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

[rhodri.livejournal.com]

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

[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

[(Anonymous)]

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

[mandyrose.livejournal.com]

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

[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.

[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 ...

[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]

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

[lemur-man.livejournal.com]

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

[imomus.livejournal.com]

And the government subsidizes those corn syrup farmers! Conspiracy theorists would say that they actually want an anxious, fat, sugar-addicted population who'll die of obesity-related ailments and not require much spending from the inadequate social security provision.

[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!

[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

[qscrisp.livejournal.com]

Thank you.

I love wagashi, too, even just the very common daifuku.

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.

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

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

Hhhmm, brainfood!

[(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.

[nicepimmelkarl.livejournal.com]

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