Wonder plant gives honey without the need for bees

For many centuries people used honey as the sole sweetener for food and drink. Human physiology evolved on a diet containing very little sugar and virtually no refined carbohydrates. In all probability, sugar entered into our diets by accident. More likely, sugarcane was primarily a “fodder” crop, used to fatten pigs, though humans may have chewed on the stalks from time to time.

Evidence from plant remnants and DNA suggests that sugarcane evolved in South East Asia around 8,000 BC, specifically in the Kuk Swamp in Papua New Guinea where other domesticated food crops such as bananas and taro were also to be found.

Two thousand years later, sugarcane found its way to the Philippines, China and India through Austronesian and Polynesian seafarers. The first refined sugar was produced in India as supported by a text describing a sugar mill in 100 AD. It is around this period that we see Indian recipes, which include sugar such as rice pudding with milk, sweet barley meal and fermented drinks with ginger.

During the reign of Alexander the Great in the 4th century AD sugarcane reached the Middle East and like saffron and nutmeg was rare and expensive. The Greeks and Romans learned about sugar during visits to India and took small amounts back home, which were traded to physicians for medicinal purposes.

They also discovered that sugarcane can make a potent intoxicating drink. In the 7th century AD, the Persians invaded India and marveled at this “reed which gives honey without the need for bees”.

At the same time Jundi Shapur, a university in Iran, had become the meeting place for Greek, Christian, Jewish and Persian scholars who created the first teaching hospital. These scholars developed better methods for processing sugarcane into crystallised sugar.

By 650 AD, the Arabs had become masters in growing, refining and cooking with sugar, beginning to conceptualise sugar not just as a medicine or spice but a delicacy for royalty and the rich.

They combined it with almonds to create a moldable sweet called marzipan, which is still popular today, and sugar sculptures became a popular part of lavish dinner parties.

As armies of Muslims took over Egypt, Persia, India and the Mediterranean, they brought with them their knowledge of sugar. Many European doctors learned of the medicinal uses of sugar from Arab texts and the Egyptians mastered the refining process, producing the finest and whitest sugar.

During the Crusades, around 1099, Europeans conquering Jerusalem learned the details of sugar production which was a profitable business at the time. As the soldiers returned home, they took sugar back with them, sparking widespread demand across Europe.

Cyprus and Sicily became important centres for sugar production during the 13th century but sugar remained a rare and expensive commodity. Although the Mediterranean sugar production dominated supply in Europe, it faced many challenges such as a diminishing labour pool, a climate that was not ideal for sugarcane growing, depleting soils and deforestation.

When the Ottoman Turks conquered Constantinople in 1453 and later the Middle East, North Africa and Eastern Europe, they also took control of and disrupted major trade routes. Searching for ways to circumvent the Turks and Arabs, Europeans took to the seas to look for new land on which to grow their own sugar.

The first place to cultivate sugarcane explicitly for large-scale refinement and trade was the Atlantic island of Madeira during the late 15th century. Realising that new and ideal conditions existed in Brazil for sugar plantations, the Portuguese moved in and established a slave-based plantation economy.

Britain, Spain, France and the Dutch followed suit in the Caribbean. This food which everybody craved for in Western Europe and which nobody needed (as we now know) drove the formation of the modern world.

There was a huge demand for labour to cultivate the massive sugar plantations in Brazil and the Caribbean. This need created the transatlantic slave trade which resulted in about 12.5 million human beings being shipped from Africa to the Americas between 1501 and 1867 under the most inhumane conditions. Mortality rates could reach as high as 25 percent on each voyage meaning that between one and two million must have been thrown overboard.

Cheap slave labour and increased yields led to lower prices making sugar affordable to the common man.

On the supply side of the equation, goods such as copper, brass, rum (made from sugar), cloth, tobacco and guns were needed to purchase slaves from the African elites. These goods were secured through expansion of industrial production (Industrial Revolution) particularly in the English Midlands and South West. Modern-day banking and insurance can trace their origin to the 18th century Atlantic economy.

As all this was going on, the slaves working in the plantations suffered a miserable existence, utterly disenfranchised of all human rights.

When they were eventually emancipated in 1834 in the British Empire, it was the slave owners who were fully compensated; not the slaves! Much of this money was used to build Victorian infrastructure, such as railways and factories.

Sugarcane occupies 26,942,686 hectares of land globally, its main output being commercial profit for corporates (sugar cartels in Kenya) and a worldwide public health crisis that has been centuries in the making.

The obesity epidemic and related diseases including cancer, dementia, heart disease and diabetes has spread across every nation where sugar-based carbohydrates have come to dominate the food economy.

Whereas the science identifying the problem is clear, like many other challenges of the 21st century, such as climate change, the public and political will is singularly lacking.

Is sugar our poisoned chalice?