A visit to an Australian sugar cane farm shows how a global love of toothsome treats creates bitter results
Brian Courtice comes from a long line of cane growers. His grandfather started cutting cane in Bundaberg, Queensland, in 1910 and farming it in 1922. Two of his grandfather’s brothers formed the area’s Sugar Workers Union and organized a cane-cutters’ strike in 1911. Brian’s father, also a cane grower, was a member of the board for the local sugar mill.
For three generations the Courtice men have lived and worked at Sunnyside, a nearly 125-acre farm in the Woongarra region southeast of Bundaberg. And for almost all of those days, sugar has been a mainstay of life. Now 64, Courtice remembers school holidays spent cutting green cane in the fields. In the mornings he’d put a mound of sugar on his cornflakes, and three sugars in his tea.
But not anymore. Sitting on his front veranda and nursing a mug of Bushells tea sweetened with honey, Courtice explained that as he got older he became increasingly concerned about the relationship between sugar consumption and dental cavities. Courtice has the weathered skin of a farmer, but his teeth have suffered worse deterioration. “I’ve got a mouth full of fillings from when I was a kid from using too much sugar,” he said.
He soon realized cavities were his least concern. As the research rolled in, Courtice became convinced that eating too much refined sugar was also linked to diabetes and weight gain. Cane plants are no longer welcome at Sunnyside; the last crop was ploughed out in November 2005, and the red-soil paddocks are now dedicated to growing potatoes.
“The sad fact is it’s an industry that our family were involved in since 1900, but it’s an industry that was founded on slavery, both here and in the Americas, and it’s an industry like tobacco that causes more harm than good,” Courtice says.
His comparison of sugar to tobacco or alcohol has gained prominence. It was popularized in the United States by Robert Lustig, a professor of pediatric endocrinology at the University of California, whose YouTube video “Sugar: The Bitter Truth” has surpassed more than five million views.
If Lustig is right, then everything you thought you knew about obesity and dieting is wrong. Typified by catchphrases like “fat makes you fat” and “calories in, calories out,” the message has been that to stop gaining weight you should avoid high-fat foods and try not to eat more calories than your body burns.
Lustig’s lecture, based on new research in biochemistry, upsets the status quo. His message is not that all calories are equal. He says sugar, not fat, is the main culprit in obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease and even some cancers. “It has nothing to do with the calories,” argued Lustig, because sugar “is a poison by itself.”
From farm to taste bud
To understand this argument, delve into the chemical composition of our favorite sweetener. Table sugar is a combination of two sugars, glucose and fructose. Glucose is common in nature, and all our cells are equipped to use it for energy. But fructose, the much sweeter part, is relatively rare in nature, found mainly in honey and ripe fruit, and it is metabolized almost exclusively in the liver.
Human trials into the health effects of fructose consumption are continuing, so the verdict is still out. But there’s no doubt sugar is under increased scrutiny.
While media attention has focused on the health effects of sugar, it largely overlooks the industry that produces it. In Australia, about 4,000 cane farms are spread across 1,300 miles of coastal plains in Far North Queensland. Australia is the world’s third-largest raw sugar supplier, and the industry is worth an estimated $1.5 to $2 billion to the local economy.
The Australian sugar industry was built on the indentured labor — some say slave labor — of South Sea Islanders. But since 1979, all Australian sugar cane has been mechanically harvested. To get an overview of the process, I visited a cane farm north of Brisbane. My guide was Tony Castro, a 55-year-old cane farmer wearing a khaki shirt and blue stubby shorts, his tanned thighs like slabs of toffee with hair stuck to the outside. Our first stop was a dirt field, where we were greeted by a man in a high-visibility top and polarized sunglasses: 33-year-old planting contractor, Jason Wheeler.
Wheeler explained sugar cane is grown by replanting a cutting of mature cane, like a short length of bamboo. Once it’s in the soil, new buds sprout from the joints. Each cutting can shoot up to 12 stalks. In sunny Queensland it takes between nine and 16 months to grow a crop; cooler climates can take up to 24 months.
