Sugar

In the summer before my senior year of high school, I got a job helping a man named Chester process sugar cane.  My first day began at sunrise. Chester led me to a tin-roofed outbuilding containing a hundred or more bins of freshly harvested sugar cane. My job was to load some cane onto a flatbed cart, wheel it to a cylinder press, and feed one handful at a time into the machine. The press squeezed out the juices, which ran into a stainless-steel trough that led downhill to a smaller outbuilding, where Chester worked. Every now and then Chester would yell for me either to slow down or speed up — usually the latter.

The juice got all over me, making me tacky from head to foot and attracting insects that literally became stuck to my skin and clothes. By the end of the first day I was eager to collect my pay and take a shower. I made my way into the other building to find Chester. Inside was a brick oven topped with a maze of stainless-steel channels. With great care Chester was using a series of dams made from wooden slats to control the flow of juice from one heated channel to another. As it passed through the maze, the juice turned thicker and darker, until at the end it had been reduced to a deep brown syrup: molasses. Wooden shelves were lined with hundreds of unlabeled Mason jars filled with it.

I thought of childhood breakfasts at my grandparents’ house. After everyone was situated at the table and a simple prayer had been said, Grandmother would teeter to her pie safe and retrieve a Mason jar of molasses. She’d meticulously dole out just enough to satisfy each diner’s taste buds and then return the jar to the pie safe, as if it were treasure.

Cary A. Wilke
Cuero, Texas

For lunch I decide to have orange slices from Whole Foods for the third time this week. The orange slices I eat don’t grow on trees. They are of the candy variety, contain zero vitamin c (unless citric acid is used as a preservative), and are fortified with modified cornstarch and pectin. They are one of the few proudly unwholesome products for sale in Whole Foods.

Candy oranges in hand, I get in line behind a mom whose cart is full of soy milk, honey-sweetened animal crackers, and frozen sweet-potato fries. Later I eye my co-workers’ salads and sushi and think, I’ll eat real food for dinner.

I first went on a diet when I was seventeen. For lunch I’d have lettuce and crackers from the high-school cafeteria’s salad bar. Then I cut back to just crackers. Lunch disappeared altogether in college, along with ten more pounds from my body and a good chunk of my self-esteem.

Although I was an English and journalism major, I did plenty of math, counting calories consumed and burned, the twisted algebra of anorexia: x - everything = happiness. I tried to go all day without any real food, but I did let myself eat candy: Laffy Taffy, Blow Pops, Swedish Fish, Mike and Ikes. When I began to slip up and eat again, I became bulimic so at least I could end each day empty and back “in control.” That worked until a concerned resident assistant and my annoyed roommate intervened. I went to an outpatient eating-disorders program, where I got into the habit of packing a lunch (if not eating it). But the program didn’t really help with the underlying nothingness I felt.

Now, in my late thirties, I have learned to eat protein at dinner and at least an energy bar for breakfast, but I still restrict and restrict, letting myself enjoy a hot meal only if I’ve made it through the day without “messing up.” (And, no, candy orange slices for lunch don’t count as a mistake in my crazy book.)

I know it’s wrong, but I lack the courage to make it right. I love being skinny and am terrified of living in a bigger body. I also love cherry sours, Lemonheads, orange slices, and grape jelly beans. I seldom drink and don’t smoke. I haven’t eaten at Taco Bell or tasted a french fry in twenty years. I deserve a treat.

I deserve it as much as I deserve the thousands of dollars in dental bills for crowns, bridges, veneers, and implants. I also deserve the slap of shame I get with every visit to the dentist. My dad was a dentist; my mom, his assistant. He died when I was six. I’ve been living on sugar ever since. 

Amanda Long
Falls Church, Virginia

“Do you like to eat cheeseburgers and pizza and ice cream?” the nurse asked me.

“Of course I do,” I replied. What eighteen-year-old didn’t?

“Well, you aren’t going to be eating those foods anymore,” he said. “No more sugar or fatty food. You are now diabetic.”

Nobody in my family had diabetes. I was the first. I felt angry and confused and depressed, and I wondered how a healthy young person could be diagnosed with a disease that would change everything so drastically. I would have to take insulin shots for the rest of my life.

Since then I have stabbed myself with a needle in the stomach or the leg four times a day, every day — 28,203 shots and counting. There hasn’t been a meal that I haven’t thought about sugar. 

Alex Peterson
Ephraim, Utah

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