Bittersweet (22 page)

RUNNING ON ALCOHOL

Many people are firmly convinced that the future of the internal combustion engine lies in alcohol made from sugar. This is, they argue, a clean fuel, a green fuel, a modern fuel, because while it produces carbon dioxide when it is burned, this has been taken out of the atmosphere by the sugar cane in the first place, so there is no net increase in greenhouse emissions. There is just one small problem, which becomes apparent in auditing the fuel and greenhouse costs of clearing the land (you lose the original productivity of the land), planting and cultivating the crop, making and adding fertiliser, spraying the crop, cutting and transporting the cane, crushing the cane and refining the sugar, distilling and transporting the alcohol.

Such an audit does not give quite such a rosy picture of clean, green, sugar-based alcohol fuels. Corn is slightly less efficient than sugar at providing feedstock for ethanol, but on American figures, eleven acres of corn, enough to feed seven people, would be needed to produce the fuel to take one car 10 000 miles—and the 852 gallons required would cost US$1.74 per gallon, against US$0.95 per gallon for fuel based on crude oil. To power all of the cars in the United States would use up 97 per cent of all the land area of that nation.

The first authentic internal combustion engine in America, developed by Samuel Morey around 1826, ran on ethanol and turpentine. In 1860, Nikolaus August Otto in Germany used ethanol to power an early engine—it was widely available throughout Europe as a fuel for spirit lamps. He devised a carburettor which, like Morey's, heated the alcohol to help it vaporise as the engine was being started. A January 1861 patent application on the carburettor in the Kingdom of Prussia was turned down, probably because heated alcohol carburetion was already being widely used in spirit lamps. Otto's initial financing came from Eugen Langen, who owned a sugar-refining company that probably had links to the alcohol markets of Europe.

The French—even though their grape growers were protective of the brandy market—recognised a good thing when they saw one, and French fuel-alcohol production rose from 2.7 million gallons in 1900 to 5.7 million in 1903 and 8.3 million in 1905. In a 1901 rally sponsored by the Automobile Club of Paris, 50 vehicles ranging from light quadricycles to heavy trucks made the 167-mile trek from Paris to Roubaix. After the next rally, the consumption of fuels (varying from pure alcohol to 50 per cent alcohol and 50 per cent gasoline) were measured for each vehicle. Most drivers apparently preferred the 50–50 blend.

In 1902 there was a Paris exhibition entirely devoted to alcohol-powered automobiles and farm machinery, as well as a wide variety of lamps, stoves, heaters, laundry irons, hair curlers, coffee roasters and every conceivable household appliance and agricultural engine that could be powered by alcohol. These were not experimental models but reflected a well-established industry.

Ten per cent of the engines being produced in 1906 by the Otto Gas Engine Works in Germany were designed to run on pure ethanol, while a third of the heavy locomotives produced at the Deutz Gas Engine Works ran on pure ethanol. In 1915, when oil shortages seemed likely to paralyse Germany's transportation system, thousands more engines were quickly modified to run on ethanol. In retrospect, it seems possible that Germany could have been beaten by 1917 if the production of alcohol from beet sugar had not formed an important part of the agricultural economy.

Perhaps the Kaiser gave time to thank that Prussian ancestor who had encouraged Marggraf to work with beet sugars, but perhaps those whose menfolk died in the mud and blood of Flanders would have been less appreciative of the part sugar played in prolonging a war that nobody could really win. But then again, sugar had long been killing human beings.

SUGAR AND HEALTH

Buddha said it was no sin for the sick to ask for
gur
, and from the time of the Romans through to the Middle Ages sugar was more a medical treatment than a treat. Thomas Aquinas approved of sugar being administered during Lent, but there were others with different views. By 1606 the French physician Joseph Du Chesne had already stated that sugar was essentially dangerous, that its whiteness was hiding dark perils.

