Bittersweet

by Peter Macinnis

  In the late nineteenth century the wheel turned again, and many physicians in France and Germany were loud in their praise of the health-giving properties of sugar. Opinion changed again in the twentieth century, and is negative to this day, with websites warning solemnly of danger, like this example:

  In the process of making sugar from both cane and beets, they are heated and calcium hydroxide (lime), which is a toxin to the body, is added. This is done to remove those ingredients that interfere with the complete processing of sugar. Carbon dioxide, which is another toxin, is then used to remove the lime (and according to my studies, not all is removed).

  This bizarre claim of remnant carbon dioxide in the sugar is at odds with the mainstream terror campaign that sugar is ‘pure, white and deadly’, to use the tag line of John Yudkin. William Dufty warns in a best-selling book that:

  So effective is the purification process which sugar cane and beets undergo in the refineries that sugar ends up as chemically pure as the morphine or the heroin a chemist has on the laboratory shelves. What nutritional virtue this abstract chemical purity represents, the sugar pushers never tell us.

  To Dufty, purity offers all sorts of magical powers, and apparently even the hint of purity in the future can work wonders, for he argues that sugar caused madness at a time when it was far from pure:

  In the Dark Ages, troubled souls were rarely locked up for going off their rocker. Such confinement began in the Age of Enlightenment, after sugar made the transition from apothecary’s prescription to candymaker’s confection. ‘The great confinement of the insane’, as one historian calls it, began in the late 17th century, after sugar consumption in Britain had zoomed in 200 years from a pinch or two in a barrel of beer, here and there, to more than two million pounds per year.

  This sort of argument is known among logicians as post hoc, ergo propter hoc, a Latin tag that means ‘after that, so caused by that’. On this principle, if I die after drawing breath, I died of a surfeit of air; if I die on exhaling, I died because I failed to hold my breath. In short, it turns a chance correlation into a major issue. It is as invalid as it would be for me to say I lost weight, my haemorrhoids disappeared, and I felt better after avoiding sweets, while neglecting to mention that I also gave up cocaine and started exercising at the same time.

  Correlations are the stock in trade of people seeking to make a case: while it may be true, for example, that some Presbyterian ministers in Massachusetts drank a lot of rum, the linear relationship between their average salaries and the price of rum sold in Havana over several centuries is unlikely to be any more than the result of comparing two values both influenced by the cost of living. And if correlations are evidence, when there were wireless licences in Britain there was a strong correlation between the number of admissions to British mental institutions and the number of licences issued for radio receivers.

  Eventually people started to come out with all sorts of fearful tales based on the purity of sugar which—by its very purity— shocked the digestive system as no food had ever done in the past! In truth, as soon as sugar is mixed with other foods, or with saliva and digestive juices, it ceases to be pure—end of story. In the 1970s the Australian sugar industry did not try to fight fads with facts: they simply advertised that sugar was natural, and restored market share. This soothed the minds of consumers, who neglected to consider that hemlock, lightning, plummeting asteroids, strychnine, cowpats, poison ivy, arsenic, great white sharks, stinging nettles, tarantulas, cobras and skunks are all natural as well. The argument worked well, but the science was as weak as the science in the attacks on sugar— but that was nothing to the attacks on the other sweeteners.

  THE ALTERNATIVES

  The alternative sweeteners, just like sugar, seem to attract their share of less than entirely rational opposition. They are accused of causing diseases, breaking down to produce poisons and, worst of all, they are accused of having been discovered by accident. To people with a low level of scientific knowledge, like the food faddists, accidental discoveries just have to be the work of the Devil, or worse.

  The problem with food faddists is that if they go on long enough, then like the infinite number of monkeys that I have currently working on the sugar-free version of The Winter’s Tale, they will hit on the truth at some point. But before they get there, they will have raised so much noise and clatter that the small medical truth, when it is found, may be missed in the general hullabaloo. In fact many scientific discoveries may be attributed to a chance event, and attacking the end product because it was found by accident is far from the rational end of the criticism scale. Accidents are far more common in the chemical laboratory than outsiders realise!

