Re-naturalizing sugar: narratives of place, production and ...

y the Florida industry. Whereas in 1940 animal
power connoted backwardness, Wholesome
Foods’ oxcart-images are employed to
suggest progressive social change through consumption
choices.
In Spring 2001 sugar packages appeared in
supermarkets proclaiming: ‘The right choice,
for you and America’s Everglades’ (Everglades
Foundation 2001). Apura Everglades Sugar,
‘pure American sugar, NOT grown, or refined,
in America’s Everglades’ (Everglades Foundation
2001), was marketed by an environmental
organization and producers in Louisiana,
Texas and Paraguay. Their slogan, ‘Fight Sugar
with Sugar’ reveals their intent to challenge
Florida Crystals in the premium and organic
sugar market, using supermarket narratives to
appeal to consumers to ‘help restore the Everglades
to the harsh uninhabitable Hell nature
intended it to be’ (Everglades Foundation
2001). Here we see a tortuous process of ‘double’
commodity fetishism, as sugar is ‘reenchanted’
with geographic knowledges
invoked to invert Florida-paradisiacal imagery
and displace consumption to supposedly
‘greener’ locales. Florida Crystal’s strategy of
melding ideas of sugar, nature and Florida is
turned against it in an escalating battle—over
resources and market share—in which nature,
imagined geographies, ideas of sustainability
and freshness are deployed in supermarket narratives.
Conclusion
Using supermarket narratives, sugar producers
attempt to differentiate their products in the
highly competitive US sweetener market. Competing
with HFCS, they have developed products
such as liquid sugar, used in juices and soft
drinks. Cane sugar producers seek niches that
neither HFCS nor beet sugar can fill, offering
Re-naturalizing sugar 69
consumers a ‘soft, yellow-tinted, unrefined
sugar’ (Wiley 1898: 694) like that described a
century ago. One product, ‘dehydrated cane
juice’, is used in ‘natural’ snack foods. Another
is Florida Crystals’ organic milled cane, a lessrefined
sugar. The corresponding supermarket
narrative presumably holds greater appeal than
would the narrative of HFCS production,
which, if held to accuracy, would depict corn
of undetermined age fermenting for days in
slurry tanks, undergoing processes to saccharify
starch by application of glucoamylase (Thomas
1985). Competing on the basis of minimal processing
and freshness—from field to package in
less than twenty-four hours—cane sugar wins.
This commodity history, and the particular
role of the Florida industry in it, demonstrates
that producers of even the most maligned food
product, 5 sugar, can refashion their product in
accord with new moral concerns. The analysis
presented here shows there is a particular strategy
of sugar marketing that appeals to consumers’
concerns for the environment and
healthful diets. The re-naturalization of sugar
is part of the ‘re-enchantment’ of food in the
marketplace based on cultural meanings of
Florida (‘the sunshine state’), farming communities
and farm families, and nature. Not
only is sweetener consumption rising (Center
for Science in the Public Interest, 1999, 2000) in
the midst of increasing scholarly attention to
and consumer concern for healthfulness and
organics, but also the sugar industry incorporates
these ideas to mirror back in their supermarket
narratives emphasizing ‘freshness’ and
‘sustainability’. Supermarket narratives, which
seem at first glance to untangle ‘the intricate
geography of production and consumption’
(Harvey 1990), are readily adopted by sugar
producers in their marketing strategies to compete
and profit, economically or politically.
This is not to say that the only change in
response to consumers’ concerns is a shift in