Sugar, and the burning world
Sugar, oil, acid, heat.
Like anyone born deep in the Anthropocene, I thought carbon + the world = the end of the world. It wasn’t till I read Les Murray’s poem “High Sugar,” that I started to think maybe sugar was a culprit, too.
My great-grandfather worked at a sugar factory in Provo, Utah; family in Colorado live surrounded by sugar-beet fields. As a high school freshman, I often went through the lunch line and came out with a chocolate donut and chocolate milk. As an adult, I’ve used sugar as a quick-flash mood stabilizer. But after I read Murray’s poem, I started to think hard about sugar. And read about sugar. And began to feel like sugar > carbon = the end of the world.
Four days ago, Civil Eats published a piece about how sugar cane farming directly contributed to Maui’s wildfires. “The sugar cane and pineapple industries reigned for nearly two centuries, with monocropping farming methods made exceptionally profitable with indentured servitude,” it wrote. “This process transformed natural ecosystems, as the companies diverted water from wet areas of the island to irrigate the fields in the drier parts.”
As Civil Eats also pointed out, many of the cane fields now lie fallow, swallowed up by invasive weeds, because companies just pulled out and relocated to Brazil or India when workers got some leverage and demanded better working conditions and better pay.
Domino Effect
The sugar industry exists in out West, but in Louisiana, where we live now, it comes with a far more intense and traumatic history. My first encounter here with industrial sugar was spotting the Domino Sugar Refinery from the highway when Thomas and I were making weekend trips out to Chalmette to dig for plants for our garden. The factory, which is more than 100 years old, is the largest sugar refinery in the western hemipshere. It went offline in 2005 after Katrina, but rebooted and is now fully functional — you can see the vast scale of sugar production in the video below:
Louisiana has a Sugar Museum in Arabi, a Sugar Festival in Baton Rouge, a Sugar Library in Jeanerette and of course the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans. Educating oneself about sugar seems like a requisite of living here. One of the first, best stops in that education is Khalil Gibran Muhammad’s essay about “the barbaric history of sugar” for the 1619 Project.
Muhammed lays out the whole history, starting with the first cane fields in Louisiana, planted by Jesuit priests near Baronne Street in New Orleans. In 1795, after a local plantation owner, Étienne de Boré, successfully granulated sugar, “plantations exploded up and down both banks of the Mississippi River,” he writes. “All of this was possible because of the abundantly rich alluvial soil, combined with the technical mastery of seasoned French and Spanish planters from around the cane-growing basin of the Gulf and the Caribbean — and because of the toil of thousands of enslaved people.”
Those enslaved people, Muhammed says, lived in conditions so awful, their life expectencies were shorter than enslaved people at cotton plantations,“closer to that of a Jamaican cane field, where the most overworked and abused could drop dead after seven years.”
New Orleans poet Karisma Price writes about the history of sugar and enslavement in her new book, I’m Always So Serious. “Buckjump,” a poem speaking to “the souls of the enslaved buried near the sugar cane fields in West Baton Rouge Parish,” employs percussive/musical language and concrete poetry to create the experience of a second-line parade on the page. As she notes in this video, she doesn’t read the poem out loud often because there are experimental stanzas that don’t translate to a live reading, but it’s powerful. (Find a copy of the book and look at it on the page if you can.)
A Subtlety
Long before the founding of Louisiana, long before sugar production was industrialized, people of means used sugar for more than just sweetening their tea. The mega-rich of the Middle Ages commissioned sugar sculptures called soliltees, or subtleties, for their tables. As this Harvard food politics course points out, these “were more than just beautiful decorations… but emblems of wealth and power; only those of status could afford to craft, serve, and eat sugar in such gluttonous quantities. The nobility, acutely aware of this connection, were motivated to display sugar in ever grander presentations.”
In 2014, Kara Walker played off that history with her installation A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby which she built inside an abandoned Domino Sugar Factory in Brooklyn. At the center was Sugar Baby, “an enormous sugarcoated woman-sphinx with undeniably black features and wearing only an Aunt Jemima kerchief and earrings,” as New York Times art critic Roberta Smith wrote, surrounded by “molasses-colored boys — underage blackamoors — made of cast resin or cast sugar, who introduced further dichotomies of light and dark, raw and cooked.”
