David Singerman

I'm David Singerman.

I'm an assistant professor of history and American studies at the University of Virginia, and I'm the author of a book, Unrefined, How Capitalism Reinvented Sugar.

Two weeks, no sugar, what would happen?

The first thing is your mood would get a lot better.

Well, I think sugar consumers and even political leaders have been kind of conflicted about sugar for a long time, but it is pretty unusual for people in power to oppose sugar this publicly on these kinds of health grounds.

I think it's probably worth acknowledging or just starting off by acknowledging how much sugar American society consumes.

So right now it's about 120 pounds per person per year.

Oh, wow.

And this is actually a decline from the turn of the century.

In 1999, it peaked at 153 pounds per person.

Wow.

And to put that in some kind of perspective, it was about 80 pounds in 1910, and it was like six pounds in 1800s.

Sugar has been consumed for a very long time, for many thousands of years.

But until about 500 years ago, it was largely, at least in European society, an expensive, rare product.

And then the big trend that you can see over the last five or six centuries is that the price of sugar has gone down because it was such a valuable commodity that empires wanted to find places they could grow it and then sell it.

And so this really drove European expansion into islands in the Atlantic, in the Caribbean, in Brazil, and to North America.

You know, in America, I think, in the United States at least, when we think about African-American slavery, we think about tobacco and cotton primarily.

But if you look at it on a hemispheric scale, sugar was the most important driver of enslavement, right?

Something like 75 or 80 percent of the Africans who were enslaved and brought to the New World were brought to work on sugar plantations.

Wow.