Sugar Changed the World

“It is a story of the movement of millions of people, of fortunes made and lost, of brutality and delight—all because of tiny crystals stirred into our coffee, twirled on top of a cake. Sugar, we began to see, changed the world.” 

This passage works as a thesis statement for Sugar Changed the World. It lays out how sugar relates to the history of cooking. However, the story also delves into economic history and the history of slavery and workers’ rights. 

“Sugar created a hunger, a need, which swept from one corner of the world to another, bringing the most terrible misery and destruction, but then, too, the most inspiring ideas of liberty.” 

Along with the first quote, this passage helps set up a major theme of the book: that the story of sugar has both negative and positive implications. Aronson and Budhos argue that the history of sugar involves inhumane systems of labor like slavery and indentured servitude. However, it also made the modern world more diverse and interconnected, and it prompted activists and revolutionaries into expanding our ideas of liberty and human rights.

“The ever-curious Greeks were glad to learn of sugar cane, but it was just one more interesting fact about the natural world, the way a postcard from a summer vacation might list the sights a family had recently seen. No one could have imagined that those ‘reeds’ would bring an end to the entire buzzing world of the Age of Honey.”

This quote discusses a key source of irony in the book’s narrative: that something as small as sugar could cause such great change over the centuries. It also explains that the potential of cane sugar was not immediately apparent. It took centuries of social, cultural, and technological change and events like the expansion of Islam to make the Age of Sugar possible.