Sugar (sort of)
If you live in an industrialized nation, it is very likely that you consume vast amounts of sugar on a daily basis, willingly or unwillingly (1). Sugar can go by so many names (2), and when it comes to scientific studies, not everything that constitutes a “sugar” (3) is going to be studied all the time in each study. Google dictionary states that the biochemical definition for sugar is “any of the class of soluble, crystalline, typically sweet tasting carbohydrates found in living tissues and exemplified by glucose and sucrose.” (4) The problem really isn’t naturally occurring sugars, such as the carbohydrates [sugars] that would be present in fruits, but is more from added sugars (5) or sugars eaten without their natural “carriers” like the actual orange with all the fiber from the pulp and other vitamins and minerals from the actual fruit.
So how is sugar related to present day colonialism? There are so many crises in the media about obesity, about too much sugar intake (6), about failing health, and so much debate on how much the government of industrialized nations should intervene (7). Sugar is big big money, so the fact that it becomes so controversial so fast is no surprise. (8)
But this is a problem that industrialized nations have created. It is one that their citizens willingly or unwillingly perpetuate, and this “sugar” problem is one we could easily fix within the week if we wanted to, but that is not in the interest of the colonial nation state, so I don’t see it happening anytime soon.
These are a few thoughts in how sugar itself is used to perpetuate colonialism.
I want to first share a message I sent to a good friend related to sugar and the colonial aspects involved:
“There’s a barbacoa and big red (soda) festival this weekend. I’m gonna think of a more clever name to call it, but it’s making me think about sugar and the institutionalization of it. Like how sugar in the U.S. is allowed in EVERYTHING. And it’s like corporations consciously use neurobiological vulnerabilities to promote chemical addictions in order to have an unquestioning consumer who is obedient.
And if you own the companies that produce sugary products, then the profits funnel to you, so then it doesn’t matter what product you buy they will still make money, and since you can promote product diversity as a free market principle even though [the products] are all the same crap, then you have a way to dupe your consumer into thinking they have a choice in product selection, but still have them unaware that they are robots in their own consumption.
And what’s worse, is you’ll have them be so loyal, that if someone speaks out, they are systematically shut down, and they will fight you about [the “virtues” of] free market capitalism and try to slander you as much as possible, because there is a lot of control and money involved in the sugar industrial complex.”
[…]
My friend responds by asking if I have read/heard about the idea of libertarian paternalism and a nudge system where consumers can still have their “choice” respected, and the “free market” can still exist. (My friend not agreeing or disagreeing, just giving me food for thought). I then respond:
“Kinda. Sorta like taxing junk food. People and the market would have a fit if junk food was taxed because it’d be seen [as] this attack on bodily choice and the government not allowing you to “pollute” your body because it’s your body and you can do whatever you want. Goes back to the idea of nature, nature (our bodies) exist for our consumption and therefore it is our right and duty to exploit them. Never mind that it means shorter lives and destruction of species for monocrop sugar (not to mention socioeconomic exploitation of labourers as a byproduct). People are so resistant to the idea that less junk, in this case sugar, is a good thing for our species because we’re able to think more clear and our bodies work better.
So it should never have to get to the point of libertarian paternalism because treating your bodies like the beautiful pieces of nature that they are should just be a given, and therefore no real need for the government to be involved. If we really cared about our bodies, then we wouldn’t need others to tell us sugar overconsumption is detrimental to our health and has ripple effects (like in the U.S. so much kidney disease) which in the long run has catastrophic medical impacts.
So it’s not about free will and restricting [free will], it’s about how we have become so shortsighted in how we view our bodies, and how we know better, but we actively choose not to engage with this knowledge.
Hmm…. [this sugar thing] is starting to sound a lot like climate change denial.”
We then proceeded to talk about other stuff related to dismantling and critiquing colonial culture.
Moving on,
Sugar is one of many examples and products of colonial nation states that I believe adequately demonstrate the inner workings and short term conquests of present day colonialism, and can even offer insight into solutions for dismantling these oppressive systems by challenging current models of consumption.
Here are then some big key points of the workings of colonialism utilizing macro observations of sugar (I don’t claim to be the only one to have made these observations, so if you can provide more citations, please let me know):
You take a naturally occurring phenomena, sugar, and you ideologically translate it into a product that can be sold for money. Think about what the U.S. has done to all the varieties of corn that exist/ed. Same general idea.
You displace the original natural relationships involved with the product. In sugar’s case, you extract the sugar from the sugar cane or sugar beet (or make it synthetically), and there is no longer a natural carrier of this sugar. I.e. you can now spoon in your sugar into your coffee/tea versus having to eat a whole apple or berry or banana or some other whole fruit. This removes the relationships we have with fruit trees/bushes, land, and seasons. Now, instead of having a different colored whole fruit at different times of the year, we have a package of white processed cocaine like substance we can liberally pour into our food/drinks/etc. Harvesting knowledge is lost, relationships with natural earth cycles are no longer part of life, and stories of the interconnectedness of plants are no longer deemed important.
