Here’s a new blog posts from the EVE’s Fall School 2024 participants!
Diana Sfetlana Stoica and Sibongile Mlotya duelve some reflections on production and consumption of sugare and their implications from a biosphere integrity perspective.
You can find their full paper here: Reflections on Sugar and biosphere integrity: what nature gives and what humans do
The full Post-Graduate Student’s Papers Collection 2024 and all the others EVE’s Publications are alwys available on our website!
Thank you so much for following along,
EVE’s Team
Reflections on sugar from a biosphere integrity perspective
By Diana Sfetlana Stoica and Sibongile Mlotya
Despite, or even along with current ideological challenges on Artificial Intelligence, humanity is more and more preoccupied by its condition of future post-human. This concern includes the becoming of the Anthropos sphere, integrated into a Biosphere’s Integrity preservation objective. Unpacking this concern, we found out lately that sugar and the narratives on its production and consumption, which were amplified in the late three decades due to the increase of diseases caused by excessive sugar consumption, are central to social, economic, political, psychological, but also epistemological perspectives on the integrity of the biosphere, posed as a planetary boundary.
Biosphere changes are natural processes, but the major issue is that they destabilize both the equilibrium of nature and culture, as a consequence of irrational and less respectful human actions or behaviours. At the basis of such actions and behaviours there is an ontology according to which, when dealing with health and nutrition, sugar would represent one of the most triggering element to define a conceptual map of relations between what nature gives (to the human) and what humans do (to the nature, or to themselves). The position of sugar at the centre of nature-culture paradigms, as a concept, reflects the vital and sensitive links between human health, the human action, environmental change and biodiversity
Literature is exhaustive on medical expertise on the consequences of sugar consumption on human health, but the subject was less regarded about dealing with how sugar production and consumption influenced ecological and even socio-ecological developments. The example of People’s Contribution to Nature (PCN) coined already[i] ( (Brown et al., 2014), was taken as an example of parameter to assess the type of changes (positive or negative) that sugar consumption and production determine in nature (from Biosphere to the Anthropos sphere), or what humans do. The same reasoning was applied in this analysis, but on the contrary, critically thinking on an eventual (NCP) – Nature’s Contribution to the People, or, what nature gives. Therefore, sugar as a concept, resource and element, was analysed from the point of view of positive –negative aspects of PCN and NCP, which are many times co-dependent. These elements, taken into account for their aim to measure, rather than to describe, are floating around perspectives on the notions of good for nature or good for people, that are often contrary to each other.
So, the next step was to reflect on what kind of contribution people brought to the nature, or the nature brought to the people, relating to sugar. The holistic outlook on the narratives on sugar include the outcome of sugar production and consumption, as well as the advantages of the use of cane or beet to the production of sugar, the harvesting of both, the alternatives in case of not harvesting them, the exclusionary choices of land use, the use of pesticides in case of harvesting, the consequences of diseases caused by direct or indirect sugar consumption, the misbalancing in public health narratives as a result of sugar and alternatives to it, the increase of deaths due to sugar consumption and the rise of sugar-based ingredients in food industry, the upshots of fruit consumption as an alternative to sugar consumption and nutrition trend’s evolutions, as well as the aftermath of changes over bird’s mechanism of survival in case of fruit over-nurturing, challenging biosphere integrity. Along with pragmatic perspectives on the consequences of the sugar’s presence in our daily diets, it would be relevant to unpack the concept of sugar from the perspective of its quality of representing the hedonistic feature of humans’ need to consume “sweets”, as well as the inclination to the will of power, symbolized by sugar as discourse of colonialism, due to various sugar cane plantations representing the economies of (ex) and neo-colonies.
The results of the analysis have shown that there were at least 6 positive and 12 negative people’s contributions to the nature (PCN), meanwhile there were 7 negative and 7 positive nature’s contributions to people (NCP). From this point of view, nature’s contribution to people (NCP) would be neutral, meanwhile the people’s contribution to nature (PCN) would be negative. Despite simplicity and limitations of such a holistic study that opens up to critical reflections, the negative PCN highlighted the relevance of the paradigm “LESS is MORE” (Meier et al., 2023)[ii], that should be applied to sugar consumption and production, based on the developments of nutrition and psychological narratives on the higher satisfaction corresponding to lesser consumption of sweets(or sugar), nonetheless, the more reconciliation and recognition with less interference from external powers, in a narrative of international relations and global sustainable development. Therefore, a less positive contribution of people to nature would mean a less negative contribution in the end (report 1:2 if considering PCN) so finally a more positive one (MORE), which could be finally translated, regarding to sugar, into the reflection that non-contribution of people to nature could be a solution to incline the balance of biosphere changes in the favour of humanity. The non-contribution of people could be the limitation of sugar consumption through methods of coercive and non-coercive limitation of the addiction to it. This would mean finding different ways to use the beet and the cane (for example in the case of the cane, its use for ecological packaging), or, suggesting the consumption of products that might bring a similar amount of satisfaction to the people, but being less impactful on the biosphere.
It is not simple to find such suggestions, that is why this analysis not only highlights the importance of sugar as a central narrative to the education for the preservation of biosphere integrity, but also exposes the new paradigm of ecology on the planetary boundary’s management instead of its shattering in practice and theory, with a focus on how to assure the equilibrium of contributions to the nature in the logics of 1 to 2 between NCP and PCN (if we report the 1:1 of NCP to 1:2 of PCN), namely continually decrease the impact of people on nature, either negative or positive, to obtain an increasing contribution of the nature to humanity and thus, a positive biosphere integrity merging.
[i] Brown, V. A., Grootjans, J., Ritchie, J., Townsend, M., & Verrinder, G. (2014). Sustainability and health: supporting global ecological integrity in public health. Routledge.
[ii] Meier, B. P., Romano, A., Kateman, S., & Nori, R. (2023). Less is more: Mindfulness, portion size, and candy eating pleasure. Food Quality and Preference, 103, 104703.