“The true Age of Sugar had begun - and it was doing more to reshape the world than any ruler, empire or war had ever done,” Marc Aronson and Marina Budhos write in their 2010 book, “Sugar Changed the World.” Over the four centuries that followed Columbus’s arrival, on the mainlands of Central and South America in Mexico, Guyana and Brazil as well as on the sugar islands of the West Indies - Cuba, Barbados and Jamaica, among others - countless indigenous lives were destroyed and nearly 11 million Africans were enslaved, just counting those who survived the Middle Passage. It was the introduction of sugar slavery in the New World that changed everything. It remained little more than an exotic spice, medicinal glaze or sweetener for elite palates. From the earliest traces of cane domestication on the Pacific island of New Guinea 10,000 years ago to its island-hopping advance to ancient India in 350 B.C., sugar was locally consumed and very labor-intensive. Even before harvest time, rows had to be dug, stalks planted and plentiful wood chopped as fuel for boiling the liquid and reducing it to crystals and molasses. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Libraryįor thousands of years, cane was a heavy and unwieldy crop that had to be cut by hand and immediately ground to release the juice inside, lest it spoil within a day or two. It seems reasonable to imagine that it might have remained so if it weren’t for the establishment of an enormous market in enslaved laborers who had no way to opt out of the treacherous work.Ĭhildren on a Louisiana sugar-cane plantation around 1885. In Europe at that time, refined sugar was a luxury product, the backbreaking toil and dangerous labor required in its manufacture an insuperable barrier to production in anything approaching bulk. None of this - the extraordinary mass commodification of sugar, its economic might and outsize impact on the American diet and health - was in any way foreordained, or even predictable, when Christopher Columbus made his second voyage across the Atlantic Ocean in 1493, bringing sugar-cane stalks with him from the Spanish Canary Islands. Among black non-Hispanic women, they are nearly double those of white non-Hispanic women, and one and a half times higher for black men than white men. During the same period, diabetes rates overall nearly tripled. Over the last 30 years, the rate of Americans who are obese or overweight grew 27 percent among all adults, to 71 percent from 56 percent, according to the Centers for Disease Control, with African-Americans overrepresented in the national figures. If it is killing all of us, it is killing black people faster. Sugar has been linked in the United States to diabetes, obesity and cancer. It aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative. The 1619 Project is an ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine that began in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. That’s nearly twice the limit the department recommends, based on a 2,000-calorie diet.
Americans consume as much as 77.1 pounds of sugar and related sweeteners per person per year, according to United States Department of Agriculture data.
Louisiana’s sugar-cane industry is by itself worth $3 billion, generating an estimated 16,400 jobs.Ī vast majority of that domestic sugar stays in this country, with an additional two to three million tons imported each year. The United States sugar industry receives as much as $4 billion in annual subsidies in the form of price supports, guaranteed crop loans, tariffs and regulated imports of foreign sugar, which by some estimates is about half the price per pound of domestic sugar. The United States makes about nine million tons of sugar annually, ranking it sixth in global production. Those ubiquitous four-pound yellow paper bags emblazoned with the company logo are produced here at a rate of 120 bags a minute, 24 hours a day, seven days a week during operating season. It is North America’s largest sugar refinery, making nearly two billion pounds of sugar and sugar products annually. Domino Sugar’s Chalmette Refinery in Arabi, La., sits on the edge of the mighty Mississippi River, about five miles east by way of the river’s bend from the French Quarter, and less than a mile down from the Lower Ninth Ward, where Hurricane Katrina and the failed levees destroyed so many black lives.