Just a Spoonful of Sugar Helps the Poison Go Down

“There's one white powder which is by far the most lethal known. It's called sugar. If you look at the history of imperialism, a lot of it has to do with that. A lot of the imperial conquest, say in the Caribbean, set up a kind of a network... The Caribbean back in the 18th century was a soft drug producer: sugar, rum, tobacco, chocolate. And in order to do it, they had to enslave Africans, and it was done largely to pacify working people in England who were being driven into awful circumstances by the early industrial revolution. That's why so many wars took place around the Caribbean.”
--  Noam Chomsky, 2002 lecture at The University of Houston

We have watched with admiration and horror as the giants of industrial agriculture have attempted to sway public opinion with their “corn sugar” campaign, designed to convince us that corn syrup is “just like any other sugar”.  This is patently false in most respects, of course, as corn syrup is addictive and without nutritional merit of any sort, while some sugars are more reasonably amenable as a part of a balanced diet, but it is true in one sense:  we eat far too much corn syrup, and we eat far too much refined sugar of other kinds, too.

There was a time, not too terribly long ago as human history is told, when table sugar was a luxury item.  Olde tyme recipes and nostalgic literature such as the Little House on the Prairie books make it clear that having sugar on the table was not something folk took for granted.

The advent of huge agricultural concerns and rapid transportation have changed all of that.  These days, having sugar on the table is still rare, but only because all the sugar a body could ever want is already in whatever premanufactured food item most of us are putting on our plates – from chocolate frosted sugar bomb cereals, to sports beverages, to bacon, to peanut butter, to loaves of bread.  Sugar, sugar, everywhere.  It’s enough to drive one to drink!

According to the USDA, the typical American consumes one hundred and fifty six pounds of added sugar every year, of which only 29% is in the form of traditional sugar.  Just eliminating the table sugar would mean, therefore, that the typical American diet would still comprise approximately one hundred and eleven pounds of added sugar, all other things being equal.

If you eat prepackaged foods, or eat in restaurants, you have no choice.  You will eat too much sugar, whether made from corn, or made from beets or sugarcane, and like it or not, you will get fat, bloated, unhealthy, pre-diabetic and probably pre-cancerous.  It is really as simple as that.

“But Myrtle, we hardly ever eat dessert, surely there’s not sugar in everything else!”

Sorry to burst your bubble, but practically everything in the typical American diet has added sugar.  Seriously.  From bacon to salad dressing, from ketchup to crackers, from flavored yogurt to spaghetti sauce, big agribusiness knows how to keep the hooks in their clientele.  Drug pushers are rank amateurs compared to Monsanto and Archer-Daniels Midland.

If sugar is so ubiquitous, then what are our alternatives?  Fortunately, escaping from this dangerous drug is really not all that complicated.  Eating fresh fruits and vegetables instead of prepackaged varieties accomplishes a great deal in the battle against added sugar.  For starters, getting away from the sugars involved in the canning of these foods reduces the added sugar total a tremendous amount right from the get-go.  In addition, fresh fruits and vegetables are filling foods, and the more of them you eat, the less desire or ability you have to eat sugar-heavy foods like cake and cookies.

Then, too, the sugars found in nature (is there anything sweeter than a peach fresh from the tree, or a watermelon straight off the vine?) are much easier for your body to deal with than the refined sugars processed in industrial vats.  In contrast to industrial sucrose and related sugars, fructose in its natural form is so easy to digest it is frequently absorbed too quickly to be registered as fermented detritus in the lower portions of the alimentary canal (graphic descriptions avoided intentionally; some of us like to snack while browsing the web, after all…)  That rotten something in Denmark?  It all comes down to how you frost your danish.

Finally, there are natural alternatives to refined sugars for those moments when you simply have to give in to your sweet tooth.  Honey and other natural sugars such as maple, sorghum, etc. are all more or less as dangerous as industrial cane and corn sugars in terms of their caloric content, and if one were to consume as much honey as one had been consuming corn sugar, this would be a real problem.  But it doesn’t happen that way.  A little honey or homegrown molasses now and then is better tasting and more satisfying than a much larger amount of industrial sugar.  A little bit goes a lot further.

That is, it goes a lot further if you get off of the industrial white powder altogether.  Cane and corn sugar are addictive; unless you quit them cold turkey, you will find yourself continuing to crave them, and you will continue to be in the clutches of the worst drug dealers the world has ever known.

We are anxiously awaiting the day when we harvest the first honey from our top bar hive; we are also looking around for a local retailer with stevia cuttings so we may grow our own table sweetener.  Until such time as we are able to finally become self-sufficient in our fight against sugar, however, we urge you to join us in supporting alternatives – buy local honey, and use natural sweeteners in place of sugar.  And above all else, eat lots of fruits and veggies!

Happy farming!