Sugar has always worn a nice disguise —an ingredient of celebration, comfort, childhood treats, and holiday traditions. But underneath that sweetness is a dark story. Sugar has been produced through human exploitation, political power, and a modern health crisis that continues to plague society.

Talking to some friends about this history yesterday, they reminded me of the current administration’s ban on this type of history. Currently, these types of stories are being pushed aside or discouraged. The parts of the American past that reveal how the “American Dream” was built on the sacrifices of human lives deemed disposable. The ones that rarely make it into textbooks. Like many others, I believe that if we pay attention, history teaches us the behaviors we shouldn’t repeat — but that doesn’t seem to be happening these days. So I’ll use this forum to share my research, hoping to make a difference.

Long before sugar became a staple in the American diet, it fueled a brutal global system, something I was reminded of on a recent trip to St. John. Sugar plantations in the Caribbean and American South were among the most violent labor camps ever created. Enslaved people were forced to cut cane under blistering heat, enduring dangerous boiling houses, and living under the constant threat of torture.

Sugar was so profitable that plantation owners pushed human beings past any natural limit. Mortality rates were staggering, and life expectancy on some plantations was measured not in decades, but in years.

Sugar was placed on the table for pleasure and paid for with human lives.

Even after slavery “ended,” Sugar’s story didn’t improve. The industry just changed tactics. By the late 1800s, the sugar refining business that started as family operations in the United States had become a monopolistic empire. Companies like the American Sugar Refining Company—also known as the Sugar Trust—consolidated power in record time. Essentially one company owned all the sugar refining business on the East Coast in a matter of years. They controlled prices, manipulated supply, crushed competitors, and used their political influence with a confidence that bordered on arrogance. (Sound familiar?)

Not exactly the homegrown Domino Sugar brand we like to imagine sitting on our pantry shelves or the iconic refinery building that became a symbol of Baltimore.

Sugar wasn’t just a product. It was a lever for economic control.

The Trust influenced Congress, tariffs, and trade policy. It shaped the American diet not through consumer choice but through corporate strategy. And we are still paying for that strategy today.

Americans consume sugar at rates that would have seemed unimaginable in the 1800s. It’s in every processed food and is more addictive than anything found in nature.

The result of all of this greed and corruption without sufficient regulation is a public health crisis. We live in a world plagued by soaring rates of diabetes, metabolic disorders, heart disease, childhood obesity, and a food system based on keeping us all hooked. All for profit.

Sugar is a reminder of how easily humans normalize exploitation when profit and pleasure are the goals. It shows how the things we crave, which may seem convenient or pleasurable, come with hidden costs. It challenges us to ask: Is it worth it?

In my next book, Chasing Fortune, one of the families lives through the sugar refinery consolidation in Baltimore.

The more we recognize that the things we believe we “need” are not free and truly understand their cost, the more clearly we see the power we have to create change.