ABOUT THE BOOK

The human element aside, cane sugar has always enjoyed preferred status among the array of crop agriculture as to taxation, protection and various forms of financial subsidies since the 1700s. It has been inexorably involved in politics, the wellspring of those protectionist measures and it continues to this day. Despite the cries of free market advocates who find the sugar industry anomalous to the American sense of capitalism as a competitive enterprise, subsidies in the form of forgiven loans to processors continues to the present day. 

 

And finally, as the United States population grows fatter by the year, health advocates and epidemiologists look to sugar in its various forms extracted from corn, beets and cane as one of the drivers of the obesity epidemic that plagues our society and eventually leads to an enormous toll of life and unnecessary depletion of health care resources.

 

The story of sugar in America has been told many times and in many ways. But the telling never ends because the industry is always justifying its profitable existence which is guaranteed by the federal government, not by reason but by obfuscation—through back door deals, money spread liberally around the halls of Congress and diffusion of the facts surrounding the health crisis in this country. 

 

That’s what this book is all about.