As Smith observed, Walker’s work described a “self-destructing present, where sugar is something of a scourge, its excessive consumption linked to diseases like obesity and diabetes that disproportionately affect the poor. The circle of exploitation and degradation is in many ways unbroken. No longer a luxury, sugar has become a birthright and the opiate of the masses. We look on it like money, with greed. Heavily promoted, it keeps millions of Americans of all races from fulfilling their potential — an inestimable loss in terms of talent, health and happiness.”
The losses extend to the nonhuman world, too, in Maui and elsewhere. As several enviromental groups, including WWF, have pointed out, industrial sugar production is linked not just to fossil fuel emissions — it takes a lot of gas to keep those tractors chugging — but habitat loss, soil erosion, heavy pesticide and fertilizer use, soil contamination and dead zones in rivers, lakes and oceans. Both sugar cane and beets suck up a lot water from local waterways, too. Domino knows this, which is why they’re invested in looking eco-friendly — which resulted in this somewhat amusing exchange (via Wikipedia):
In 2009, Domino had its Domino Granulated Sugar and Florida Crystals brands certified as carbon neutral by the Carbonfund.org Foundation. It began including the foundation's CarbonFree partner logo on product packaging. The certification involved carbon offsetsas well as changes to the production process. Some commentators noted in response that it was chemically impossible for sucrose (C12H22O11) to be free of carbon. The company issued a statement to clarify that “CarbonFree” referred to the production process rather than the product itself, and was not the same as the phrase “carbon free.”
Poet and conservationist W.S. Merwin knew firsthand what sugar could do to a landscape. He moved to Maui in the ‘70s and began rehabiltating land ravaged by plantations, largely by planting palm trees. He died in 2019, but The Merwin Conservancy still tends those lands. Eerily and sadly enough, the 2014 documentary on his ecological efforts is titled Even Though The Whole World is Burning.
“On the last day of the world / I would want to plant a tree,” Merwin wrote in his poem Place. In its 2015 New Yorker review of the documentary, it notes that for 40 years, Merwin “planted a tree every day that he could, restoring nineteen acres of land in Haiku, Hawaii, even as it seemed the world might well be ending, first from military conflict and then from ecological crisis. The film is a chronicle of a man struggling to make meaning through tiny, trembling acts. The palm forest, like Merwin’s poetry, has become a kind of prophetic stance against contemporary life: bearing witness to individual, almost foolish acts of creativity while devastation abounds.”
Can making art despite of the destruction, out of the ingredients of the destruction, be a homeopathic remedy against it? I feel Kara Walker’s art does that. Karisma Price’s poems do that, too.
There are many artists engaged in that work, folks talented and smart enough to counteract coercive magic like this oldie from “The Dominmo Sugar Bowl Kitchen,” which argues that sugar is a low-calorie, nourishing health food that will give you a zip of energy and make life great. We know that’s a lie, but still eat the cake. We need people to remind us that before we put the cake in our mouth, we might think hard about how much it costs us, and how much it costs the world.
Borrowing a cup of sugar (AKA getting the kitchen in order)
In January, I started this newsletter, and posted twice a week. Whew. Too much! I blew my circuits and I overwhelmed readers. I cut back to Wednesday, which ended up, more often than not, being Friday. Going forward, because I’ll be in grad-schooling M-F, I’m changing Historiola! into a weekend brunch read. I’ll send this guy out, fingers crossed, around 7 a.m. (not 7 p.m.) on Sundays.
Thanks for your patience as I recalibrate…. everything!
In other news, Thomas started a new project. He’s doing micro Q&As with ever other Crone-titled newsletters on this platform. Crones/crones, non-crones/Crones and cronies, check it out!
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I don’t like sugar in my coffee (just milk, another problematic white ingredient), but if you want to support the work I do here, you can always buy me a coffee.
Evil aside, I'm tickled that Domino calls the bulk sugar warehouse a "sugar shack" even though it's the size of a zeppelin hanger.
Such amazing research in this piece! I've heard before about how damaging sugar plantations are to the environment but I tend to forget about it because it's really not something you hear about often. You always hear about the more obvious ways were harming the environment (cars, planes, trash, etc.), but not things like sugar. Kind of makes me think of how we often pick and choose what we want to criticize and turn a blind eye when we feel like it.
Also really loved your ending! Very powerful.