Sugar

The biggest change brought about by the industrial food revolution is that food producers (one cannot really call them farmers) have figured out how to grow and manufacture as cheaply and efficiently as possible exactly what people have desired for million of years: fat, starch, sugar, and salt. The result of their ingenuity is a superabundance of inexpensive calorie-dense food. Consider sugar. The only really sweet food a hunter-gatherer can eat is honey, which usually requires walking many miles to find a hive, climbing the tree, smoking out the bees, and then bringing the honeycomb back. Sugarcane became a crop in the middle Ages, and its cultivation accelerated during the eighteenth century, largely by using slaves to produce massive quantities in plantations. With the end of slavery in the late nineteenth century, industrial methods were applied to sugar production, and modern farmers now use specialized tractors to plant enormous fields of domesticated sugarcane and sugar beets, which have been bred to be as sweet as possible. Other machines are used to irrigate the plants and to make and spread fertilizers and pesticides, which increase yields and minimize crop looses. Once grown, these supersweet plants are harvested and processed by yet more machines to extract the sugar, which is then packed and shipped all over the world by ships, trains, and trucks. The availability of sugar increased even more dramatically in the 1970s when chemists devised a method to transform cornstarch into as sugary syrup (high fructose corn syrup). About half the sugar Americans consume now derives from corn. After adjusting for inflation, a pound of sugar today costs one-fifth what it did one hundred years ago. Sugar has become so superabundant and so cheap that the average American consumes more than 100 pounds (45 kilograms) a year! Perversely, some people now pay extra money to buy foods made with less sugar. ~ Page 220