  Accident 1

  Constantine Fahlberg, who patented saccharin in 1879, claimed that he accidentally spilled some chemical on his hand while working on possible food preservatives in Ira Remsen’s laboratory at Johns Hopkins University. Fahlberg noticed a sweet taste while eating dinner that night, and then sought it out in the laboratory the next day. Fahlberg and Remsen published a joint paper on the new substance, but then Fahlberg took out the patent on his own, and became rich. Remsen went on to become president of Johns Hopkins, and is reported to have said later, ‘Fahlberg is a scoundrel. It nauseates me to hear my name mentioned in the same breath with him.’

  Saccharin was a wonder in its time, and before the First World War, when it was taxed in terms of its sweetening power (rated then at 500 times the sweetness of sugar), quite a lot of saccharin was smuggled into Britain. Sir William Tilden describes the checking of a number of ‘white powders’:

  . . . the inducement to smuggle this article into the country is very great, and numerous ingenious methods have been devised for this purpose have been detected by the Customs Department. The presence of saccharin, therefore, has to be searched for in all preparations in which there is any probability of its occurrence. Saccharin was discovered in 83 samples specially examined . . . in the year 1911–12.

  In fact, saccharin was used much more commonly in Europe after the Americans joined in the First World War and, with sugar rationed, the little pink packets became common. Since 1960 there has been some evidence of bladder cancer in rats dosed with saccharin, but no human cancers have been associated with the product. Saccharin has been banned in Canada for many years, but not in the United States, producing a new generation of saccharin smugglers motivated more by matters relating to diabetes than to evading excise and customs.

  Accident 2

  Michael Sveda, a graduate student at the University of Illinois in 1937, was investigating the structures of antipyretics, drugs that reduce fevers. While studying sulfamates and their derivatives, he produced cyclamate, but at this point chemical legend and the story Sveda told a few years later diverge. The legend has it that he picked a cigarette up off the bench, where it had rolled in some spillage. He was indeed smoking in the laboratory, as happened in those more innocent days, but he merely lit the cigarette without washing his hands, and so transferred a small sample of the compound to his mouth.

  His son, also a scientist, recalls that when cyclamates were released commercially Sveda was asked to endorse a brand of cigarette, but he declined the opportunity. An intensely honest man by all accounts, he was later wounded by the campaign that was directed at cyclamate/saccharin sweeteners, based on a bizarre experiment that induced cancer in rats when they were given a dosage equal to a human drinking a bathtub of cyclamate-sweetened drink, every day for a year.

  Another public demonstration showed deformed chickens which had been injected with cyclamates, when injections of salt, water or even air would probably have had the same effect. These were stunts aimed at stampeding the American public, and it is not too hard to see which part of the marketplace might gain from such a scare campaign. Not that I am making any such allegation, but it bears thinking about.

  The science journal Nature commented after America banned cyclamates that ‘it would be all too easy for
public apprehension to be raised to the pitch where a fever of vegetarian faddism drives everything but mothers’ milk from the market’. Others called it bad science, and strangely done, but it was enough to bring in a ban in the United States, although Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Canada all allow the product in some forms, as do many other countries. The American ban persists, and to this day nobody can quite see why it was imposed, or why it is maintained.

  Accident 3

  James Schlatter’s accident came in 1965 while he was studying compounds that might be useful against ulcers. The target was a tetrapeptide, a chain of four of the amino acids that are found in all proteins, which was being made from two dipeptide intermediates. One of these, aspartyl-phenylalanine ester, is what we now call aspartame. Schlatter accidentally spilt a few drops of aspartame on his hand; when he later licked his finger to pick up a piece of paper, he tasted an intensely sweet taste. Schlatter and his colleague Harman Lowrie, knowing that the compound contained nothing that did not occur in other proteins, tried a small amount of the chemical in black coffee, noted the absence of a bitter after-taste, and wrote up their discovery.

