ABSTRACT
In a 1947 pamphlet the Sugar Research Foundation promoted sugar as “a natural food and useful chemical,” extracted from sugar-bearing plants, “exactly as made by nature, without changing in any way its structure or composition.”1 Indeed, sucrose as produced by plants and the granulated sugar that humans consume are both C12H22O11, despite differences in form. However, making the plant extract “useful” meant more than turning it into a food product, something that had been done by humans for millennia. In modern times sugar came to be a commodity of mass consumption and a focus of industrial capitalism. In the words of one sugar executive, it was about “the bountiness of nature and the profitable business.”2 By the twentieth century, making sugar both “useful” and “profitable” required integrating the biological processes of the sugarcane with increasingly sophisticated mechanical processes and scientific knowledge under modern corporate control.