On the other hand, the British physician Tobias Venner wrote in 1620 that ‘sugar by how much the whiter it is, by so much the purer and wholesomer it is . . .'. Venner also argued that tobacco was health-giving, so he may not be a reliable source. In 1647 another doubtful commentator, the French-born British author Theophilus Garencières, accused sugar of being the cause of
Tabes Anglica
, later known as consumption and which we now call tuberculosis. The same author was also rather keen on ‘tincture of coral' as a general cure, and used the prophecies of Nostradamus to show that King Charles II would have a son. Sadly for both prophets' reputations, Charles died childless.

According to Garencières, sugar was ‘not only injurious to the lungs in its temperament and composition, but also in its entire property', a view that found support from Dr Thomas Willis, commonly credited with the discovery of glycosuria in 1674, who not only quoted Garencières favourably, but expressed the opinion that in addition to tuberculosis, sugar was responsible for scurvy.

In France too, sugar was under attack. Philippe Hecquet, at one time physician to Louis XIV, was associated with the Jansenists, an influential ‘puritan' sect within Catholicism. He was adamant that sugar was an essentially treacherous substance, a poison that used pleasure as a lure. In fact, the theme of sugar as lure continues right up to the present day. In a similar way, the different materials used in sugar making have also come under attack. When Joseph Banks discussed the poor state of the teeth of the betel-nut chewers of Savu in 1770, he blamed the lime used in refining sugar:

This loss of the teeth is . . . in my opinion is much easier accounted for by the well known corrosive quality of the lime, which is a necessary ingredient in every mouthfull and that too in no very insignificant quantity . . . Possibly the ill effects which sugar is beleivd by us Europeans to have upon the teeth may proceed from the same cause as it is well known that refin'd or loaf sugar contains in it a large quantity of lime.

In the late nineteenth century the wheel turned again, and many physicians in France and Germany were loud in their praise of the health-giving properties of sugar. Opinion changed again in the twentieth century, and is negative to this day, with websites warning solemnly of danger, like this example:

In the process of making sugar from both cane and beets, they are heated and calcium hydroxide (lime), which is a toxin to the body, is added. This is done to remove those ingredients that interfere with the complete processing of sugar. Carbon dioxide, which is another toxin, is then used to remove the lime (and according to my studies, not all is removed).

This bizarre claim of remnant carbon dioxide in the sugar is at odds with the mainstream terror campaign that sugar is ‘pure, white and deadly', to use the tag line of John Yudkin. William Dufty warns in a best-selling book that:

So effective is the purification process which sugar cane and beets undergo in the refineries that sugar ends up as chemically pure as the morphine or the heroin a chemist has on the laboratory shelves. What nutritional virtue this abstract chemical purity represents, the sugar pushers never tell us.

To Dufty, purity offers all sorts of magical powers, and apparently even the hint of purity in the future can work wonders, for he argues that sugar caused madness at a time when it was far from pure:

In the Dark Ages, troubled souls were rarely locked up for going off their rocker. Such confinement began in the Age of Enlightenment, after sugar made the transition from apothecary's prescription to candymaker's confection. ‘The great confinement of the insane', as one historian calls it, began in the late 17th century, after sugar consumption in Britain had zoomed in 200 years from a pinch or two in a barrel of beer, here and there, to more than two million pounds per year.

This sort of argument is known among logicians as
post hoc, ergo
propter hoc
, a Latin tag that means ‘after that, so caused by that'. On this principle, if I die after drawing breath, I died of a surfeit of air; if I die on exhaling, I died because I failed to hold my breath. In short, it turns a chance correlation into a major issue. It is as invalid as it would be for me to say I lost weight, my haemorrhoids disappeared, and I felt better after avoiding sweets, while neglecting to mention that I also gave up cocaine and started exercising at the same time.

Correlations are the stock in trade of people seeking to make a case: while it may be true, for example, that some Presbyterian ministers in Massachusetts drank a lot of rum, the linear relationship between their average salaries and the price of rum sold in Havana over several centuries is unlikely to be any more than the result of comparing two values both influenced by the cost of living. And if correlations are evidence, when there were wireless licences in Britain there was a strong correlation between the number of admissions to British mental institutions and the number of licences issued for radio receivers.