  Aspartame is currently under attack because of the breakdown products it supposedly yields. In particular, it is a popular target for those claiming Gulf War syndrome problems, since aspartame breaks down at high temperatures. There is nothing in the literature of science to back this at the moment, but claims such as this, along with assertions that aspartame is ‘RNA-derived’, are generally thought to be enough to damn it forever.

  Accident 4

  The most amazing tale is also the most difficult to confirm, and it is still unconfirmed. In this story, Shashikant Phadnis, an Indian student in London, was working on halogenated sugars, which are sugar molecules with chlorine atoms substituted. He was told to test a compound, misheard this as an instruction to taste it, did so, and discovered sucralose.

  All my attempts to track down any of those involved at the time have proved fruitless. There is no trace of any Shashikant Phadnis on the Internet, but a person of this name appears on the patent for sucralose. Tate and Lyle, who funded the research and who profit from sucralose, do not answer any queries that are directed at them. One can only conclude that the public relations department at Tate and Lyle maintains a fond belief that the questioner will go away and say nothing about this.

  The problem with sweeteners is that there are always scare campaigns going on, and just as those two interest groups known as the East India Plunderers and the West Indies Floggers misused political power in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain for economic advantage, so it seems some people have misused science for economic advantage. Most of the ‘science’ we hear about rival sweeteners seems to have come from the spin doctors, rather than from the medical doctors.

  OI L PASTE BLACKING

  Take oil vitriol, 2 ozs., tanners oil, 5 ozs., ivory black, 2 lbs., molasses, 5 ozs; mix the oil and vitriol together, let it stand a day, then add the ivory black, the molasses, and the white of an egg; mix well, and it is ready for use.

  Daniel Young, Young’s Demonstrative Translation of Scientific Secrets, Toronto, 1861.

  EPILOGUE

  THE COSTS AND

  BENEFITS

  Much of the history of sugar of the past four centuries seems to involve the jostlings of various European countries: the Dutch with the Spanish, Portuguese, English and French, Germany with everybody, England with America and, most famously, England with France. The history of sugar also involves the predation of those countries on the nationals of many other lands, either by deliberate enslavement or in the more polite guise of indentured servitude, barely a notch above slavery.

  In these more enlightened times sugar slaves are often replaced by machines, but there are still parts of the world where the back-breaking task of hand-harvesting sugar cane goes on, and the lot of the sugar worker today is little better than that of the slave of yesteryear.

  Sugar has caused the mass movement and death of millions of humans. It has resulted in the large-scale clearance of land and the destruction of soil and whole environments. On the plus side, it has provided us with many taste delights, and had a beneficial effect on the economies of many nations.

  Sir Eric Williams, a Marxist scholar and Trinidad’s first Prime Minister, argued first in his doctoral thesis, and later in his book Capitalism and Slavery, published in 1944, that the sugar and slave trade had provided the pump-priming, the finance, for the Industrial Revolution in Europe, although this is now generally regarded as an extreme viewpoint. Sugar slavery probably did no harm to the European economy in providing working capital in Britain and France, but Germany managed to industrialise without colonies, slaves or cane sugar.

  Sugar was never the friend of socialism. When the British Labour government planned in 1949 to nationalise the sugar industry, the main British producer, Tate and Lyle, fought back, sending sugar out in bags labelled ‘Tate not State’. Sugar had a great effect on Marxist Cuba after Fidel Castro’s 1969 announcement that the country was to aim for a 10 million ton sugar harvest in 1970, to earn money to fund industrialisation. While the harvest was a record at 8.5 million tons, the sugar-led recovery failed, for the Cuban economy was in tatters because of the over-emphasis on one product. Cuba returned after that to a more normal Marxist economy based on the Russian model.

