Sugar with everything

[imomus]

Sugar Rush is a fascinating, terrifying and important Guardian Special Report about sugar in food. Sugar is so addictive it should be classified, says the British Medical Journal, as a hard drug. The immediate pleasure it gives us soon leads to much less pleasant things -- tooth decay, obesity, diabetes, cancer, depression and anxiety. More and more of the food we eat -- even fresh fruit and vegetables and savoury stuff -- is, basically, turning into sugar. Whether we choose to eat the stuff or not, it's everywhere, bred into crops and brewed into beer and sprinkled into cooking and stuffed into every plastic-wrapped package lying in wait for you at the late-night grocery. There's more of it in more products than there was even in the early 1990s. It's there for commercial reasons. We like it, we buy it.



Read the article yourself -- I did, while sucking on a marzipan potato. What I want to single out and pick up on today is just one quote that pops up half way through, a quote I found very interesting, very symptomatic. A "sugar apologist" is speaking, an executive who worked for Cadbury Schweppes for 23 years before becoming a market researcher. Colin Gutteridge is explaining the "taste evolution" towards today's sugar-with-everything world.

"I remember being presented with yoghurt for the first time when I was nine," Gutteridge says. "It was acidic and I thought it was repulsive. If there is a trend over the past 100 years it is taking products that are marginal in taste and making them more acceptable to a wider range of people by adding in sweetness. Does any of this matter? Personally, I don't think so. Without it I would never have enjoyed yoghurt."

Now, never mind sugar, what Gutteridge is describing could as well be the story of indie bands signing to major labels, or New Labour. It's the application to the food world of the old question "what profiteth a man if he gain the whole world but lose his own soul?" Let's look at Gutteridge's argument more closely.

1. Yoghurt is acidic, repulsive.
2. Sugar is pleasant, popular.
3. Yoghurt is marginal.
4. Sugar is central.
5. If we put sugar in yoghurt, it can become central, mainstream.
6. Therefore, by adding sugar, we can help people to enjoy yoghurt, and help yoghurt to go mainstream. Everyone wins!

But here are the contradictions Gutteridge doesn't seem to see in his argument:

7. Is this sweetened yoghurt still yoghurt? Isn't it just sugar posing as yoghurt?
8. If you believe yoghurt is essentially repulsive, why help people to enjoy it in the first place? Why not just eliminate it?

I think these last two questions raise troubling thoughts about democracy, consumerism, the free market and other systems that purport to give people what they want. People usually want things that stimulate them in the most stupid and obvious ways. Like rats in a lab experiment, we'll push the button that gives us orgasm, or money, or a sugary snack. Given half a chance, we'll push it until it kills us. We sort of know this, and we sort of feel guilty. Rather than gulping down pound bags of sugar all day, we try to balance our diets, eat healthy things like vegetables and yoghurt. If those things also turn out to have sugar in them, well, at least it's a blend of the palatable and the virtuous. We did try.

The system doesn't really want to change, but it does want to think well of itself. So, instead of revealing its monopoly face and just showing us its addictive trade in drugs and sugar and arms and energy (and in the case of sugar it was a brutal slave trade), it shows us a diverse system in which lots of healthy things are also for sale -- yoghurt and indie pop and intelligent literature -- and in which the Labour party can sometimes come to power rather than the business-friendly Conservatives. And yet, when you look closer, you find that the Labour Party has come to power at the price of expunging Clause 4 of its constitution -- the idea that the goal of the party is to secure for workers the full fruits of their labour. That's the core DNA of the Labour movement, its "yoghurt".

The price of success is often the complete destruction of all otherness, all identity, all soul, all flavour, all texture. And yet success on those terms isn't success at all. It's a kind of possession, a capitulation. Nothing fails like success. By failing to provide a real alternative, by giving the public only what it thinks it wants, you're failing them as well as yourself. Instead of giving them the full fruits of their labour, you offer them a fruit stuffed full of sugar.

Comments

<3 acid, <x3 glucose

[lilredbite.livejournal.com]

It is true but glucose is the only fuel normally used by our brain cells and we need constant supply of it since our neurons cannot store it.

Everything is dangerous when its consumption exceeds moderation, even water and oxygen.

And I like plain yogurt without sugar. Love sour stuff :D

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

That´s exactly what I was going to say.
I shall now go back to my chocolate.

Hhhmm, brainfood!

[rhodri.livejournal.com]

I would enjoy hearing you apply the yoghurt / vegetables metaphor across 90 minutes of football commentary.

[nicepimmelkarl.livejournal.com]

black beer, a mars bar and pele clips on youtube. the perfect evening in.

[wingedwhale.livejournal.com]

Loved your analogy there, but I have to be insipid and just look at food.

It pisses me off how much stuff is sweet!

You know, there are these convenience stores, and they sell "healthy" green tea drinks, that have over 20g of sugars per serving added.

They also have "vitamin drink" things that are vitamin-fortified but have over 40g sugar per serving!

I think this is a "Japanese people rule" moment, or could have been. I love passing by Jidouhanbaiki that dispense so many unsweetened, refreshing teas.