Once the product has been displaced, you extract and exploit the money making potential of that [now] product. Because sugar is so “delicious” to so many people, it is easy to sell. Because it makes people want to consume more, it is even easier to sell to large scale production companies so that they can put sugar in everything and keep people buying their products. From this vantage point of acquiring profit, sugar is a “win win” situation for those that stand to benefit from making profit within the capitalist/colonial regime. I’m sure there are even folks who would argue that if we are to cut sugar consumption, then it means we are pro-unemployment as this cut would also cut jobs. It’s an easy way to put a target on those who question the motives of the systems in place who are aware that these same systems are meant to exploit the many to benefit only a few. This simple vilification overlooks the deeper colonial aspects of the non-conversation going on. This is how things like sugar are portrayed by settler colonial narratives as a “good” thing, or at least “not so bad.” (Think about oil, plastic, gas, beef-cattle, bottled water, the list goes on…)
You then create dependence on the product, so much so that it is very hard to not consume the product in some fashion. This ties into why sugar can go by so many names on package labeling, and why low fat products can just replace the fat with sugar instead (9), and why sugary products are allowed in large public places and give the spaces money with the trade off of product placement (think soda). The companies know that they are investing in long term consumers, and that their profits will build exponentially in the future the earlier and more conspicuously they can create dependence.
You find ways to create a false sense of diversity. Goes back to my previous comment in my message to my friend that in most sugary products there is all the same crap. Just change the packaging, change the colors, change the recipe, create better commercials, diversify your investments, find new niche markets. This is how companies involved with sugar stay big, stay rich, selling essentially nothing but water and sugar. This is also how they maintain a large enough profit margin to where they can easily settle lawsuits to keep their revenue streams going while silencing those in opposition to their poison selling.
You silence the communities this impacts the most or vilify them for their lack of “personal choice.” This is the modern day equivalent of displacing Indigenous people from their ancestral land, and then telling them that if they just tried harder maybe they could succeed in our corporate “democracy.” Same idea behind “freeing” slaves but creating no social structures for them to do well, so these former slaves have to join the military to help settler colonial folk kill off Indigenous people and take their land just so the former slaves are able to have enough food to live. When you systematically create a demand for a product that destroys bodies, then you have a source of funding that comes from expendable bodies, which serves as a self sustaining stream of revenue and profit for those corporations selling the sugar. They know this.
You begin to nanny state them. You call the treatment of their bodies a “crisis,” and you demand government intervention. You as a sugar product selling company when pressed for accountability say that this is from lack of education, so you donate large sums of money to schools in the area on the condition that they place your soda machines as conspicuously as possible in the most visited spaces, and if not in the schools, then in your towns. The government intervenes and says that there is an obesity crisis/health crisis, but because sugar is “not so evil,” it is high fat foods that are attacked. So fatty fried foods are replaced with high sugar packaged processed fruit bowls, high fat milk is replaced with high sugar low fat milk. In shorter words, the colonial government (in cahoots with corporations so much so that they are many times not different at all) tell you what is good for you. It is important to note that at this stage there is NO meaningful consultation with the communities this affects, and any consultation typically is a forced signature of someone who stands to also profit off of this exploitation or who was not well informed. Sound a lot like the “treaty negotiations” of western colonizers with Indigenous people the world over? That’s because it is.
This nanny state point is the most difficult to conceptualize and articulate for most people. I think it is difficult because most people don’t see the long chain of events that gets something as “simple” as a soda vending machine into an elementary school or large public area, and how colonial nation states and “big business” (a product of colonization) are intimately tied, and depend on each other for survival. One cannot exist without the other.
There is a strong incentive to create cycles of socioeconomic exploitation of people’s bodies related to product consumption, and this product can also be “just” an idea in a contemporary sense. This socioeconomic exploitation is different from creating demand, as demand is directly correlated to the settler colonial population “requiring” said product. The socioeconomic exploitation of peoples refers to the actual workers and the society they are a part of that is being used to provide such product, as well as the vicious cycles of poverty and colonial-nation-state dependence this can create. Take for example the Caribbean island Martinique which is a French territory, where sugar and banana are main cultivations, and where neither banana nor sugar are native to the land. The plantations also developed through slavery after many of the Indigenous people of the island were exterminated, and France directly benefits from the sale of the production of these monocrops, while Martinique is left in less than ideal conditions. (10) Examples like these are ever-occurring for many other industrial monocrops. I also want to make note that I am not necessarily equating slavery with Indigenous colonization, though the two can and often do exist simultaneously, nor am I stating that slavery and colonization are clean cut concepts that only happened to either Black or Indigenous peoples as this would not acknowledge the complex intersectionality that can occur. In the Americas, slaves were stolen from Africa while the majority of Indigenous Americans (all Americans, not just U.S.) had genocide committed against them. Once the lands were clear of these peoples, mass agriculture could/would be introduced, and the slaves were the “people” [read: non-human animals unworthy of decent treatment] who provided the work.
