant proportions of other foods of high nutritive quality." By 1966, medical professionals “recommend a decrease in sugar intake, noting new studies that correlate sugar consumption with diabetes and other diseases. These studies, and the increasing rates of diabetes and obesity, spark an interest in sugar substitutes” (Mucci, 2017).

In 1980, the sugar industry helped fund an attack on fats within foods in the U.S. With national and then global attention directed towards low-fat foods as the primary means to prevent cancer and heart disease, processed food companies began to replace fat with sugar. This move was founded on a myth that fat was solely responsible for the spike in cardiac disease in the U.S., when it was actually driven by a combination of many different environmental, social, cultural, and nutritional factors. The increase in processed foods and growing car-culture in the 60s and 70s certainly both contributed. The anti-fat campaign increases global sugar profits, but not global health.

Two-pane advertisement for GW granulated sugar. On the left, a picture of a halved orange.

Today the United States is sixth in global sugar production. Louisiana’s sugar cane industry continues to produce about $3 billion worth of sugar a year, and most of it is consumed within the United States. Global sugarcane production has been charged with high incidents of child labor and gender inequality. There are multiple cases of forced and trafficked labor in sugar production, particularly in the Dominican Republic, Ethiopia and Brazil. Since 2008, the Monsanto Corporation (which dominates much of the sugar beet industry as well as other genetically modified crops) has used genetically modified seeds to strengthen the sugar beet’s resistance to pesticides. Sugarcane production uses high quantities of water, and the use of fertilizers and pesticides leads to high levels of water pollution. Sugarcane production is contributing to the death of the Great Barrier Reef and the deforestation in the Amazon rainforest, as more farmland is cleared for sugar.

Creating the conditions to shift histories

The histories of sugar are vast and are deeply entwined with the institution of slavery and the colonization of lands and intended destruction of indigenous ways of living. One opportunity for resistance is moving to fairtrade sugar or sugar that is grown by smallholder farmers who control the profits generated by the sugar’s production. Fairtrade sugar includes commitments to not using genetically-modified seeds and are mandated to produce sugar in a way that is ecologically sustainable (though all of this makes fairtrade sugar more expensive). The history of sugar production also demands resistance in the form of reparations. “Blood sugar” reparations campaigns are showing up in multiple ways in Cambodia, Brazil, the Caribbean, and elsewhere.

As care workers, organizers, healthcare practitioners, and families, it is not enough to recognize the health impacts of too much sugar on a single body, but rather on our collective/communal body. Disproportionately, sugar continues to be provided to poor BIPOC communities. Our work is to attend to the global impact of sugar production, including on the descendants of those forced to work on plantations, the communities whose lands were stolen, and on the people who are still exploited for the production of a tiny sweet crystal that, over time, builds up in each human cell, weakening its ability to produce and manage its own energy. Sugar is literally a form of cellular colonization.

Sources Cited

*see Sugar timeline for additional sources

https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/united-states-and-canada/us-history/sugar-industry

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/sugar-slave-trade-slavery.html

http://werehistory.org/sugar/

https://www.businessinsider.com/chart-american-sugar-consumption-2012-2

Mucci, K. (2017, Jan 9). The Illustrated History of How Sugar Conquered the World. Saveur. https://www.saveur.com/sugar-history-of-the-world/

https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/40532/50517_aer382a.pdf?v=0

https://www.livestrong.com/article/13724130-what-does-sugar-do-to-your-body/

https://www.oxfamindia.org/blog/structural-injustice-sugar-cane-agriculture

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8753018/

https://www.worldwildlife.org/magazine/issues/summer-2015/articles/sugarcane-farming-s-toll-on-the-environment

https://evols.library.manoa.hawaii.edu/bitstream/10524/12241/HJH43_101-124.pdf

https://foodprint.org/blog/ethical-sugar/

https://www.inclusivedevelopment.net/cambodia/commencement-of-cambodian-blood-sugar-reparations-process-a-crucial-step-towards-justice/

https://www.technologynetworks.com/cell-science/news/cellular-implications-of-excessive-sugar-consumption-highlighted-351644