Sugar is our pleasure and one of mankind's worst plagues. Human beings love sugar. We've been frantically searching for it since prehistoric times. Alexander, conqueror of Greece, brought sugar cane back from India, which he acclimatised in the Mediterranean before the colonists cultivated it in the West Indies. With the complicity of African chiefs, they introduced the worst form of slavery. Napoleon ruined the triangular trade that had so enriched Nantes and Bordeaux by encouraging Delessert to develop sugar beet. But the wound of slavery took another half-century to heal.
Today, we eat too much sugar and diabetes is one of mankind's most dreaded diseases. We need to be wary of sugar.
Gilles Fumey, 2013, catalogue passe-moi le sel !