Interestingly enough, when slavery was abolished through the emancipation proclamation in the U.S., many former slaves had no choice but to join the U.S. army in eradicating Indigenous peoples (having the “choice” of no employment, no land ownership, no assets, and hoping not to starve to death versus fighting in the army killing the Indigenous people and having a meager chance of living another day is NOT a choice) (11). This is how a product such as sugar can be made into a colonial product by displacing Indigenous people from their land, and then using forced labor to produce the product off of the stolen land. A product such as sugar can then promote Indigenous genocide and forced slavery because the supply chain is untraceable, the product itself is now literally an inescapable part of our everyday lives, and there is no single entity that can be held accountable. This design of colonialism is intentional. This design ensures that if one part of the chain is broken through accountability of government or public sanctions, the rest of the chain can absorb those revenue losses and remain unaffected in the larger picture. This is also how socioeconomic exploitation is created and becomes institutionalized.
Also, genocide is a strong term, but I use it and it gets used frequently to mean exactly that: genocide. If you are creating conditions where those affected cannot escape the systems they are a part of that will eventually lead to their death and socioeconomic violence that is not of their own creation, then that is promoting genocide (11). Think about this next time you stir in a bit of extra sugar to your tea/coffee or buy a soda can, or tell others that sugar is not a big deal. Can sugar use in a contemporary sense ever be free from its colonial past, if yes, how?
The next point is: colonization allows settler colonial people and mind-frames to absolve themselves of any responsibility. “The weight of this reality is uncomfortable; the misery of guilt makes one hurry toward any reprieve” (12). This is evident when we try to rationalize our sugar consumption as “it’s not that bad,” or “well at least I only use a little bit of sugar.” This point is important because when many of us are faced with the reality of the products we consume, we may actively try to ignore the facts about this product that make us uncomfortable. We know sugar production requires too much land where people have been displaced, we know monocrops are literally genetic trash of our own colonial creations that will eventually fail all of us, we know that sugar is something that corporations add to EVERYTHING fully aware of sugar’s addictive properties, and we know that sugar literally rots our teeth and bodies, but we EAT IT ANYWAY.
From a social interaction viewpoint, all of these things happening are complex. If we go back to the individual choice logic, can we really blame a person born into a poor socioeconomic situation whose only fruit intake comes from sugared up snack packs because that’s what the government has said they will give them? No, I don’t think so. But, can we hold those people accountable who are privileged enough to make a choice about their sugar consumption, and know full well that added sugar is just generally a no-win situation. Yes, I think we should hold people accountable, but the problem becomes how? We can’t hold them accountable (yet) because these are the same people that are benefitting from the exploitation of bodies via sugar consumption. We can’t hold them accountable because these are the same people who have vested interests in maintaining the systems that promote sugar consumption and other products. These are the people with the assets and resources that could actually collectively make huge changes within a weeks time.
But this is how colonization operates. When these same people can tell themselves that they are “good” people and trying their hardest because they donate a few dollars to a random organization for poor people every month (that’ll provide these poor people with sugary products to consume), or attend expensive fundraising galas where the costs to produce the gala are exorbitant, then these are the settler colonial people who don’t want to feel uncomfortable and want no change in their lifestyle no matter how many people are suffering from their actual ability to make choices. When we are not part of this social class of people, but have the know how and minimal financial resources required to remove large portions of sugar from our diet yet we don’t, then we are also pandering to this settler-colonial mind-frame and trying to absolve ourselves of responsibility because it is “just too hard right now.” Interestingly, “right now” seems to never end. These ideas above go a bit beyond “just” sugar of course, but sugar is used here to illustrate the workings of colonialism, but I’m sure you can see the parallels with many other products and ideas.