Stores like Trader Joe's and Whole Foods are really growing in popularity, and their prices are lowering. And they have very few products that are overly sweetened, if at all.

But yogurt is still a nightmare.

[zephyrcrow.livejournal.com]

Don't listen to that researcher! He doesn't like yogurt, and therefore isn't to be trusted.

[charleston.livejournal.com]

I concur.

[cadavergradual.livejournal.com]

Mr Momus, I like the way you think.

new gutevolk

[(Anonymous)]

is out.

[(Anonymous)]

you should pack your bags and move to san francisco

[mandyrose.livejournal.com]

Mr. Vice president, is that you...?

[(Anonymous)]

I just had an insanely painful root canal. No more sugar for me.

[qscrisp.livejournal.com]

This is interesting.

I've just started writing some articles about Japanese food and how it intertwines with Japanese culture for a trade magazine, and I'm starting to feel quite excited, if that's the word, about the idea of natural foods - seasonal foods with as little processing as possible. And this is what traditional Japanese food is, hence the preponderance of raw and very lightly prepared foods. And traditional dishes are meant to evoke the seasons in just the way that haiku are. From nature to food to art, a continuous aesthetic.

In the middle of the last century, Nagai Kafu, my avatar here, wrote that the morals of a nation are in danger when it loses touch with the soil and the seasons. Having lost touch with the seasons, we really do seem to lose everything, including the seasons themselves, which are now going awry.

[auto-nalle.livejournal.com]

i like this very much, what you're saying. very well put. and even the sweets are something else.
http://smt.blogs.com/japanese_food/2004/06/wagashi_japanes.html

[trini-naenae.livejournal.com]

I suspect that I beg to differ, but I can't say why right now. I need to go to work, and cook breakfast for a bunch of old people.

[xishimarux.livejournal.com]

Sort of reminds me of when Homer Simpson finds all that "White gold" on the side of the road and decides to sell it on his own.

First you get the sugar
Then you get the power
Then you get the women..

Very Tony Montana but you get the idea. Sugar controls women for sex with men. I only kid but then again the chocolate industry ...

[lemur-man.livejournal.com]

And Marge at Halloween: 'Fruit is nature's candy!'.

[lightfromlight.livejournal.com]

Of course, here in the US we've transcended good old cane sugar, and instead put high fructose corn syrup (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/archive/2004/02/18/FDGS24VKMH1.DTL) in everything. A likely culprit for the obesity and diabetes epidemics, and what makes so much food terribly, sickly sweet.

[lemur-man.livejournal.com]

Corn itself has been bred with increasing levels of sweetness over the past few decades.

[cap-scaleman.livejournal.com]

We should treat salt the same way too, some people like to just tip over tons of salt on their food. And lest we forget ketchup! Tons of sugar that people tip over onto their smelly hotdogs, minced meat and what not. What is wrong with bitter food? Cinnamon? Curry? In the middle-east they have faaaar more spices than us. We don't even use half of the spices that we can buy!

it begins with the crumb snatchers!

[(Anonymous)]

What are little girls made of?
Sugar and spice, and everything nice,
That's what little girls are made of.

[fishwithissues.livejournal.com]

I rode the Atkins train for about five years (lost a lot of weight and more or less kept it off) so I think a lot about the nigh-unavoidable sugar infusion we're all subjected to thanks to the ease and toxicity of cheap, tasty, addictive, mass-produced food. Lately I've been trying to reform (jesus, so much meat!), but there's obviously still a lot of carryover from my former faith. Anyways, I'd like to present a draft standard of one meta-endomorph's dietary philosophy:

variation (yes!) + moderation (some!) + a magic realist understanding of the glycemic index (helps!) + zero food-based guilt (none of that!)

what's important to me more than anything is to avoid the profit-mongering bullshit without feeling like i'm making sacrifices for the sins of the motherfather farmfirm.

[(Anonymous)]

No. The core of the Labour movement is social justice and the redistribution of wealth. And you always seem to wilfully ignore the fact that this Labour government has spent truckloads of cash on social services and the poor. Sure, they haven't hit the rich too hard and London has become a honeypot for international money, but there's still been huge investment in the NHS, education, tax credits and the New Deal. The results of all this spending are certainly debatable, but the Blair government - whether you like it or not - has been Labour to its very core.

What's really been lost in Britain is the core DNA of the working class, and also perhaps the national identity as a whole. However much Brown spends, I doubt if he can bring that back.

[niddrie-edge.livejournal.com]

too right mate!

(now i am off to think about it a bit cos I need to justify my loathing of the suits)

[cheapsurrealist.livejournal.com]

...it should be classified, says the British Medical Journal, as a hard drug

Hopefully they're just refering to hard tac (http://www.candyusa.org/Media/General/mom_dad_grad_candy.asp)

Possession of pixie stix would just be a misdemeanor

Toddler Busted With Half Kilo Of Lemondrops

[(Anonymous)]

...screams The Daily Mail

Thomas.

Plume

[(Anonymous)]

Sugar is part of a world wide conspiracy targeted against the working class.

