James Rorty and Dr. N. Philip Norman advance lively historical evidence which argues that even when resources are adequate, sheer accidents of fate plus plain human perversity can unfit soil, food and human health not only for the living but for generations unborn. Both of these authors, a crusading writer and a pioneer nutritionist, are doughty foes of denatured food. Prentice-Hall, Inc. of New York will publish a book-length blast on this similar subject by Rorty and Norman in the near future.
It seems clear that Napoleon Bonaparte had a good deal to do with causing the rising incidence of diabetes mellitus in our time, and that a fly-by-night Polish promoter named Mueller was substantially to blame for both the increasing erosion of American soils that occurred after 1880, and for the rise in the deficiency diseases that began to alarm us about the turn of the last century.
Lest we be accused of concocting ecological “who-dunits,” let us hasten to adduce facts of record; first, our reasons for hanging one more millstone of guilt about the neck of the unspeakable Corsican.
In 1800 the warring British blockaded the French ports, thereby depriving the French people of their customary supplies of sugar derived from the West Indies. Nutritionally, even total abstinence from refined sugar would have been nothing to worry about. The populations of the world had been getting along very well on honey and the more sugary fruits and vegetables for countless centuries before machine processes for refining sugar-cane juice were invented. But by 1800 the French people had already acquired something of a “sweet tooth,” so Napoleon instructed French scientists to find without delay a substitute for the cane sugar which could no longer be shipped from the Caribbean. They tried everything from apples and plums to walnuts and chestnuts. Finally, one Benjamin Delassert, following the earlier experiments of the Germans Margraf and Achard, produced a crystallized sugar from beets. Napoleon gave him the Cross of Honor.
Beet sugar is identical chemically with cane sugar. Its discovery enabled the temperate regions to enter the sugar market in competition with the tropics. In the ensuing rivalry the price dropped and consumption spiralled upward. When the sugar beet countries were at war, the tropical producers stepped up their production. When the war ended, state subsidies were demanded and obtained to get the sugar beet producers back into the market. Whereupon the cane sugar producers mined their soil to the limit, exploited their half-starved labor ruthlessly until there were slave riots in the “poor house of the Caribbean” and went broke anyway. Soon technological improvements increased man-hour productivity and yielded a pure hard white crystalline product from which practically all traces of vitamin and mineral content had been eliminated so that it could be shipped anywhere and kept indefinitely. Again the price dropped, and again the per capita consumption jumped.
Up to this time, with the possible exception of the Hindu physicians Caraka, Susruta and Vagbhata, who during the first centuries after Christ had suggested that too much sugar was not good for some people and had described a disease then considered fatal, which modern physicians have identified as diabetes mellitus, sugar as a food had been practically exempt from criticism. Such criticism appears for the first time in the early part of the nineteenth century by which time, significantly, sugar had become “pure,” that is to say, devoid of minerals and vitamins.
In 1836 the Frenchman Bouchardat isolated a pure crystalline sugar from the urine of diabetics. Noting that the quantity of the sugar in the urine was in constant ratio with the quantity of sugary foods consumed, Bouchardat positively forbade these foods to his diabetic patients.
Bouchardat did not prove a direct correlation between excessive sugar consumption and the rising incidence of diabetes, nor has such a correlation yet been clearly established. The connection is merely a suspicion–a profound and general suspicion among physicians that has persisted for over a century. Certainly Dr. Elliott P. Joslin, one of our eminent American authorities on diabetes, shared this suspicion. It was he who cited figures showing a threefold increase in the consumption of refined sugar between 1860 and 1910, and an almost parallel rise in the mortality from diabetes during the same period. At the very least, most physicians would agree that there is an indirect but firm connection between the obese type of diabetes and the unbalanced consumption of processed and devitalized carbohydrates, especially sugar. By 1939 our consumption of highly processed carbohydrates amounted to 42 per cent of our total average per capita calories; sugar contributing 17.9 per cent to this total and refined white flour 25 per cent.
