Sugar: A Bittersweet History

Sugar: A Bittersweet History tells the story of sugar in the world and explores how its cultivation created a new form of slavery, began the fast food industry, and has led to modern obesity dangers. From its roots in the 18th century when European businessmen turned the Caribbean islands into sugarcane farms to sugar's move from a luxury item to an everyday staple, and its influence on the concept of meals, this is a 'must' for any culinary collection.

I picked up this book on recommendation of NPR's summer reading list, and boy!--what a great book. The history of sugar sounds interesting enough for perhaps a chapter or two, but with ELizabth Abbott skillfully crafting the narrative, a full 400 pages just fly by, reading at times like a novel! I, too, like other readers here, will never eat sugar again without remembering the painful, terrifying and bitter legacy that accompanies it to my taste buds!

I saw a review in a newspaper and decided to read this book for insights into what I thought was an extremely lucrative industry that, among other things, supposedly populated the British aristocracy. I was looking for insights for picking future gravy-train industries.

This book has amazing non-stop details, and is extremely well-written by its Candadian author. It seems that Canadian women sure know how to write non-fiction. No padding or contrived "themes," forced pop ideas, etc. This book is a non-stop detailed recounting of interesting facts. It was a relief from the stream of bad American books I've read over the last few years (and that keep coming out). If this were written by an American male, it would probably try to hammer a square peg of details into a round peg of a some hyped-up clever anthropological pop theory. Or we would read non-stop descriptions of characters (as if the author was told by his editor to "personalize" the characters--make them exciting, and make the book artificially exciting).

One sees in this book's non-stop, unexpected details how sugar was always a hazardous business, with non-stop unexpected catastrophes, small problems, and bankruptcies. I'll bet an American writer would not mention inconvenient details like rats in the fields. That led me to think that someone should write a book on the history of rats in agriculture. I know that rats were tied to the Black Death, but I never thought much about rats in agriculture (except when I saw a documentary about rats in India collecting and hoarding rice grains from the fields).

Abbott has wriitten an incisive overview of the history of sugar and its affect on past and present societies. The information about sugar's role in the slave trade will be enough to send you back to high fructose corn syrup. A great read for the archair historian.

Sugar: A Bittersweet History, is a engaging and unrelenting look at the growth of the sugar industry across the globe, and the reprecussions this seemingly commonplace item had on history and culture. Abbott herself is a descendent of Antiguan sugar producers; her personal history sparks an in-depth and refreshingly gripping account of the growth of the sugar industry in the Carribean, continuing through sugar's integral role in the Industrial Revolution, and leading up to modern times. What makes Abbott's book more than a mere history tome is the thread of detailed, harsh and revealing first-hand stories of individuals closely involved in the sugar trade, specifically plantation slave accounts. Given the recent tragedy in Haiti and how much of modern Haitian political and social instability relates back to its age as the most wealthy colony in the western hemisphere due to the sugar trade, Abbott's reflections and intimate history of Haitian sugar production struck me as especially relevant and enthralling.