One last important point I’ll make is that settler colonial people stand to benefit from all of this, or at the very least are not at all affected by colonialism in the short term, so there is no incentive for systemic change. That’s right, sugar consumption to the point of detrimental health doesn’t impact settler-colonial people, it doesn’t touch certain social classes, and these people know the shitty stuff sugar can do to your bodies. What’s important here is that they can actively choose to not participate in sugar consumption. The narrative then becomes that “those” impoverished people consuming sugar should just make better informed decisions and consume less sugar, duh. This rationalization erases all the privileges that a settler colonial person may have had because of the fortune of WHAT THEY WERE BORN INTO or how DOMINANT SYSTEMS PRIVILEGE THE SUCCESS OF PEOPLE LIKE THEM. I.e. settler colonialism perpetuates the false narrative that everyone has the same agency in individual choice. To a settler colonial person, these facts are seen as not that big a deal: being born with titles to large plots of land, or having access to inherited financial resources, or having access to social connections built off of internalized institutionalized racism over centuries that will allow certain types of people easier access than others, particularly the more their phenotype looks like the majority of settler colonial people.
The settler colonial narrative says that “these people” should just try better in consuming less sugar and the problem comes from a lack of will and defective character. Therefore there is nothing that these settler colonial people can do they argue. This type of narrative erases the systemic manipulations that create poverty, and places the blame on those impacted communities for being born or displaced into these types of systems and/or having a different phenotype than the majority of settler colonial people. The above points also demonstrate how settler colonial folk telling you that only individual choice can fix all of societies ills is a “solution” only perpetuates colonization.
This post is of course not just about sugar as a product, it’s about sugar as a concept because of its use as an engineered product to systematically promote colonialism. The post is an intellectual exercise of looking at a popular “everyday product” and the colonization involved. These products are part of colonization because a lot of the products we have been told we can take for granted do the same thing: they displace our relationships with our own bodies, and therefore our relationship with the planet and nature, and they diminish our creativity in being able to be self sufficient within smaller communities. This is the same ideological concept of moving large populations of Indigenous peoples to less productive lands so that settler colonial people can keep the original land to produce and sell products back to Indigenous peoples to create a dependence and make a profit to feed their greed. This looks like gentrification (termed resettlement) in more recent times, and in sugar’s case, this looks like poverty and food deserts where sugar is used to displace more whole foods in the diet.
These products also hide their extractive destructive nature behind words such as “fair trade,” “natural,” “ethically harvested,” “cage free,” or a myriad of other labels and complex naming systems all of which have typically been developed by the colonial nation states themselves. Even though the product with these labels itself might be “okay” to an extent, the amount of plastic used, amount of resources destroyed, and fuel used in transport is never really tracked, especially when the product is pitched as having some sort of direct benefit to human pleasure.
In conclusion, these are just some thoughts on sugar consumption, and I hope they make you think about your own life and the impacts of any “quick sugar fixes” you may participate in, and how those fixes are so normalized in our various cultures, despite the fact that they are literally killing us faster.
I will leave you with a positive note, and a potential start to finding solutions to dismantling the ongoing history of a very violent and oppressive colonialism related to sugar consumption, an initiative to get folks to eat more whole produce: https://www.aglanta.org/urban-food-forest-at-browns-mill-1
References:
1)
World Health Organization. (2015). Guideline: sugar intake for adults and children. accessed online at: https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/149782/9789241549028_eng.pdf;jsessionid=76EA5240A6C303342F5C7C43CFDA528B?sequence=1
2)
https://sugarscience.ucsf.edu/hidden-in-plain-sight/#.XRJhzJNKjVo
3)
Newens, J.K. & Walton, J. (2016). A review of sugar consumption from nationally representative dietary surveys across the world. Journal of Human Nutrition and Dietetics, 29(2): 225-240. accessed online at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5057348/
4)
https://www.google.com/search?q=Dictionary
5)
https://www.health.harvard.edu/heart-health/the-sweet-danger-of-sugar
6)
Bray, G.A. & Popkin, B.M. (2014). Dietary sugar and body weight: have we reached a crisis in the epidemic of obesity and diabetes? health be damned! Pour on the sugar. Diabetes Care. (37)4:950-956. accessed online at: https://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/37/4/950.long
7)
Klurfeld, D.M. (2013). What Do Government Agencies Consider in the Debate over Added Sugars? Advances in Nutrition. 4(2): 257-261. accessed online at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3649106/
8)
https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/sugar-sweeteners/background/
9)
Nguyen, P.K., Lin, S., Heidenreich, P. (2016). A systematic comparison of sugar content in low-fat vs regular versions of food. Nutrition & Diabetes. 6(1): e193. accessed online at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4742721/
10)
Childers, K.S. (2006). Citizenship and Assimilation in Postwar Martinique: The Abolition of Slavery and the Politics of Commemoration. Journal of the Western Society for French History. 34. accessed online at: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/w/wsfh/0642292.0034.018?view=text;rgn=main
Wong, A. & Gomes, R. (2012). Intractable Social-Economic Problems of Martinique. Études caribéenes. accessed online at: https://journals.openedition.org/etudescaribeennes/6073?lang=en
11)
Dunbar-Ortiz, R. (2014). An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. Beacon Press.