Enough has been written to indicate the position of sugar in the ecologic fabric. Note that the strands run back and forth between physiology, technology, economics, soil chemistry, politics, and morals, binding all these factors in a tight web of inextricable cause and effect, effect and cause. Morals? Consider The Great Western Sugar Company of Colorado, organized in 1905 with a net actual investment of $25,000,000, which by 1939 had “earned” a total of $188,000,000, or an average of 43 per cent a year. These “earnings” were largely based on our annual sugar subsidy which Henry A. Wallace estimated at $350,000,000, paid by taxpayers, that is to say sugar consumers, to both the cane and beet sugar industries. Of this annual subsidy Great Western Sugar got about a third; it also was greatly helped by the public and private charity extended to the Mexican “stoop labor” it employs in its Colorado and Montana sugar beet fields–the wages paid these seasonal migratory workers being rarely enough to carry them over the winter.
In the field of morals one should also give a passing glance at the coast-to-coast broadcast of December 9, 1942, sponsored by the National Confectioners’ Association. On this occasion General Edmund B. Gregory of the Army and Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt joined in praising the patriotic contribution of the candy industry to the “morale” of our boys, for whom they provided really heroic quantities of hard candy, chocolate Wet Snacks, etc.
Our armed forces were privileged, in one form or another, to consume about four times as much sugar as the average prewar civilian consumer which was around 100 pounds a year, this in turn being at least twice the quantity that eminent nutritionists like Professor Henry C. Sherman think it should be. The late Dr. Joslin must have pirouetted in his grave when he read that one.
The soft drink boys also did their bit, despite the attempts of subversive characters like Dr. Clive M. McCay, nutritionist for the Navy, to run the soft drink dispensing machines out of the PX stores and substitute–what do you suppose–milk? Dr. McCay wearing, it is alleged, a bullet-proof vest, even went so far as to feed cola beverages to laboratory rats and show, in slides exhibited at conventions of dieticians, what a wonderful job the phosphoric acid in the cola drinks does in etching the rats’ teeth. These papers were duly printed in scientific publications, digested by Science Service and patriotically ignored by our free press in general. Also ignored were some estimates the present authors printed in the co-op newspapers showing that when the housewife bought her sugar via the unrationed cola drinks it cost her around a dollar and a half a pound instead of 6 or 7 cents a pound in the form of rationed sugar.
Still in the field of morals as well as high international economics and politics were the attempts of the Mixed Committee on the Problem of Nutrition (sic) of the old League of Nations and the International Sugar Conference, staged simultaneously and appropriately on April 1, 1937 to cut the Gordian knot of this interesting ecologic tangle. In London the representatives of the sugar producers met to discuss ways and means of increasing the consumption of sugar in the as yet unsaturated countries of the world, while in Geneva the Mixed Committee reaffirmed its opinion that in many countries the consumption of sugar was already excessive. In the report of the International Sugar Conference the two organizations are seen glaring at each other and exchanging stately if somewhat acid communications.
Meanwhile, in Cuba, Marquez Sterling was writing this:
“Sugar does not make colonies happy, or a people cultured, or republics opulent; and the independence we have won in the war against Spain, we must consummate in the war against sugar cane, which perpetuated in the Golden Island as an inexhaustible tradition the despotism of the major domo and the hatred of the slave…”
To sum up the contribution of sugar from the ecologic point of view it would not be unfair to say that it has contributed importantly and increasingly to the malnutrition, misery, and degeneracy of both its producers and consumers. And it all goes back, as is plainly apparent, to Napoleon and his determination that Josephine’s pastry cook be supplied with the sugar which the British fleet had denied her.
II
Let us now consider the ingenious M. Mueller who back in 1830 set going the train of ecologic causation that produced on the one hand the Mississippi floods and on the other the epidemics of beriberi in American jails and on American ships that called attention to the nutritional deficiency of white flour and white bread.
It was Mueller who dreamed up the first steel roller grain mill, later improved by the Hungarian Hoffenberger and imported into this country about 1880 by Governor Washburn of Minnesota. With the aid of bleaching it produced a dead white “patent” flour from which all but about 6 per cent of the thiamin in the original wheat berry had been removed, and since our American housewives were impressed by its “purity” and keeping qualities, it quickly ran the nutritionally superior product of the old stone mills out of the market. It also provided greatly increased by-products of middlings and bran for which it was necessary to create a market. The millers achieved this by persuading dairymen and stock raisers to buy these allegedly cheap mill feeds instead of keeping up their pastures and growing the cover crops of grass and legumes needed both to protect the land from erosion and to supply winter forage.
