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The World of Sugar - How the Sweet Stuff Transformed Our Politics, Health, and Environment over 2,000 Years (Hardcover)
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The World of Sugar - How the Sweet Stuff Transformed Our Politics, Health, and Environment over 2,000 Years (Hardcover)
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The definitive 2,500-year history of sugar and its human costs,
from its little-known origins as a luxury good in Asia to worldwide
environmental devastation and the obesity pandemic. For most of
history, humans did without refined sugar. After all, it serves no
necessary purpose in our diets, and extracting it from plants takes
hard work and ingenuity. Granulated sugar was first produced in
India around the sixth century BC, yet for almost 2,500 years
afterward sugar remained marginal in the diets of most people.
Then, suddenly, it was everywhere. How did sugar find its way into
almost all the food we eat, fostering illness and ecological crisis
along the way? The World of Sugar begins with the earliest evidence
of sugar production. Through the Middle Ages, traders brought small
quantities of the precious white crystals to rajahs, emperors, and
caliphs. But after sugar crossed the Mediterranean to Europe, where
cane could not be cultivated, demand spawned a brutal quest for
supply. European cravings were satisfied by enslaved labor;
two-thirds of the 12.5 million Africans taken across the Atlantic
were destined for sugar plantations. By the twentieth century,
sugar was a major source of calories in diets across Europe and
North America. Sugar transformed life on every continent, creating
and destroying whole cultures through industrialization, labor
migration, and changes in diet. Sugar made fortunes, corrupted
governments, and shaped the policies of technocrats. And it
provoked freedom cries that rang with world-changing consequences.
In Ulbe Bosma’s definitive telling, to understand sugar’s past
is to glimpse the origins of our own world of corn syrup and
ethanol and begin to see the threat that a not-so-simple commodity
poses to our bodies, our environment, and our communities.
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