IT’S a song that was sung to me, and which I sang to my daughters, in the most consoling of moments. But I hope – if that reality ever happens for them – that they don’t pass it on to their children:
Ally bally, ally bally bee,
Sittin’ oan yir daddy’s knee
Greetin’ fur a wee bawbee
Tae buy some Coulter’s Candy
“Sugar is the new tobacco” ran the headlines this week, after a report from Food Standards Scotland added to a mounting chorus for a tax on sugar in foods (although the FSS proposes giving the food industry a “12-month deadline” to improve its act). Something extraordinary is building. A well-informed, many-headed health movement is rounding on the corporations, in exactly the same way as Big Tobacco was cornered and tamed.
It would be easy just to submit yourself to this powerful alliance of forces. They are: fluent senior doctors, tax-happy legislators, multimillion-pound public information programmes, motivated celebrities like Jamie Oliver.
All of them have the red light of “obesity and diabetes epidemic” bleeping loudly on their dashboards. They also have groaning public health budgets that could be eased by citizens improving their eating habits. They want to herd us to the same conclusion we made about cigarettes. Eventually, and rightly, I think they will. But it might be worth spending a little time on the sweet side as well. You should know your enemy. However, when it comes to sugar, the enemy is also us – something buried deep in our evolved natures, as well as baked into our own personal and national histories. Coming down from our sugar rush will be difficult – but it will also be momentous.
In Scotland, as an entry point to all this, you couldn’t do better than muse upon Ally Bally Bee. The historians say that the song was the invention of a former Galashiels weaver, Robert Coltard (1832–1880). He used it to promote his aniseed-flavoured sweets, which he made in Melrose and sold in the Borders markets. It was heard being sung in schoolyards and communities by folklorists like Norman Buchan in the 1960s, and collected under the title “Coulter’s Candy”.
Even in these details, there are clues to our present predicament. As the (brilliantly named) guru of sweetness Sidney Mintz has shown, sugar-based foods came into the diets of the 19th-century worker displaying an aura of affordable luxury.
Affordable because of the carnage of colonial slave plantations – but luxurious in its association with the upper-classes, whose spun-sugar creations and fancies had long been consumed in elite drawing rooms.
Coltard’s aniseeds, and Tunnock’s teacakes, stand in a long tradition of the hard-working classes giving themselves a utopian gift, a blissful respite, amid the grind. Many who currently oppose a sugar tax still invoke this right.
Think of the symbolism of the Tunnock’s wrapper, and the meaning is all too blatant. Over a snatched cup of tea, for a few moments, you are the star of your own universe.
And the bodily consequences? Again, Ally Bally Bee is a clue to how much historical weight pulls down on any healthy eating policy in Scotland. As I sang it to my daughters (my version, but there seems to be many out there):
Oor wee Jeanie, she’s awfy thin
A rattle o’ bones and a layer o’ skin
Noo she’s gettin’ a wee double chin
Frae eating Coulter’s Candy.
I often wonder whether Scotland’s sweetie culture, at least on the demand side, comes from a trace memory of acute poverty and hardship. Even in our current circumstances of relative poverty, obesity can sometimes look like a way of (literally) cushioning yourself against blows – whether from degrading jobs, or hectoring politicians, or the body norms of commercial media.
Either way, an association of sugary stuff with personal vitality, energy and resilience is a long-standing advertising tactic. The Irn-Bru delivery boy started dancing on the label in 1948, but the boxer Benny Lynch was promoting “Iron Brew” before that. (The current logo seems to be a futurist fusion of both.)
The last run of Irn-Bru ads I noticed last year were all about wimpy Scots gulping down the stuff to help them “get a grip”, in excruciating social situations. Tearfully funny, yes. But by means of humour, it’s also fiendishly tailored to drill down deep into our feelings of insecurity and incapacity. And deposit the answer: reach for your other national drink.
Recall again the greetin’ Jeanie on her parent’s knee, who is trying not to succumb to their beloved’s piteous wailing for “candy”. Sweetness gets to us at a very elemental level.
One story from the evolutionists is that we’re grappling with our ancient biological limitations. Our long period as hunter-gatherers means that we still regard sweetness as something rare and valuable, and thus to be wolfed down instantly. For rare perishable fruit encountered on savannah wanderings, read the Magnum bar in the newsagent’s fridge.
If this is indeed how we’re made, then drifting around the crammed shelves of the average food superstore is like an invitation to madness.
Go deeper into the body, and sweetness becomes even more fundamental. In order to reward getting that rare sugar down our necks, the ancient parts of our brain release endorphins and phenylethylamine – the latter is a neurostimulant similar in effect to cocaine and amphetamines. Even human breast milk is intensely (and one would presume, adaptively) sweet. We are on a sugar rush from the very start.
So there’s a lot to unravel, and re-ravel again, if we wish to change our current relationship with sugar. Sidney Mintz’s original masterwork was called Sweetness and Power – and it’s perhaps the power question which can be more directly addressed here.
First off, in Scotland at least, there’s a ticking cultural time-bomb about processed sugar’s colonial death toll waiting to properly go off – and the explosion will befoul us all.
Sugar may be sweet – but it has been a destroyer of millions of lives, too. More awareness of that moral debt might lift the hand from the chocolate bar.
The bigger sweetness-and-power question is: what kind of social and economic arrangement best serves healthy eating? It’s not just that Jamie Oliver makes the case against the industrial and exploitative use of sugar in processed foods: his sugar tax is a necessary, though limited, disincentive.
But Oliver also suggests we embrace a hands-on cooking culture – a mentality that takes time to consider every ingredient; a “slow food” that makes sociable occasions possible.
Ideally, of course, that works. Sweets may be intensely and briefly pleasurable – but the skills, crafts and achievements of cooking could give you a more durable enjoyment.
Realistically, though: do we live in a world in which there are enough non-working hours, or enough basic security of housing and livelihood, to allow us to be mindful and considerate of every bite we eat?
In short, it’s very difficult to imagine a post-sugar society without imagining a post-capitalist society as well. For centuries, and right up to the minute your local coffee outlet opens, sugar – at least in its processed form – has been an indicator of how brutally we can exploit the resources of others, and how susceptible we are to seduction by consumerism. It may sparkle in the bowl, but it’s not a pretty sight.
We clearly need to remove Ally Bally Bee from our knees, hand her a refilled bottle of tap water, and steer the wee yin implacably towards the local playpark. But let’s be honest about the challenge. The sugar system in general – whether inside or outside of us – will not be easily dissolved.
Pat Kane is a musician and writer (www.patkane.today)
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