12)
Tuck, E. & Yang, K.W. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1): 1-40. accessed online at: https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/view/18630/15554
See also:
Wildcat, M. et al. (2014). Learning from the land: Indigenous land based pedagogy and decolonization. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 3(3): I-XV. accessed online at: https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/view/22248/18062
So how is sugar related to present day colonialism? There are so many crises in the media about obesity, about too much sugar intake (6), about failing health, and so much debate on how much the government of industrialized nations should intervene (7). Sugar is big big money, so the fact that it becomes so controversial so fast is no surprise. (8)
But this is a problem that industrialized nations have created. It is one that their citizens willingly or unwillingly perpetuate, and this “sugar” problem is one we could easily fix within the week if we wanted to, but that is not in the interest of the colonial nation state, so I don’t see it happening anytime soon.
These are a few thoughts in how sugar itself is used to perpetuate colonialism.
I want to first share a message I sent to a good friend related to sugar and the colonial aspects involved:
“There’s a barbacoa and big red (soda) festival this weekend. I’m gonna think of a more clever name to call it, but it’s making me think about sugar and the institutionalization of it. Like how sugar in the U.S. is allowed in EVERYTHING. And it’s like corporations consciously use neurobiological vulnerabilities to promote chemical addictions in order to have an unquestioning consumer who is obedient.
And if you own the companies that produce sugary products, then the profits funnel to you, so then it doesn’t matter what product you buy they will still make money, and since you can promote product diversity as a free market principle even though [the products] are all the same crap, then you have a way to dupe your consumer into thinking they have a choice in product selection, but still have them unaware that they are robots in their own consumption.
And what’s worse, is you’ll have them be so loyal, that if someone speaks out, they are systematically shut down, and they will fight you about [the “virtues” of] free market capitalism and try to slander you as much as possible, because there is a lot of control and money involved in the sugar industrial complex.”
[…]
My friend responds by asking if I have read/heard about the idea of libertarian paternalism and a nudge system where consumers can still have their “choice” respected, and the “free market” can still exist. (My friend not agreeing or disagreeing, just giving me food for thought). I then respond:
“Kinda. Sorta like taxing junk food. People and the market would have a fit if junk food was taxed because it’d be seen [as] this attack on bodily choice and the government not allowing you to “pollute” your body because it’s your body and you can do whatever you want. Goes back to the idea of nature, nature (our bodies) exist for our consumption and therefore it is our right and duty to exploit them. Never mind that it means shorter lives and destruction of species for monocrop sugar (not to mention socioeconomic exploitation of labourers as a byproduct). People are so resistant to the idea that less junk, in this case sugar, is a good thing for our species because we’re able to think more clear and our bodies work better.
So it should never have to get to the point of libertarian paternalism because treating your bodies like the beautiful pieces of nature that they are should just be a given, and therefore no real need for the government to be involved. If we really cared about our bodies, then we wouldn’t need others to tell us sugar overconsumption is detrimental to our health and has ripple effects (like in the U.S. so much kidney disease) which in the long run has catastrophic medical impacts.
So it’s not about free will and restricting [free will], it’s about how we have become so shortsighted in how we view our bodies, and how we know better, but we actively choose not to engage with this knowledge.
Hmm…. [this sugar thing] is starting to sound a lot like climate change denial.”
We then proceeded to talk about other stuff related to dismantling and critiquing colonial culture.
Moving on,
Sugar is one of many examples and products of colonial nation states that I believe adequately demonstrate the inner workings and short term conquests of present day colonialism, and can even offer insight into solutions for dismantling these oppressive systems by challenging current models of consumption.
Here are then some big key points of the workings of colonialism utilizing macro observations of sugar (I don’t claim to be the only one to have made these observations, so if you can provide more citations, please let me know):
You take a naturally occurring phenomena, sugar, and you ideologically translate it into a product that can be sold for money. Think about what the U.S. has done to all the varieties of corn that exist/ed. Same general idea.
You displace the original natural relationships involved with the product. In sugar’s case, you extract the sugar from the sugar cane or sugar beet (or make it synthetically), and there is no longer a natural carrier of this sugar. I.e. you can now spoon in your sugar into your coffee/tea versus having to eat a whole apple or berry or banana or some other whole fruit. This removes the relationships we have with fruit trees/bushes, land, and seasons. Now, instead of having a different colored whole fruit at different times of the year, we have a package of white processed cocaine like substance we can liberally pour into our food/drinks/etc. Harvesting knowledge is lost, relationships with natural earth cycles are no longer part of life, and stories of the interconnectedness of plants are no longer deemed important.
