I learned this today. Sugar came to England in 1069 but it wasn’t eaten by most people until 700 years later.
The average British person eats about 90kg of sugar a year. This is not only unhealthy, it is also a relatively recent trend. In 1750, it was about 1kg a year. By 1820, that had risen to about 8kg a year. In 1900 it was 40kg a year, and now it is about 90kg. Before 1700, the average person probably ate close to 0kg. Sugar was a luxury only for the wealthy.
Before sugar became well known, people did still have sweet food. The most common sweetener was honey. People have harvested honey for thousands of years. 12,000 year old cave paintings in Spain show women collecting honey. That was probably wild honey. Over time, honey farming became possible. Bees were domesticated in about 3,000 BC. They can survive in most climates and can produce honey as long as they have flowers. Honey was cheap and it lasted for a long time. Bees also produce wax, which was used for candles, but they were far more expensive than regular tallow candles, so they were only used by the wealthy. Honey also has antimicrobial properties so it was used as a medicine as well.
Sugarcane was domesticated by the Papuans in New Guinea about 6,000 years ago. From there it spread to Southern Asia. It was also independently domesticated in Southern China, particularly Taiwan, about 5,500 years ago. Sugar was not eaten as a food and was quite often given to pigs.
From Southern Asia, sugarcane made its way up into India. There, people chewed the cane for the sweet juice. Somewhere between the 4th and 3rd centuries BC, Indians worked out how to refine sugar from the juice of the sugarcane. The cane was beaten to extract the juice, which was then dried in the sun to leave lumps of sugar that looked like gravel. The first word for sugar was the Sanskrit word sharkara, which meant gravel.
From India, sugar refining techniques travelled into China and the Middle East. In the Middle East, during the Middle Ages, Arabian sugar plantations were started. Sugar farming, refining and consumption spread into Southern Europe as the Arabian Empire expanded.
Sugar came to Northern Europe and Britain during the Crusades when soldiers discovered caravans transporting “sweet salt”. The first sugar was recorded in England in 1069. As people developed a taste for it, trade developed, but sugar was as expensive as any other imported spice. The Kingdom of Venice bought some farmland and started to grow and sell their own sugar. They became the major sugar supplier to Europe. Venice had a monopoly on sugar in Europe, so other places started to grow sugarcane to compete. The Portuguese began growing sugarcane in Madeira, and by 1480 they had 70 ships engaged in the sugar trade. In the early 1500s, Portuguese traders took sugarcane to Brazil and by 1540 there were close to 3,000 sugar plantations in Brazil. They were worked by slaves brought from Africa. The Dutch also planted sugarcane in the Caribbean.
Sugar was a popular import through the 17th century and into the early 18th century, but it was an expensive luxury that only the rich could afford. This began to change as more and more places produced sugar. The price slowly came down and more people could afford it. People in Britain in 1770 ate five times more sugar than they did in 1710. The Industrial Revolution also helped bring prices down because the refining process was mechanized.
The imported sugar went into tea and coffee to begin with, but people started eating more sweet cakes, chocolates and confectionaries. Jam became very popular. A number of things happened at the same time here, which makes it difficult to judge which was the cause of which. As England industrialized, people moved into cities and their diets started to change. They had less access to fresh meat and vegetables, as they did in the countryside. People started eating more sweetened food. Because of the rising demand in Europe, sugar production in Brazil and the Caribbean increased, which made prices cheaper, increasing demand. All of the sugar was produced by slave labor until the mid 19th century.
In 1747, Andreas Siggismund Margraaf, in Germany, worked out how to get sugar out of beets. Later, Franz Karl Achard worked out how to mechanize the process. Sugar from beets wasn’t popular to begin with, but during the Napoleonic wars Britain cut France off from sugar imports, and they turned to sugar beet. Today, sugar from beets makes up about 30% of worldwide sugar.
So, sugar was first made in India over 2,000 years ago. The process slowly made its way to Europe, but it was too expensive for most people and they used honey. European powers started to grow sugarcane in their colonies and the price of sugar dropped. At the same time, people moved to cities and started to eat a lot more sugar. And this is what I learned today.
Photo by Suzy Hazelwood from Pexels
Sources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_sugar
https://www.nordzuckerireland.ie/ie/about-sugar/how-sugar-arrived-in-europe
https://www.verywellhealth.com/reduced-sugar-consumption-recommendations-5080477
https://www.etymonline.com/word/sugar
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_beet
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