Darra Goldstein - The Oxford companion to sugar and sweets

I can remember easily the first time I stood deep in a field of sugarcane in full bloom, a field already marked for harvesting. It was the spring of 1948, and I had just begun fieldwork in Puerto Rico. The field lay in a rural barrio on the south coast of the island, only about a hundred yards inland from the beach. The well-irrigated soil in which the cane was growing was clayey, black in color. It looked cool under a blinding sun, but the air in the field was intensely hot.

The cane was the kind called gran cultura (literally, big growth), a term that means only that it was left to grow for 15 months or even more before being cut. Topped by the pale, wheat-like, lavender sugarcane blossoms they call guajana, the cane was thicker than a mans wrist. Standing more than 12 feet tall, these plants are bred to be one of the most substantial and important economic grasses in the world. They were full to bursting of their intensely sweet green sap, guarapo, which is drunk by the cupful nearly everywhere that cane is grown.

That sap is not won easily from the cane. Once it is cut and stripped of its leaves, it must be delivered to the mill as soon as possible to be crushed, ground, and soaked to extract its juice, before it begins to dry out or to sour. When freshly extracted, guarapo is definitely an acquired taste, even among sweet-crazed humans. Gray-green in color, lukewarm and cloying, and, if not strained, full of bits of cane fiber and other even less pleasant stuff, it also brims over with calories. The cane on a single acre of good tropical land can supply about 8 million calories. To get that many calories in wheat requires 9 to 12 acres. (And how many acres to get that many calories in beef? Dont even ask.)

There is a great deal aesthetically pleasing about sugarcane. Each stalk is a tiny living photosynthetic factory, transformed by human effort to maximize its yield. But the history of these beautiful grasses, and of the people who have looked after them during these last 2,000 years or so, is not so much beautiful as profoundly tragic.

After 30 years study of sugar and the countries that grow sugarcane and sugar beet and produce sugar in the New World, I started to write a book about it. I aimed to uncover the part that sugar played in world history during the first chapter of the economic system called capitalism. I knew something about the history of sugar. I realized that I would have to do what I could with this one thin thread, of sweetness and violence, embedded in the thick fabric of the past and stretching far back, long before anything like capitalism could even have been dreamed of. I found unexpected masses of data, much of it fascinating. What kept me afloat in a sea of alluring description was the simple hunch that sugarcane was not merely a dessert crop, as scholars of tea, coffee, chocolate, and sugar were wont to describe it. Far more than desserts, I thought, the history of sugars production and consumption might shed a bright light on the everyday unfolding of the capitalistic system.

Since it was linked for at least five centuries to the pain and suffering of millions of human beings, I have long thought of sugars sweet thread as red in colorthe color of blood. During the long struggle against the slave trade and slavery, blood was in fact the liquid the abolitionists came to invoke to depict the terrible work of men and women in chains: a teaspoonful of sugar for so many drops of blood.