The Sugar Love Triangle

Food is a big deal. Everyone needs it and most everyone loves it. But food, namely sugar has a dark side. Thousands of people were enslaved, hundreds of thousands died, millions of people still suffer the consequences of the sugar high during the 1500s-1600s. Because our ancestors had a sweet tooth, today we deal with the fall out of slavery. Here's how the story goes...

Early in our history, sugar came from sugar cane. Sugar cane is kinda bamboo like and the process of extracting it is pretty complex. It was discovered in India, where the crusaders sampled the sugary goodness and brought it home.
The English (the Spanish too) fell in love with sugar and wanted to mass produce it. Tough luck for them, they didn't really have the warm tropical weather you need to grow sugar cane. India wasn't tropical enough and it produced to low a yield for the growing sugar market. On second thought, they had quite a bit of land in the New World. So they set out for the Caribbean and started sugar plantations.

Everything was going according to plan except that almost all their workers were dying of malaria and all those fun tropical diseases. Slaving away all day in the sun only to die of some exotic tropical disease was not exactly what the English (and Spanish too) signed up for. But the sweet tooth wouldn't go away. They needed cheap labor and tragically it was easy to find.

Tribal warfare in Africa resulted in the winning tribe selling off the loosing tribe (warriors, wives and children) to the highest bidder. The English had the perfect item to barter with: guns. Thus began the great sugar love triangle. Guns made in England were taken to Africa. The guns were loaded off and the slaves were loaded on. The slaves traveled across the ocean and dropped off in the "West Indies" where they worked on the sugar plantations. The boats picked up the sugar and sold it in England where they got gold and more guns.

The love triangle hit its breaking point when a brilliant German, Andreas Marggraf discovered how to extract sugar from sugar beats in 1747. Sugar beats are hardy, grow everywhere, and sugar is easily extracted from them. Sugar became easy to get, and coincidental with the sugar surplus, England abolished slavery in 1772. That's 25 short years for everyone keeping score at home.

The American War of Independence started three years later in 1775. When the great Constitution was adopted as law in 1787, it not once mentioned slavery. The logic is simple. The demand for slaves was being shot down by the sugar-beat extraction method. Very few new slaves were being brought from Africa, and people were generally pretty moral and set their slaves free. Our founding fathers created the greatest form of government, and made sure to address everything from religion to basic rights. It is no mistake they didn't address slavery. They assumed it would just die off, and they would have been right if it hadn't been for Eli Whitney.

1793, six years after the Constitution was approved, 21 years after England abolished slavery, and 46 years after the sugar beat method was invented Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin. Sadly, the slaves were already in the perfect cotton growing climate and the old sugar plantations just needed a tiny bit of remodeling.

So began the cotton plantation. Plantations, where slaves were treated as animals, led to the Civil War. Slaves were used as pawns to get the English and French on the side of the North. With slaves now bearing the guilt of the war, it lead to resentment of the Reconstruction, the KKK, and thousands of lynchings. Extreme racism occurred just one generation ago, and today we still hotly debate affirmative action.

Who knew that sugar would cause so much trouble.