Castro explained that only the stalk, which stores the sugar, is sent to the mill. Twenty years ago, unwanted leaves were burned before harvesting, but nowadays the cane is cut green and the leaves are left to blanket the ground, helping to retain moisture and suppress weeds. At Bundaberg Sugar’s Millaquin Mill, I met general manager David Pickering. Some of the farmers I’d met had been built like gummy bears, but Pickering had the physique of an incense stick. His diet, he says, is marked by moderation. “I love my pavlova [a meringue cake], but not every night.”
We watched bins full of cane being weighed, then cane shredded and passed through rollers to extract juice. Water was added, creating a mud-colored slurry that smelled like grass clippings. Finally, the cane fiber was wrung into a dry, fluffy-looking substance that is burned to generate electricity to power the mill.
The cane juice is pumped away for processing into raw sugar. This happens in another part of the mill that smells like licorice. Looming above a part of the mill Pickering called “the sugar room” is a massive rotating cylinder that dries the sugar. Motes of sweet-tasting dust hung suspended in shafts of sunlight. Sitting in a puddle of water on the floor was an iceberg of rejected sugar from the refinery. “We just re-melt it and use it again,” said Pickering. “Sugar’s great at recycling.”
A not-so-sweet tax
After the tour, I sat down at a convenience store across the road and thought about what I’d seen. I was unexpectedly impressed: Very little was wasted.
But this positive side was overshadowed by something more sinister: The substance’s sheer pervasiveness, which makes it hard to know how much sugar Australians really eat. But I can say a few things: Sugar-sweetened drinks are the largest single source of sugars in the Australian diet, and they’re also more clearly linked to obesity than sugar in solid form. The average estimates of sugar consumption in Australia — about 22 teaspoons a day — far surpass the World Health Organization’s mooted guidelines of just six teaspoons a day. So while we may not know exactly how much sugar we’re eating, we know we’re eating too much.
Australian health experts have recently called for sugar to be taxed like alcohol, and some countries and cities around the world have already introduced sugar taxes. In January 2014, Mexico, which has one of the highest rates of obesity in the world, introduced a 10 percent per liter tax on sugary drinks. And last November, residents of Berkeley, Calif., voted to impose a “soda tax” of one cent per ounce.
But the beverage industry is a formidable foe. In 2012, New York’s then mayor, Michael Bloomberg, pushed through a city-wide ban on large sugary drinks. In response, the American Beverage Association (ABA) successfully petitioned to have it struck down by the courts. In Washington state a “candy tax” was short lived: In November 2012, voters overturned a tax on soft drinks and candy, a defeat linked to some $16 million contributed by the ABA. In Australia, I found little support for a sugar tax. Brian Courtice, the former cane farmer who refuses to put sugar in his tea, wasn’t for it. A former Labor Member of Parliament, Courtice worried that a sugar tax would disproportionately target the working class and poor.
In the end, perhaps the government won’t need a tax, because consumers will abandon it for other sweeteners. Food and Agriculture Organization figures show Australians are increasingly consuming sweeteners other than sugar.
It’s part of a trend in developed countries. A September 2013 report by Credit Suisse on sugar’s global prospects predicted “the most likely outcome over the next 5 to 10 years will be a significant reduction in sugar consumption and a marked increase in the role played by high-intensity natural sweeteners in food and beverages”.
Does all of this spell doom for Australian cane farmers?
On my tour around Bundaberg, I learned that the cane plant is remarkably resilient: A cutting can reshoot five times or more after harvesting. As planting contractor Jason Wheeler told me, “It’s hard to get rid of sometimes.” Those who rail against sugar might just discover that the Australian industry — survivor of floods and cyclones, pests and diseases, mechanization, globalization and a volatile commodity price — will prove just as persistent.
By Greg Foyster via Big Issue Australia
A longer version of this story was published by streetnewsservice.org.