Once the product has been displaced, you extract and exploit the money making potential of that [now] product. Because sugar is so “delicious” to so many people, it is easy to sell. Because it makes people want to consume more, it is even easier to sell to large scale production companies so that they can put sugar in everything and keep people buying their products. From this vantage point of acquiring profit, sugar is a “win win” situation for those that stand to benefit from making profit within the capitalist/colonial regime. I’m sure there are even folks who would argue that if we are to cut sugar consumption, then it means we are pro-unemployment as this cut would also cut jobs. It’s an easy way to put a target on those who question the motives of the systems in place who are aware that these same systems are meant to exploit the many to benefit only a few. This simple vilification overlooks the deeper colonial aspects of the non-conversation going on. This is how things like sugar are portrayed by settler colonial narratives as a “good” thing, or at least “not so bad.” (Think about oil, plastic, gas, beef-cattle, bottled water, the list goes on…)
You then create dependence on the product, so much so that it is very hard to not consume the product in some fashion. This ties into why sugar can go by so many names on package labeling, and why low fat products can just replace the fat with sugar instead (9), and why sugary products are allowed in large public places and give the spaces money with the trade off of product placement (think soda). The companies know that they are investing in long term consumers, and that their profits will build exponentially in the future the earlier and more conspicuously they can create dependence.
You find ways to create a false sense of diversity. Goes back to my previous comment in my message to my friend that in most sugary products there is all the same crap. Just change the packaging, change the colors, change the recipe, create better commercials, diversify your investments, find new niche markets. This is how companies involved with sugar stay big, stay rich, selling essentially nothing but water and sugar. This is also how they maintain a large enough profit margin to where they can easily settle lawsuits to keep their revenue streams going while silencing those in opposition to their poison selling.
You silence the communities this impacts the most or vilify them for their lack of “personal choice.” This is the modern day equivalent of displacing Indigenous people from their ancestral land, and then telling them that if they just tried harder maybe they could succeed in our corporate “democracy.” Same idea behind “freeing” slaves but creating no social structures for them to do well, so these former slaves have to join the military to help settler colonial folk kill off Indigenous people and take their land just so the former slaves are able to have enough food to live. When you systematically create a demand for a product that destroys bodies, then you have a source of funding that comes from expendable bodies, which serves as a self sustaining stream of revenue and profit for those corporations selling the sugar. They know this.
You begin to nanny state them. You call the treatment of their bodies a “crisis,” and you demand government intervention. You as a sugar product selling company when pressed for accountability say that this is from lack of education, so you donate large sums of money to schools in the area on the condition that they place your soda machines as conspicuously as possible in the most visited spaces, and if not in the schools, then in your towns. The government intervenes and says that there is an obesity crisis/health crisis, but because sugar is “not so evil,” it is high fat foods that are attacked. So fatty fried foods are replaced with high sugar packaged processed fruit bowls, high fat milk is replaced with high sugar low fat milk. In shorter words, the colonial government (in cahoots with corporations so much so that they are many times not different at all) tell you what is good for you. It is important to note that at this stage there is NO meaningful consultation with the communities this affects, and any consultation typically is a forced signature of someone who stands to also profit off of this exploitation or who was not well informed. Sound a lot like the “treaty negotiations” of western colonizers with Indigenous people the world over? That’s because it is.
This nanny state point is the most difficult to conceptualize and articulate for most people. I think it is difficult because most people don’t see the long chain of events that gets something as “simple” as a soda vending machine into an elementary school or large public area, and how colonial nation states and “big business” (a product of colonization) are intimately tied, and depend on each other for survival. One cannot exist without the other.
There is a strong incentive to create cycles of socioeconomic exploitation of people’s bodies related to product consumption, and this product can also be “just” an idea in a contemporary sense. This socioeconomic exploitation is different from creating demand, as demand is directly correlated to the settler colonial population “requiring” said product. The socioeconomic exploitation of peoples refers to the actual workers and the society they are a part of that is being used to provide such product, as well as the vicious cycles of poverty and colonial-nation-state dependence this can create. Take for example the Caribbean island Martinique which is a French territory, where sugar and banana are main cultivations, and where neither banana nor sugar are native to the land. The plantations also developed through slavery after many of the Indigenous people of the island were exterminated, and France directly benefits from the sale of the production of these monocrops, while Martinique is left in less than ideal conditions. (10) Examples like these are ever-occurring for many other industrial monocrops. I also want to make note that I am not necessarily equating slavery with Indigenous colonization, though the two can and often do exist simultaneously, nor am I stating that slavery and colonization are clean cut concepts that only happened to either Black or Indigenous peoples as this would not acknowledge the complex intersectionality that can occur. In the Americas, slaves were stolen from Africa while the majority of Indigenous Americans (all Americans, not just U.S.) had genocide committed against them. Once the lands were clear of these peoples, mass agriculture could/would be introduced, and the slaves were the “people” [read: non-human animals unworthy of decent treatment] who provided the work.