  One of the most unusual effects of sugar is seen in the Great Boston Molasses Flood of 15 January 1919. According to some accounts, there had been a rush to import as much molasses as possible in order to make and sell as much rum as possible before Prohibition came into force. The flood was caused by an overfilled storage tank bursting and flooding the streets with a two and a half metre wave of molasses that killed 21 people, crumpled the steel support of an elevated train, and knocked over a fire station. The story has often been told since, usually with a wry comment about the victims meeting a sticky end. It is another example of the way sugar products can be dangerous, though the main problems have been environmental.

  Sugar cane is a tropical crop and, like coral animals, does best in the tropics. In Florida, the Caribbean, Australia and Mauritius, mangrove swamps, seagrass beds and coral reefs are all under threat from increased sediment and fertiliser run-off from the fields of sugar cane, moving down the rivers and into the sea. The main nurseries supporting new generations of life in the sea are under serious threat because of the way sugar is grown on the land. Part of the problem is that consumers do not pay anything like the true cost of sugar, any more than they did in the days of slavery. The costs of environmental destruction cannot be readily converted into dollar amounts, and so they are largely ignored.

  Yet there are solutions, and some of them are simple, like ‘green cane trash blanket harvesting’, which leaves a cover of organic material on the cane fields that minimises sediment movement, which can be significant during heavy rainfall. This can be done because mechanical harvesting does not require that the cane fields be burnt as they were previously to prevent the cane-cutters contracting leptospirosis, the germs of which are left on the cane by rats. If the cane stalks are left on the soil after harvest as a trash blanket, the headlands, the strips around the outside of the cane fields that are used for machinery access, will be the only remaining major sediment source.

  All farming results in a steady run-off of pesticides and fertiliser, but the location of the cane fields makes them a particular problem. In some places the environmental damage is even worse. Liquid waste from sugar mills and refineries, material called vinasse, is discharged directly into the sea on Guadeloupe, for example, causing a serious breakdown of the marine environment. If we need sweetness in our food, perhaps we should seek other ways of finding it, because right now our joint human sweet tooth looks set to cause a nasty abscess in the environment.

  ÖSTERMALMSGLÖGG

  500 mL vodka, 330 mL strong beer, 750 mL Madeira, 3 dried figs, 150 grams raisins, 20 peeled almonds, 3 bitter orange peel,
1 cinnamon stick, ginger, 300 mL sugar, 6 cloves, 10 cardamons. Chop the figs into four pieces. Mix all spices except the sugar, add the beer and boil it. Add the sugar and boil until the sugar has melted. Let it cool, then add the vodka, and reheat gently—no more than 55°C (130°F) or the vodka will evaporate. Let it stand for an hour, add the Madeira, and let it stand for another hour. Pour the glögg through a mesh (but keep almonds and raisins) into bottles. Warm to no more than 55°C before serving.

  Swedish recipe (modern)

  Glossary

  bagasse the fibrous material left over after sugar cane has been through the rollers, and all the juice has been squeezed out.

  claying a method of trickling water through raw sugar to whiten it.

  creole/Creole depending on the context, a lingua franca that develops where cultures meet; a member of the plantocracy of some Caribbean islands; a person of mixed racial origins; the sterile sugar cane used in the Mediterranean which was taken to the Americas.

  defecant material added to the boiling sugar juice to precipitate impurities.

  eddoes a form of food found originally on the Gold Coast of Africa, and taken to the New World. It is used for the root of various plants, including Colocasia esculenta and Colocasia macrorhiza (taro).

  guinea grass a grass used as feed for the animals that operated mills and hauled cane.

  gur a sticky sweet ball of dark sugar, obtained by boiling cane juice.

  isinglass a form of gelatin, originally made from the swim bladders of sturgeons, and sometimes used to clear sugar juice.

  Jamaica train a system of pans used to heat sugar juice over a single fire, with the juice being moved progressively down to the final pan. It was known to the French as ‘the English train’ and to the Cubans as ‘the French train’.