The resulting change in farm practice disturbed the natural ecology at several points. The diet of the cattle tended to become unbalanced; thereby their health and reproductive capacity were adversely affected; also the nutritional value of the milk and milk products for human food. These adverse effects were aggravated by loss of soil minerals caused by soil erosion, which was in turn reflected in the mineral deficiencies of the food crops grown on these soils.
It is significant that over-concentration and monopoly suggestive of giantism appeared early in both the sugar industry and in the flour and baking industries. Repeatedly, we applied to these economic diseases the therapy of government investigation and prosecution, but always with notable lack of success, although substantial regulatory parasitisms were established in government. These grew apace adding materially to the public’s aches and pains caused by the growth of bureaucracy.
Since both products were heavily advertised, our apparatus of social communication, including the medical as well as the lay press and later the radio, soon acquired vested interests in the maintenance of the white bread and sugar habit. These tertiary parasitisms proved to be the most disastrous of all.
When the world went to war over the dry bones of its planned and cartelized scarcities, the Food and Nutrition Committee of the American Medical Association, together with representatives of food-industry supported foundations, was instrumental in putting over the “take and put” policy of flour and bread enrichment. Thereby a deluxe penthouse of vested interests in synthetic vitamins–both expensive and nutritionally dubious–was added to the already towering structure of economic parasitism and advertising-created food-wants and addictions.
III
One of the hazards of the ecologic chase is that the quarry pays no attention to the boundaries that are supposed to divide the social from the natural sciences. He is likely to start up anywhere and run to almost any cover.
Take, for example, the phenomenon of physiological addiction as related to social and economic forces. In the opinion of many physicians the excessive consumption of sugar has many of the characteristics of an addiction. Once the processes of metabolism are thrown off balance they tend to stay that way and the luckless victim demands the sugar that the healthy organism doesn’t need but which the unbalanced organism craves.
Suffering from over-capacity in 1937, as it will again suffer when world production returns to “normal” after this war, the sugar industry sent its representatives to the International Sugar Conference with instructions to launch a campaign of propaganda and advertising in all the not yet sugar-saturated countries of the globe, designed to create new sugar addicts. In short, in order that the sugar industry might become healthy it was considered necessary to increase the supply of sugar addicts. The alternative which, be it said to its credit, the Sugar Research Foundation is now systematically exploring, is to divert more of the existing and prospective sugar supply of the world to industrial uses.
It should be obvious that ecologic considerations of this sort have an important bearing on the new, brash science of social and economic planning. Thus far, most of the planners have been economists. They operate for the most part in conformity to the measures of a pecuniary accountancy which makes short term pecuniary sense–sometimes–but almost no other kind of sense.
It made pecuniary sense and practical political sense to subsidize the sugar industry–but only if you assigned no pecuniary value to the nutritional and health status of the population. Those dairy farmers who in the eighties began using the cheap mill feeds and neglecting their pastures could prove they made money that way so long as they were careful to ignore what was happening to their soil capital and to the health of their cattle and of their families.
Or take a large and flagrant example of the kind of social and economic planning now being projected, namely the Wagner-Murray-Dingell Bill. It undertakes to provide, through a system of health and disability insurance, the money needed to buy adequate medical care for everybody, which is badly needed. There is little assurance that it would make better medical care available, especially the kind of medical care that concerns itself with positive hygiene and disease prevention.
Observing all this, one wonders: Should the rationalization and subsidization of the personnel and apparatus of medical therapy be given priority over the establishment–by subsidy if necessary–of a minimum floor under the nutrition of our people? Could it not successfully be argued that a public investment of money, education and administrative energy in the rationalization of our food economy and culture, all the way from the farm to the dinner table, to the measures of a biological accountancy, would net greater gains in health than an equal investment in medical therapy?
The title of the Rorty-Norman book, scheduled for delivery is TOMORROW’S FOOD–The Coming Revolution in Nutrition. Since spring Mr. Rorty has been in the Tennessee Valley living at Norris, and writing a further book on Minerals and Man. Dr. Norman is the author of CONSTRUCTIVE MEAL PLANNING published by the Phototone Press, Passaic, New Jersey. He is also Consultant Nutritionist to the Departments of Health and Hospitals of the City of New York.