Interestingly enough, when slavery was abolished through the emancipation proclamation in the U.S., many former slaves had no choice but to join the U.S. army in eradicating Indigenous peoples (having the “choice” of no employment, no land ownership, no assets, and hoping not to starve to death versus fighting in the army killing the Indigenous people and having a meager chance of living another day is NOT a choice) (11). This is how a product such as sugar can be made into a colonial product by displacing Indigenous people from their land, and then using forced labor to produce the product off of the stolen land. A product such as sugar can then promote Indigenous genocide and forced slavery because the supply chain is untraceable, the product itself is now literally an inescapable part of our everyday lives, and there is no single entity that can be held accountable. This design of colonialism is intentional. This design ensures that if one part of the chain is broken through accountability of government or public sanctions, the rest of the chain can absorb those revenue losses and remain unaffected in the larger picture. This is also how socioeconomic exploitation is created and becomes institutionalized.
Also, genocide is a strong term, but I use it and it gets used frequently to mean exactly that: genocide. If you are creating conditions where those affected cannot escape the systems they are a part of that will eventually lead to their death and socioeconomic violence that is not of their own creation, then that is promoting genocide (11). Think about this next time you stir in a bit of extra sugar to your tea/coffee or buy a soda can, or tell others that sugar is not a big deal. Can sugar use in a contemporary sense ever be free from its colonial past, if yes, how?
The next point is: colonization allows settler colonial people and mind-frames to absolve themselves of any responsibility. “The weight of this reality is uncomfortable; the misery of guilt makes one hurry toward any reprieve” (12). This is evident when we try to rationalize our sugar consumption as “it’s not that bad,” or “well at least I only use a little bit of sugar.” This point is important because when many of us are faced with the reality of the products we consume, we may actively try to ignore the facts about this product that make us uncomfortable. We know sugar production requires too much land where people have been displaced, we know monocrops are literally genetic trash of our own colonial creations that will eventually fail all of us, we know that sugar is something that corporations add to EVERYTHING fully aware of sugar’s addictive properties, and we know that sugar literally rots our teeth and bodies, but we EAT IT ANYWAY.
From a social interaction viewpoint, all of these things happening are complex. If we go back to the individual choice logic, can we really blame a person born into a poor socioeconomic situation whose only fruit intake comes from sugared up snack packs because that’s what the government has said they will give them? No, I don’t think so. But, can we hold those people accountable who are privileged enough to make a choice about their sugar consumption, and know full well that added sugar is just generally a no-win situation. Yes, I think we should hold people accountable, but the problem becomes how? We can’t hold them accountable (yet) because these are the same people that are benefitting from the exploitation of bodies via sugar consumption. We can’t hold them accountable because these are the same people who have vested interests in maintaining the systems that promote sugar consumption and other products. These are the people with the assets and resources that could actually collectively make huge changes within a weeks time.
But this is how colonization operates. When these same people can tell themselves that they are “good” people and trying their hardest because they donate a few dollars to a random organization for poor people every month (that’ll provide these poor people with sugary products to consume), or attend expensive fundraising galas where the costs to produce the gala are exorbitant, then these are the settler colonial people who don’t want to feel uncomfortable and want no change in their lifestyle no matter how many people are suffering from their actual ability to make choices. When we are not part of this social class of people, but have the know how and minimal financial resources required to remove large portions of sugar from our diet yet we don’t, then we are also pandering to this settler-colonial mind-frame and trying to absolve ourselves of responsibility because it is “just too hard right now.” Interestingly, “right now” seems to never end. These ideas above go a bit beyond “just” sugar of course, but sugar is used here to illustrate the workings of colonialism, but I’m sure you can see the parallels with many other products and ideas.
One last important point I’ll make is that settler colonial people stand to benefit from all of this, or at the very least are not at all affected by colonialism in the short term, so there is no incentive for systemic change. That’s right, sugar consumption to the point of detrimental health doesn’t impact settler-colonial people, it doesn’t touch certain social classes, and these people know the shitty stuff sugar can do to your bodies. What’s important here is that they can actively choose to not participate in sugar consumption. The narrative then becomes that “those” impoverished people consuming sugar should just make better informed decisions and consume less sugar, duh. This rationalization erases all the privileges that a settler colonial person may have had because of the fortune of WHAT THEY WERE BORN INTO or how DOMINANT SYSTEMS PRIVILEGE THE SUCCESS OF PEOPLE LIKE THEM. I.e. settler colonialism perpetuates the false narrative that everyone has the same agency in individual choice. To a settler colonial person, these facts are seen as not that big a deal: being born with titles to large plots of land, or having access to inherited financial resources, or having access to social connections built off of internalized institutionalized racism over centuries that will allow certain types of people easier access than others, particularly the more their phenotype looks like the majority of settler colonial people.