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

But when the working class takes over, everyone will finally be made to consume like Momus. So it's alright.

[onthemoon.livejournal.com]

The bigger, albeit related, devil in the states is corn syrup, which is even sweeter than sugar, and leaves me with a disgustingly coated mouth and throat and bit of illness after consuming products pumped full of it (which are EVERYWHERE). Last week I picked up some cranberry juice, looking forward to some nice tart consumption, and took a big swig of it and damn near spit it out as it was the sweetest, most syrupy junk I'd tasted in weeks. I proceeded to check its label and low-and-behold: corn syrup! Corn syrup has managed to find itself into virtually every american juice, soda, condiment and any other liquid you can imagine that once used sugar as a sweetener, or even the products natural sweetness.

This, of course, has nothing to do with product quality and everything to do with money and politics. The corn industry, and make no mistake about it, it no longer has anything to do with farming and is a full-fledged industry, is receiving some of the greatest governement subsidizing in the states. It is relatively cheap and easy to grow, and also control by way of genetically modified crops. It's also quickly wiping out other, more varied crops, due to the money-forces behind it. It is quickly becoming the cotton of the 19th and early 20th century.

Back to sugar, I recently found a brand of rootbeer that uses cane sugar instead of corn syrup and was shocked by the difference. None of the sweet syrupy after taste, not the bit of illness I typically feel after drinking soda and other hyper-sweetened beverages. Over sweetening of everything is surely a devil, but if it is to be done then let it be sugar, rather than corn syrup that rots our teeth.

[(Anonymous)]

Enjoyed your condiment related analogy on the homogenisation of U.K. political parties.
To go off on something of a tangent it is also interesting how food-guilt and the silly paranoia surrounding the calorific potential of certain foods is used by the multi-billion dollar diet industry to seperate slightly over-weight nominal adults from their pounds rather than their pounds...
All things in moderation except merlot, I say...
Thomas Scott.

[lupoleboucher.livejournal.com]

Sugar is interesting. It is actually a very useful drug-like suppliment in weight training. Take it right after you exercise, and it helps feed your muscles via a healthful surge of insulin and glucose. Knowing this, I don't understand why anyone would eat it any other time than post-exercise, unless they wanted to get very fat. It generally makes me feel sick from the insulin jolt. I suppose people get used to feeling sick & mistake it for normality.

"New Labour" cracks me up; a way for the growing social class of clerks and "brain workers" who would have been Tories a few decades ago to feel virtuous and countercultural. Modern american 'leftists' are cut of the same cloth. They recycle and drive expensive foreign cars which use toxic batteries to achieve an illusion of environmental virtue while outsourcing redneck jobs to Mexico, so they don't have to pay poor native born americans a living wage.

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

A single glance at a supermarket shelf tells us that there is much, much sugar available - and also much, much yoghurt, and sugar yoghurt. But this is clearly not enough - a culture of "choice" leads to trends of desire, which lead to mass markets, and it should be obvious to all that liking things someone other somewhere likes simply dehumanises a man. And since that is simply immoral, man must be moralised by someone who knows better than him. No one is entirely innocent. Yesterday, I must confess, I bought a bottle of Coca-Cola. (It is true - I shall never create again.)

There is a cure for the soul-throttling evils of sugar capitalism if we would just reach for it. Increased central planning of the economy could easily redirect man's labour to foodstuffs and luxuries he neither likes or wants. This progressive culture would create infinite variety, as its produce would be geared to be unpopular and never to gain significant market shares! I do admit this is difficult. Only when more command economics is imposed on society will man be liberated to pursue the things he doesn't want to buy. And the West, the corrupt and decadent West of sugar and trade and "success", it shall crumble before the new, bright, wonderful unsuccesful economy.

[(Anonymous)]

What do you intend to call the secret police force required to implement this dictatorial sugar-free utopia?
Thomas S.

[dzima.livejournal.com]

http://dzima.stanleylieber.com/music/kyogicha/dagashi.mp3

[butterflyrobert.livejournal.com]

7. Is this sweetened yoghurt still yoghurt? Isn't it just sugar posing as yoghurt?

That's like saying "If you add a lot of water to soup, is it still soup?" Yes, it's still soup/yoghurt, but it's quality suffers.

Momus, your most charming paradox is that, politically, you cannot accept the idea of "quality" and yet artistically/philosophically, nothing could be more important. I love these posts where you have to reconicle this paradox within yourself in order to provide social commentary. In my opinion, this inner conflict quietly inspires your best posts.

[heliumflash.livejournal.com]

you're right, too much sugar isn't good for you, and a lot of behavioural problems can be put down directly to bad diet. however, i feel that the effect of sugar in foods on society pales in comparison to the effect of alchohol on society, a drug which, next to tobacco, is one of the major killers in western society, and yet is not only sanctioned by governments which profit, like tobacco, from its sale, but the consumption of which is also openly encouraged, and at a younger and younger age. im worried about a government which profits from peddling sweetie drinks to kids in the shape of alcopops. and my main concern isnt the sugar content...

...i like the pic of the lollipops btw :)