Cloud Factory
The local sugar industry springs into life, turning mud-clotted beets into sweet crystals.
The local sugar beet campaign has started, and there are days when its scent hangs heavily over our town. I have always been fond of this factory from my sixth form days when, approaching town after an interminable school bus journey, a plume of water vapour would hover over the fields. The bus would fill with the scent of hot, woody, sugary roots on its approach to the Southgate roundabout. On the way home, we would look back and see the factory lit up against the waning light of an early winter afternoon. It seemed so mysterious. How many local children grew up believing they had a ‘cloud factory’ in their midst? I told this story to my children, and I still think of it in this way. There is something Willy Wonka-ish about the British Sugar compound as I have never been inside, so it is easy to imagine it as a vast city peopled by tiny, scurrying workers we never see enter or leave. Their labour transforms mud-clodded roots into gleaming sugar crystals that sweeten candy, chocolate, cake, and our mood. And this delicious local sweetness starts to be made as winter approaches. What good timing.
Belching great gouts of steam into the sky and visible for miles around, the factory acts as a sentinel, telling locals they are home. Despite the appalled reaction of nature writer Roger Deakin, many of us are pretty tolerant of the factory, smells and all. Deakin was pretty hard on the sugar beet factory because, back in the 80s, toxic effluent leaked into the river Lark. Sugar is a particularly malevolent contaminant, deoxygenating water by encouraging a massive overgrowth of bacteria. Chronically high blood sugar levels in diabetics can reduce the flow of oxygenated blood, particularly to extremities. Skin infections can take a long time to clear up. Bacteria adore sugary humans, too.
Deakin reminds us that lorry drivers refer to Bury St Edmunds as “sugar city” on their CB radios. He depicts the factory as a “giant conspiracy against the nation’s health…it looks at its most satanic at night when clouds of evil-smelling smoke and steam billows like candyfloss out of a forest of steam chimneys and high-tech ducting, floodlit in lurid pink and orange.”
He continues…“The place looks like a missile launching site…with a system of deodorising mist sprays…perfuming the evil-smelling air…a gleaming new spinney conceals vast lagoons full of rotting beet sludge” then ends by referring to “a potpourri of perfume and stench [which] assails the puzzled nostrils of the traveller.”
The campaign scent is not always unpleasant: sometimes, it reminds me of vegetally sweet, burned sugar. And sometimes, I am assailed by the scent of potatoes left to rot in a forgotten vegetable bin or the smell of decaying old rhubarb leaves as you dig them back in. That can make me gag. But it is an agricultural smell, and we live in an agricultural region. However, residents in Bury St Edmunds know not to open their windows when the wind blows in a certain direction.
It’s easy to find beauty in woodlands, the electric blue dart of a kingfisher in flight, or the seer, granite edge of a tor, but one has to look a bit harder to see the grace and beauty in the work of an engineer, scientist or technician. But it is there. Humans designed and built this factory. We can see it as a blot on the landscape or a series of scientific discoveries and technical refinements that helped reduce our dependence on the sugar cane produced by enslaved people and colonial systems. To be accurate, though, the argument for beet sugar might have been economic rather than moral. In abolitionist David Lee Child’s US-published monograph, The Culture of the Beet and the Manufacture of Sugar, published in 1840, there is only one mention of sugar beet as an ‘antidote’ to slavery, and that comes towards the end of its 156 pages.
Further reading:
Sugar Barons By Matthew Parker explores the rise and fall of Europeans who made and lost sugar fortunes.
A Dark History of Sugar by Neil Buttery looks at our historical relationship with sugar from a physiological, economic, political, and social perspective. He’s strong on how racism and capitalism reinforce each other. It’s not a read for the fainthearted.
Sydney W. Mintz has written several books on the subject. Sweetness And Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History is seminal. I also recommend Worker in the Cane: A Puerto Rican Life History.
Gary Taube’s The Case Against Sugar is extremely good on the effects of sugar on our health and how the industry managed to distract us from this, focusing instead on the incorrect demonisation of fat.
“When one kicks over a tea table and smashes everything but the sugar bowl, one may as well pick that up and drop it on the bricks, don't you think?”-Margery Allingham.
Melissa Thompson’s Motherland, a book about the food of Jamaica (which I reviewed here), has an interesting tale about Richard Drax MP and his family’s involvement in the sugar trade. Thompson used to live close to his estate in England. Of late, it has been announced that Barbados is to seek reparation from Drax.
“I want to acknowledge that most of the cakes, gingerbreads, and biscuits in this book would not have existed if not for sugar imports that were made possible due to slavery, which was particularly concentrated in the Caribbean islands of Barbados, St. Kitts, Nevis, Antigua, and Jamaica, and later Grenada and Trinidad in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, until the British Slavery Abolition Act took effect on August 1, 1834 - which unfortunately only resulted in partial liberation. Sugar has a cost, and that cost was paid by those held in bondage,” wrote Regula Ysewijn in the preface to her book Oats in the North, Wheat From the South.
The Evils of Corn Syrup: How Food Writers Got it Wrong by James McWilliams in The Atlantic (£)
Podcast: The Dark History of Sugar From Food Matters Live has an interview with Neil Buttery.
Ruby Tandoh for Eater on the primal, troubling pleasure of sugar. “How has sweetness — something we are evolutionarily programmed to like, for survival — come to stand in for sex and escapism and hedonism,” she asks.
“People think how a sugar basin has no physiognomy, no soul. But it changes every day.”- Paul Cezanne