The settler colonial narrative says that “these people” should just try better in consuming less sugar and the problem comes from a lack of will and defective character. Therefore there is nothing that these settler colonial people can do they argue. This type of narrative erases the systemic manipulations that create poverty, and places the blame on those impacted communities for being born or displaced into these types of systems and/or having a different phenotype than the majority of settler colonial people. The above points also demonstrate how settler colonial folk telling you that only individual choice can fix all of societies ills is a “solution” only perpetuates colonization.
This post is of course not just about sugar as a product, it’s about sugar as a concept because of its use as an engineered product to systematically promote colonialism. The post is an intellectual exercise of looking at a popular “everyday product” and the colonization involved. These products are part of colonization because a lot of the products we have been told we can take for granted do the same thing: they displace our relationships with our own bodies, and therefore our relationship with the planet and nature, and they diminish our creativity in being able to be self sufficient within smaller communities. This is the same ideological concept of moving large populations of Indigenous peoples to less productive lands so that settler colonial people can keep the original land to produce and sell products back to Indigenous peoples to create a dependence and make a profit to feed their greed. This looks like gentrification (termed resettlement) in more recent times, and in sugar’s case, this looks like poverty and food deserts where sugar is used to displace more whole foods in the diet.
These products also hide their extractive destructive nature behind words such as “fair trade,” “natural,” “ethically harvested,” “cage free,” or a myriad of other labels and complex naming systems all of which have typically been developed by the colonial nation states themselves. Even though the product with these labels itself might be “okay” to an extent, the amount of plastic used, amount of resources destroyed, and fuel used in transport is never really tracked, especially when the product is pitched as having some sort of direct benefit to human pleasure.
In conclusion, these are just some thoughts on sugar consumption, and I hope they make you think about your own life and the impacts of any “quick sugar fixes” you may participate in, and how those fixes are so normalized in our various cultures, despite the fact that they are literally killing us faster.
I will leave you with a positive note, and a potential start to finding solutions to dismantling the ongoing history of a very violent and oppressive colonialism related to sugar consumption, an initiative to get folks to eat more whole produce: https://www.aglanta.org/urban-food-forest-at-browns-mill-1
References:
1)
World Health Organization. (2015). Guideline: sugar intake for adults and children. accessed online at: https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/149782/9789241549028_eng.pdf;jsessionid=76EA5240A6C303342F5C7C43CFDA528B?sequence=1
2)
https://sugarscience.ucsf.edu/hidden-in-plain-sight/#.XRJhzJNKjVo
3)
Newens, J.K. & Walton, J. (2016). A review of sugar consumption from nationally representative dietary surveys across the world. Journal of Human Nutrition and Dietetics, 29(2): 225-240. accessed online at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5057348/
4)
https://www.google.com/search?q=Dictionary
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https://www.health.harvard.edu/heart-health/the-sweet-danger-of-sugar
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Bray, G.A. & Popkin, B.M. (2014). Dietary sugar and body weight: have we reached a crisis in the epidemic of obesity and diabetes? health be damned! Pour on the sugar. Diabetes Care. (37)4:950-956. accessed online at: https://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/37/4/950.long
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Klurfeld, D.M. (2013). What Do Government Agencies Consider in the Debate over Added Sugars? Advances in Nutrition. 4(2): 257-261. accessed online at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3649106/
8)
https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/sugar-sweeteners/background/
9)
Nguyen, P.K., Lin, S., Heidenreich, P. (2016). A systematic comparison of sugar content in low-fat vs regular versions of food. Nutrition & Diabetes. 6(1): e193. accessed online at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4742721/
10)
Childers, K.S. (2006). Citizenship and Assimilation in Postwar Martinique: The Abolition of Slavery and the Politics of Commemoration. Journal of the Western Society for French History. 34. accessed online at: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/w/wsfh/0642292.0034.018?view=text;rgn=main
Wong, A. & Gomes, R. (2012). Intractable Social-Economic Problems of Martinique. Études caribéenes. accessed online at: https://journals.openedition.org/etudescaribeennes/6073?lang=en
11)
Dunbar-Ortiz, R. (2014). An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. Beacon Press.
12)
Tuck, E. & Yang, K.W. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1): 1-40. accessed online at: https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/view/18630/15554
See also:
Wildcat, M. et al. (2014). Learning from the land: Indigenous land based pedagogy and decolonization. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 3(3): I-XV. accessed online at: https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/view/22248/18062
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