Well, if
you’re like me, you can still see the bag in your mother’s kitchen—or kitchens,
since I could locate the sugar immediately in my childhood home, were the sugar
still there. Sugar tends to figure pretty strongly in the culinary life of
kids.
Then
there’s the fact that the sugar came from a site across the East River from
Manhattan. In fact, the factory had operated from the site since the
mid-nineteenth century at least—the ships had come in laden with a sugar cane
slurry from the Caribbean or the Philippines or wherever, and the sugar was
refined right there in Brooklyn.
Nor was it,
as the Times article
describes it, “refined” in anything but name. Temperatures could get up to 140
degrees. Here’s what the Times
had to say about the process:
In the
earliest days, much of the sugar arriving at the Havemeyer family’s refinery on
the Williamsburg waterfront had been harvested by slaves. It was mixed into a
dirty slurry, boiled in enormous vats and filtered through charred animal
bones.
Then it was
“whipped, beaten, flayed, hurled into ‘grain,'” The Illustrated American magazine reported in 1894. “The process
is very wild and terrible, like a caged cyclone.” Life in the refinery was so
infernal that The New York Tribune declared in 1894 that a worker had only one
hope of escaping “perpetual torture.”
“Not
infrequently,” the newspaper said, “death comes quickly to his relief.”
Henry Osborne
Havemeyer inherited some sugar interests, and then went on to found his
company in 1868, when he was just 22. The current building, built after a fire
destroyed the original building, was built in 1882, and is the only factory
site named as a New York City Landmark. Havemeyer went on to become an
extremely rich man, know as the Sugar King, and the company was one of the
original 12 companies in the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
What
happened? Well, the company stumbled on, and sources for sugar shifted from
cane to beet sugar to the nefarious high fructose corn syrup. And why the
shift? In part, according to Wikipedia, because of tinkering with the marketplace:
A system
of sugar tariffs and sugar quotas imposed in 1977 in the United States
significantly increased the cost of imported sugar and U.S. producers sought
cheaper sources. High-fructose corn syrup, derived from corn, is more
economical because the domestic U.S. and Canadian prices of sugar are twice the
global price[29] and the price of corn is kept low through
government subsidies paid to growers.[30][31]
High-fructose corn syrup became an attractive substitute, and is preferred over
cane sugar among the vast majority of American food and beverage manufacturers.
Soft drink makers such as Coca-Cola
and Pepsi use sugar in other
nations, but switched to high-fructose corn syrup in the United States in 1984.
Hey
wait—the cost of sugar in the US is twice as
much as in the rest of the world? So the government is protecting the corn
farmers by paying them to grow this stuff—or at least the raw material for
it—and also imposing tariffs and quotas on sugar, which may be far healthier?
In fact, a
recent study at the University of Guelph in Canada has this
to say:
Canadian researchers
have found that high-fructose corn syrup can cause behavioral reactions in rats
'similar to those produced by drugs of abuse, such as cocaine'.
Professor
Francesco Leri of the University of Guelph, who carried out the research, said
it suggested there was an addictive quality to foods that contain high levels
of high-fructose corn syrup which could explain, at least partly, the current
global obesity epidemic.
Oh, and the
same article says this:
Research from
Princeton University in 2010 found that rats fed on a sugary diet became
nervous and anxious when the sugar was removed. They were thrown into a state
of anxiety similar to the kind of stress that people feel during withdrawal
from drugs like nicotine and even morphine.
So at some
point the Havemeyer family sold out, and in 2003, the refining part of the
operation closed down, after a bitter, twenty-month strike, one of the longest
in New York history. And then, in 2004, the whole operation closed down.
I tell you
it’s bittersweet; here’s why. First, we used to produce stuff, rather than
import it. Second, it’s an outrage that we are subsidizing high fructose corn
syrup, which has been linked to something called metabolic syndrome: high blood
sugar, diabetes, obesity, heart disease, etc.
Lastly,
anyone who has been in the Metropolitan
Museum of Art in New York City will know the Havemeyer name; both Henry
Osborne Havemeyer and his wife collected art like crazy, and their three
children carried on as well. Here’s
Wikipedia on the
subject:
Although
each of the children collected in their own right, Electra
Havemeyer Webb collected on the grand scale of her parents and went
on to found a museum to showcase her deep and diverse collections. Louisine
identified some 142 works as a bequest to the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, and empowered her children to give the Met's curators
free rein. By the time they had finished an inventory of the Havemeyer's
three-story Fifth Avenue manse 1,967 works would be assimilated into the Met's
holdings.
And here’s
the Met itself on the collection:
A
legendary assemblage, the Havemeyer collection is famous for its unparalleled
groupings of works by Corot, Courbet, and Manet, its great Monets and Cézannes,
and its many paintings, pastels, drawings, and bronzes by Degas. But the real
depth and the encyclopedic range of this legacy are not well known, because
part of it is dispersed throughout the Metropolitan and part dispersed
throughout the world. Few know, for example, that the collection encompassed
Rembrandts and El Grecos as well as works by other old masters. The Havemeyers
were not only the premier American patrons of late nineteenth-century French
painting—Mrs. Havemeyer was perhaps the first American to buy a Monet—but also
pathbreaking collectors in such uncharted fields as Spanish painting, for which
they created a demand and established a taste among their contemporaries.
Will our
current crop of magnates do as well?
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Portrait
of a Cardinal, Probably Cardinal Don Fernando Niño de Guevara (1541–1609) El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos)
(Greek, Iráklion (Candia) 1540/41–1614 Toledo)
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