CHAPTER TWO
Growing Markets, Growing Waistlines

Too many people are eating too much sugar. That was the contention of the World Health Organization (WHO) which in 2014 proposed that the consumption of sugars - including sweeteners manufactured from corn, and natural sugars found in fruit and honey - be reduced to 5 per cent of total daily energy intake, or around 100 calories per day for an adult. For countries including the United Kingdom and United States, this would entail more than halving current levels of consumption, completely changing their dietary landscapes. No more bottomless refills of soft drinks, no more chocolate bars between meals and definitely one lump of sugar, not two, in the morning cup of tea!

Before we consider why the World Health Organization and other agencies working in the fields of health and nutrition have made such proposals, it is worth reflecting first on how diets in certain parts of the world became so sweet. Although there is strong evidence to suggest that humans have an innate preference for sweetness in foods, there is no physiological requirement to eat sugar in its processed form as sucrose, and certainly not in the quantities currently ingested. Yet, as Figure 2.1 suggests, at a worldwide level, the amount of sugar and other calorific sweeteners in the food system continues to grow, providing on a per capita basis more than double the amount that the WHO proposed we should actually be eating. The chapter argues that this prevalence is due to sugar's ability to dissolve barriers to accumulation. Its chemical properties have helped food manufacturers and retailers overcome those barriers that might otherwise have restricted their sales: feelings of satiety can be suspended, eating outside of mealtimes encouraged and the taste of foods rewired without them being rejected. Sugar-sweetened industrial food can be sold more often, at more times and in more parts of the world. But by the same token, this is not something that is bound to happen simply because of the pursuit of profit. Levels of sugar consumption vary between and within countries, and in some cases it is actually decreasing, suggesting the importance of law and culture in shaping demand. Sugar may be an intoxicating substance, but it is not beyond societies to control it.

Figure 2.1 The global availability of sugar and other sweeteners in the human diet, 1961-2011

Source: FAOSTAT

Making markets for sugar

In his classic book Sweetness and Power, the anthropologist Sidney Mintz traced the historic emergence of the British sweet tooth. Within Britain, which by the nineteenth century had become the biggest consumer of sugar in the world, sugar was not originally seen as a foodstuff but variously as a medicine, condiment and decoration before then becoming more prominent as a preservative and sweetener. Market prices alone could not explain this transition. For one thing, while sugar did become cheaper over time, thanks to imports from the colonies and then from Europe, demand continued to grow even during periods when prices temporarily increased. Offering a sociology of consumption, Mintz drew attention to the way sugar became an accepted and expected part of the national diet. Key to this was the adoption of sugar by different classes.

For bourgeois families, sugar was used to conserve fruits, make jam and serve with tea, the kinds of activity that signified a particularly Victorian respectability in society. For labouring families, whose diets were both inadequate in calories and monotonous in taste, sugar found a ready place, along with other colonial produce such as rum, tobacco, coffee, cocoa and tea, as a 'drug food'. Mintz gave them this label because of the way they provided respite from reality - deadening hunger pangs, giving stimulus and calories, and offering new and exotic tastes. New rituals such as taking tea breaks at work and having pudding courses at home were soon established too, encouraged by the widening availability of sugar in manufactured foods like marmalade, treacle and chocolate. Indeed, consumption of sugar by the poor increased so much that by 1850 it had outgrown that of the wealthy. Sugar had gone from a rarity to ubiquity in less than a century.

Looking into the household tells us even more about this process, particularly its gendered dynamics. As the main purchasers and providers of food, it was the decisions of women which were particularly influential in the sweetening of the British diet. Female-authored cookery books were formidable advocates of sugar, proposing its increased use in breads, cakes and even salads. Others instructed women on how to be good housewives and domestic servants, providing detail on how to manipulate sugar in their own kitchens to create a variety of syrups, caramels and candies. Meanwhile, for those women who were working in factories but were still expected to manage the family's meals, sugar-sweetened foods offered the advantage of being quick and easy to prepare. It was also women and children who tended to eat disproportionately more sugar, with men consuming a larger proportion of available meat. Yet, far from enriching the female diet, sugar contributed to its simplification as combinations like jam on white bread became accepted as meals in their own right. Indeed, Mintz concluded that this maldistribution of food within the family and the subsequent undernourishment of children, especially girls, could even be described as culturally legitimized population control.

The rapid change in the type and levels of sugar consumption experienced in Britain has since been repeated in other countries. This has formed part of a worldwide 'nutrition transition' in which huge numbers of people switch to energy-dense foods. In particular, there have been marked increases in the contribution of calories from livestock, vegetable oils and sugar and other sweeteners, rendering a radical change in both the quantity and quality of national food intake. Take the case of China, in which the daily availability of sugar and sweeteners increased from 60 calories per capita in 2000 to 71 calories in 2011.1 This equates to an extra 1 kg. bag of sugar for every man, woman and child each year and has contributed significantly to the overall increase in calorific consumption in the country. But, as Mintz cautioned, such averages tell us very little about how sugar is being eaten, by whom, and with what consequences. For this, we need to begin by looking a little closer at the way sugar has been integrated into the industrialized food system in the twentieth century.

Sugar in the industrial food system

Industrial foods are those that have been conceived and created not in the kitchen, but in the laboratory and factory. Produced on a scale unimaginable by the household cook or restaurant chef, they have provided convenience and cultural association for generations of largely urbanized consumers. The consumer revolution in industrial foods was spearheaded in the United States and bore a strong legacy from the Second World War. The preference given by the government to commercial, rather than home, users in sugar rations, and the lobbying of the military by companies like Hershey's and Coca-Cola to equip soldiers with chocolate and sugared drinks on account of their calorific and morale-boosting value both helped to encourage the sweetening of industrial foods. Allied to this was the increased reliance on industrial foods to save time in meal preparation. Key here was the changing role of American women, who were drawn into the factories during the war and the service sector afterwards, and who sought a way of reducing the housework burden with which they were still saddled. Food manufacturers pressed this to their advantage and sought to provide a commercial fix to a social problem.

Instant dishes had already been developed to replace time-consuming ones, like swapping steamed puddings for gelatine desserts, but soon the impetus for innovation came not from the harried housewife but from the calculating corporate manager. As documented by Michael Moss, by 1965 the Chief Executive of General Foods was making sure that the tail wagged the dog: 'Today, consumer expectations are so high and the pace at which new products are introduced is so fast that Mrs Homemaker usually can't say what it is she really wants - until after some enterprising company creates it and she finds it in a retail store.'2 As Moss goes on to note, part of this pact with 'Mrs Homemaker' had been secured through the takeover of home economics taught in the country's schools. In 1965 when this speech was made, the American Home Economics Association had around 50,000 members. These were teaching (largely female) students how to shop around for basic ingredients and then prepare and cook them. In so doing, this cadre of professionals acted as a bulwark against the commodification of food provisioning. To rectify this, the major food manufacturers invented characters like 'Betty Crocker', a fictional mother-figure who told families it was morally acceptable to outsource food work to the factory. They also began to send out their own 'teachers' to conduct public cookery classes and flooded the Home Economics Association with funding, which perhaps explains the appointment of a General Mills executive as its president in 1987. The point here is that there was more to marketing industrial food than simply pushing a product. There was a very purposeful intent to remake social...