Sweets for my sweet

An interesting article in Saturday's Guardian describes a trend to produce and sell specialty sugars in the same way as the various dofferent specialty salts on the market (the pink Himalayan crystrals, the carefully harvested sea salt...). If there were any hope that the single origin products so temptingly descibed might lead to sugar becoming something to use with discernment, as sparingly as other spices, instead if a cheap bulking agent, I'd be a lot more interested.

But the article is in the paper's Environment section, not Food or Health. It acknowledges a downside to sugar, but only one:

Sugar production has an ugly past. About 5 million slaves were brought to the Caribbean, most to toil on sugar plantations starting in the mid-1500s. The slave trade reached its height in the 1700s, and Barbados, known as Sugar Island, was its crown jewel. Abolitionists in Europe and the US waged boycotts of sugar, a slave-derived good that represented abhorrent working conditions.

For even a vestigial awareness of the damage sugar does in the present to our national diet, you have to go to the Feast supplement. Feel free to insert here the tradional rant about how Feast caters to every dietary exclusion but one, or just skip straight to the back pages, where Grace Dent has her finger on the pulse:

Apple Butter Cafe, which recently opened a second branch at the top of London's Regent Street, is very much a cafe of its time. Today's young may be eschewing the vices of yesteryear - booze, ciggies, drugs, etc - but their Achilles heel is sugar. Build a cafe that serves short stacks of chunky, fat pancakes smothered in banoffee syrup and topped with mini meringues, shards of tempered chocolate, quenelles of thick cream and microplaned lemon zest, and they will come. Post a video on TikTok of someone blowtorching said pancake stack, so the meringue browns and gives the whole hot mess a baked alaska vibe, however, and your customers will queue from 8am for the chance to make their own content next to the fake plastic trees "growing" inside the cafe.

And since these are the people who write my daily paper, their blind spot is apparent in its pages.