400 Years of Sweetness

Throughline

NPR

Society & Culture, History, Documentary

4.7 • 15K Ratings

🗓️ 8 December 2022

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In the 1970s, a savvy CEO named Dwayne Andreas hit on an idea: take surplus corn from America's heartland, process it into a sweetener, and start selling it to anyone who would buy, all in the name of patriotism. Within a decade, high fructose corn syrup dominated the U.S. sweetener market; today, American diets are saturated with sweeteners, including cane sugar, high fructose corn syrup, and dozens of others.

But Andreas wasn't reinventing the wheel. He was just taking the next step in a 400-year journey that took sugar from a rare delicacy for the wealthy to an inextricable part of our lives, our culture, and our bodies. A journey that began on the brutal sugar plantations of Haiti and eventually went global, confronting us all with an impossible moral dilemma.

In this episode, we journey across centuries and continents to visit the people who've schemed — and those who've suffered — to bring us sweetness.

Transcript

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0:00.0	8 times in my life I've run into grassways.
0:18.5	This is Richard Manning, talking to us from Montana.
0:22.0	He's a journalist.
0:23.4	He's also the author of Against the Grain, How Agriculture has hijacked civilization.
0:29.6	And back in 1996, he was working on a book about the business of agriculture.
0:35.0	In the process of reporting that book, he decided he needed to go to the Mecca of America's
0:40.2	corn industry to meet its king.
0:43.5	So I got on the train in Montana and rode the Empire Builder.
0:47.9	A train that took him east all the way through North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and eventually
0:53.3	to a little town called Decatur.
0:55.5	Decatur Decatur, Illinois.
0:58.3	Which was Ground Zero, ADM's headquarters.
1:02.1	ADM stands for Archer Daniels Midland.
1:05.2	They were one of the biggest farming businesses in the U.S. at that time.
1:09.6	And Richard was hunting for an interview with their CEO.
1:13.1	So he gets off the train.
1:14.8	Checked into Motel and put in a call and said, hey, I want to talk to Dwayne and Dreyis.
1:19.4	And I got a secretary.
1:21.6	You may have never heard of him, but in the 1970s, Dwayne and Dreyis was one of the biggest
1:26.5	names in the U.S.
1:28.2	He was a politically connected CEO of one of the country's biggest companies.
1:32.6	He was friends with American presidents and world leaders.
	...

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