Eventually people started to come out with all sorts of fearful tales based on the purity of sugar which—by its very purity— shocked the digestive system as no food had ever done in the past! In truth, as soon as sugar is mixed with other foods, or with saliva and digestive juices, it ceases to be pure—end of story. In the 1970s the Australian sugar industry did not try to fight fads with facts: they simply advertised that sugar was natural, and restored market share. This soothed the minds of consumers, who neglected to consider that hemlock, lightning, plummeting asteroids, strychnine, cowpats, poison ivy, arsenic, great white sharks, stinging nettles, tarantulas, cobras and skunks are all natural as well. The argument worked well, but the science was as weak as the science in the attacks on sugar— but that was nothing to the attacks on the other sweeteners.

THE ALTERNATIVES

The alternative sweeteners, just like sugar, seem to attract their share of less than entirely rational opposition. They are accused of causing diseases, breaking down to produce poisons and, worst of all, they are accused of having been discovered by accident. To people with a low level of scientific knowledge, like the food faddists, accidental discoveries just have to be the work of the Devil, or worse.

The problem with food faddists is that if they go on long enough, then like the infinite number of monkeys that I have currently working on the sugar-free version of
The Winter's Tale
, they will hit on the truth at some point. But before they get there, they will have raised so much noise and clatter that the small medical truth, when it is found, may be missed in the general hullabaloo. In fact many scientific discoveries may be attributed to a chance event, and attacking the end product because it was found by accident is far from the rational end of the criticism scale. Accidents are far more common in the chemical laboratory than outsiders realise!

Accident 1

Constantine Fahlberg, who patented saccharin in 1879, claimed that he accidentally spilled some chemical on his hand while working on possible food preservatives in Ira Remsen's laboratory at Johns Hopkins University. Fahlberg noticed a sweet taste while eating dinner that night, and then sought it out in the laboratory the next day. Fahlberg and Remsen published a joint paper on the new substance, but then Fahlberg took out the patent on his own, and became rich. Remsen went on to become president of Johns Hopkins, and is reported to have said later, ‘Fahlberg is a scoundrel. It nauseates me to hear my name mentioned in the same breath with him.'

Saccharin was a wonder in its time, and before the First World War, when it was taxed in terms of its sweetening power (rated then at 500 times the sweetness of sugar), quite a lot of saccharin was smuggled into Britain. Sir William Tilden describes the checking of a number of ‘white powders':

. . . the inducement to smuggle this article into the country is very great, and numerous ingenious methods have been devised for this purpose have been detected by the Customs Department. The presence of saccharin, therefore, has to be searched for in all preparations in which there is any probability of its occurrence. Saccharin was discovered in 83 samples specially examined . . . in the year 1911–12.

In fact, saccharin was used much more commonly in Europe after the Americans joined in the First World War and, with sugar rationed, the little pink packets became common. Since 1960 there has been some evidence of bladder cancer in rats dosed with saccharin, but no human cancers have been associated with the product. Saccharin has been banned in Canada for many years, but not in the United States, producing a new generation of saccharin smugglers motivated more by matters relating to diabetes than to evading excise and customs.

Accident 2

Michael Sveda, a graduate student at the University of Illinois in 1937, was investigating the structures of antipyretics, drugs that reduce fevers. While studying sulfamates and their derivatives, he produced cyclamate, but at this point chemical legend and the story Sveda told a few years later diverge. The legend has it that he picked a cigarette up off the bench, where it had rolled in some spillage. He was indeed smoking in the laboratory, as happened in those more innocent days, but he merely lit the cigarette without washing his hands, and so transferred a small sample of the compound to his mouth.

His son, also a scientist, recalls that when cyclamates were released commercially Sveda was asked to endorse a brand of cigarette, but he declined the opportunity. An intensely honest man by all accounts, he was later wounded by the campaign that was directed at cyclamate/saccharin sweeteners, based on a bizarre experiment that induced cancer in rats when they were given a dosage equal to a human drinking a bathtub of cyclamate-sweetened drink, every day for a year.