*Heard this song on the radio the other day . It's always fascinating what oldies music gets picked up down here.
My eyes lit up when I found Sidney Mintz' Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History in the Peace Corps office, because I reminded me of one of my favorite classes in college, Professor Steven Bailey's anthropology class "Food, Nutrition and Culture" where we discussed the main ideas from it extensively. Secondly, since practically every drink and snack here is sugar coated (pun most certainly intended) I was looking for some answers on why cuisine here had developed this way. Sugar laden refrescos naturales (fruit juices) and sodas, candies, caramels and sickly sweet coffees are the norm. The extremes to which desire for sweetness manifests itself is evident the negative health effects that are increasingly rampant in the developing world, such as diabetes and tooth decay, which are not yet on the scale of the US epidemic but are sure heading that way. What factors, in addition of the evolutionary predilection for sweet things, make us crave the stuff?
Mintz' work is like a more academic anthropological cousin of books like Mark Kurlansky's Cod: A History of the Fish that Changed the World, Salt: A World History or Michael Pollan's The Botany of Desire, which create revisionist histories by looking at the effects of foodstuffs (mainly). Sugar happens to be an even more fascinating tale than the other consumables traced by the previously mentioned authors, because it is intimately connected to so many aspects of (dark) aspects of modernity- slavery, colonialism, exploitation, factory labor and capitalism.
Focusing particularly on European and more specifically English usage, Mintz traces the expansion of sugar technologies from the Arab world and India to the west and how demand for sugar revolutionized production systems as it tore traditional ways of life in the Americas and Africa asunder, leading to a quasi-feudal but capital intensive system relying on forced or low paid labor that he argues is just as important in the rise of factory systems and capitalism as the rise of artisan and professional guilds in Europe.
Mintz goes on to chronicle how the massification of sugar from exclusive use by elites to an everyday commodity revamped some power structures (ie the balance of power between domestic manufacturing elites and planters in the colonies) while simultaneously reinforcing other structures of power, such as class divisions within Britain. Furthermore, he demonstrates how sugar accompanied or even protagonized (shoot, is that a real verb in English??) the shift to the industrial age, by providing British workers with cheap, rapidly available calories: tea and sugar with white bread. It's fascinating to imagine a world without sugar and then watch as it becomes a spice, a plaything of the rich, an accompaniment to exotic beverages, and eventually, as demand expanded production and drove down the price, part of almost everything we consume. Mintz wrote the book just as high fructose corn syrups, packaged foods and snacks were becoming a norm, but the argument that sugar revolutionized eating, undoing the structure of the meal over centuries is even more salient today.
Much of the hellish process of cultivating sugar remains scarcely changed in the present day. While the obsession with sweetness brought on by sugar has lead to cheaper alternatives like corn syrup, it goes without saying that sugar is still an important crop, and here in Nicaragua is very important economically. The drive for sugary profits is still killing many worldwide: particularly, young, strong Central American men. "The malady of the sugar workers,"Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD), a disease by which the kidneys fail as the tubules stop functioning, is currently plaguing sugar workers in Central America, as well as in other sugar growing regions of the world, such as Sri Lanka and India. According to some estimates, the disease kills more men in Central America than HIV/AIDS, diabetes and leukemia combined. Unlike the usually causes of kidney disease in developed countries, which are usually attributable to deteriorating kidney function as a complication of diabetes or high blood pressure, the causes of this disease are not fully known, but there are a few theories:
- Sugar workers are literally working themselves to death, as long days of back breaking labor in 100 degree heat leave them devastatingly dehydrated and quickly leading to kidney problems. Recent research on rats suggests that re-hydrating with sugary drinks can have seriously compromising effects on the kidneys, consistent with the type of damage seen in sufferers of the disease.
- Exposure to toxins in pesticides that are inappropriately applied, without protection or used despite bans for environmental reasons are leading to the deaths. In addition, these chemicals getting into the groundwater and increasing exposure. However, some scientists argue that this isn't the main cause because the types of damage these chemicals provoke to the kidneys are not consistent with the types of damage observed in effected populations.
To me, it seems like these deaths are over-determined, in a region of the world where finding legitimate ways to support a family are scarce, and that it's likely that a lot of factors are responsible.
Here are a few articles to provide more information:
- An excellent series of articles at Public Integrity.org
- The Guardian's take
- A photo series in Nicaragua's sugar growing regions, in the New Yorker
On the subject of hiring out dirty work to others, I also recently finished Sebastian Junger's War, a book intimately exploring the war in Afghanistan, from the perspective of a platoon of infantry soldiers fighting in the Korengal Valley, near Afghanistan's border with Pakistan. The author was embedded with these soldiers for approximately a year (on and off). With troop levels finally drawing down in Afghanistan, there's no better time to reflect on what the war meant and what it means for the future. Will Afghanistan be the last time America fights such a war in such a way? Or will counterinsurgencies in foreign lands continue to be the way of the future? Will we continue to entrust war to a slimmer and slimmer margin of the population, allowing them to be damaged physically and psychologically to ensure our foreign policy priorities? Overall, Junger lets the reader draw conclusions about the larger significance of the war and focuses on the psychology of battle and of brotherhood. I found the book much easier to follow than the film version of the same events, Restrepo, produced by the recently deceased journalist Tim Hetherington, which we watched last year when I was a member of EPIIC, an intensive year long exploration of various themes put on by Tufts' Institute for Global Leadership. We also got to met Colonel Ostlund, the commander of the platoon featured in the book, and ask him questions during the course of our symposium, which was a fascinating opportunity. So reading this was sort of full circle and really interesting.
No comments:
Post a Comment