Sugar ecologies: their metabolic and racial effects

Abstract

In this paper, we articulate sugar ecologies as the product of an unequal and racist system of food production and distribution. We trace the flow of sugar from its sources in the postcolony and racial capitalism, into sociocultural systems we call sugar ecologies the social systems that drive global sugar production, industrial processing, patterns of distribution and consumption. These systems encompass networks of economic, political, scientific, and ideological practices that link global systems of agricultural trade under racial capitalism to the hyper-local contexts of biological exposure and metabolic processing of sugar. Sugar’s pernicious effects are magnified by forces which guide sugar into Black bodies, becoming the source of extraordinary levels of toxicity and chronic metabolic disease for Black people the United States. This burden of metabolic disease, which also affects metabolic function and gene expression, also creates demand for for-profit health services that palliate, but do not treat the root causes of, chronic illness resulting from exposure to sugar. The kind of metabolic analysis we enact in this paper remains an underutilized yet illuminating framework through which to reframe our cultural stories and political analyses of sugar ecologies in the contexts of the Anthropocene, environmental racism and food justice.

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