Tastes Like Sugar
America's war on human flourishing
Lately, I have been remembering the many times I have ordered a coffee and, to my delight, the coffee arrives with a small biscuit or chocolate on the side, the sweet treat helping prepare the palette for the caffeinated drink. This is generally how coffee is served in France. The tiny treat is not there as an end in itself: it's there because the sweetness of the treat contrasts perfectly with the bitterness of the coffee. It has been decided by people of refinement that this is the right way to do things. And they are not wrong.
Regrettably, this is not how coffee is served in Canada or the United States. No matter how bourgeois the North American cafe might be, the coffee is served on its own. If you want a side sweet, you’re going to have to invest in an entire cookie, a slice of banana loaf, or a muffin, taking on board hundreds of extra calories.
The difference between coffee culture in France versus North America has long vexed me. There are other vexatious differences. While North American chains like Starbucks with their carry-out culture have infiltrated France just as they have much of the world, in the traditional French cafe, ordering a coffee to go is a no-no. It’s weird behavior. I have no doubt that if you go back a few decades, the very idea of hauling out your own coffee in a paper cup would have been considered preposterous. You stop in for a coffee because you want to relax, read Le Monde, watch the pigeons fluttering into the sky, have a chat with the barista or friends, or sit in quiet contemplation of life. You stop in for a coffee because quotidian existence has a reassuring pattern of routines, which might include the early-morning trip to the boulangerie to get fresh bread, or the ninety-minute lunch with a splash of wine, or the cinq à sept social outing with work buddies before heading home for dinner.
I’ve also been remembering all the times I’ve stood in line at Subway, here in North America, because the veggie-and-cheese sub is the only reasonably cheap and non-artery-clogging option on offer in our food deserts. Yet the entire experience makes me bristle with bourgeois irritation. So many questions! So many choices to make! I hate it all, and I cannot enter the mind of a person who enjoys any of this — barking out random selections to a poor beleaguered sandwich artist who has been forced to wear a silly hat. At the end of all this — “no hot peppers, yes to cheddar cheese please, I’d like multigrain not white bread” etc. — you still end up with a totally crap sandwich. The bread is limp. The interior contents taste as if they’ve been fortified to survive a nuclear winter. Every dutiful mouthful makes you regret the many twists and turns of your life that brought you to this exact spot, sitting in an airless food court under artificial light, surrounded by people feeling every bit as miserable as you do.
By contrast, there are sandwiches sold by the French chain, Paul, headquartered in Marcq-en-Barœul, Lille, that come pre-made with good-quality meat on a high-quality baguette, tasting like real food. The experience of eating one of these sandwiches is actually pleasurable. There is relatively little choice involved. The sandwiches come with a variety of ingredients — cheese, meat, eggs, tomato, and so on — and if you don’t like any of the selections on offer, well, you’re out of luck. If you want to remove or substitute any of the ingredients, you can go sit in a corner and make a spectacle of yourself as you dissect your sandwich like a three-year-old child.
It pays to remember: the Subway sandwich isn’t cheaper than the Paul sandwich. It just involves a whole lot more embarrassment and awkwardness and substantially reduced pleasure for everyone involved. This, to my mind, gets at the core of North American life.
North American life has not been devised for human flourishing.
And here we are, we Canadians, sitting next to the giant elephant that stampeded through the world promoting this very way of life. I generally love Americans — truly, I do. But at this point in history, I think it’s become common knowledge that corporate America sees the world purely as a laboratory and those of us living in it as guinea pigs. We are subjects of a terrible experiment. How much substandard product can be pumped into us in the name of profit?
We have been told, as North Americans, that we like choice. We consider choice to be our birthright. But this is sheer propaganda. No one entering a food court and considering the options could walk away saying this was a triumph of choice. No one that dares visit the local gigaplex (or whatever they call movie theatres these days) and glances at the movie posters for ten different superhero movies or preposterous thrillers made for 14-year-olds could come away saying that our culture values diversity.
What about a house? Would you like to buy a house? The contemporary suburban North American house is one of the most standardized consumer choices of them all. It comes with a mandatory minimum four-metre setback from the sidewalk. No one can say why. It’s almost definitely going to come with a lawn, and it’ll be your duty to mow it and water it and rototill it until the day you die. Your house will almost definitely come with a backyard, which will seldom be used. It’s almost definitely going to be on a street with literally zero amenities—no shops, no leisure facilities, no cultural institutions, etc. No, for any of that, you’re going to have to walk, cycle or most likely drive to somewhere else. That’s your standard suburban house, the American dream.
In 1924, the Department of Commerce, led by Herbert Hoover, introduced the following document, “A Standard State Zoning Enabling Act Under Which Municipalities May Adopt Zoning Regulations,” which set down the pattern for American life (and by extension, much of Canadian life), with its tell-all preamble: "For the purpose of promoting health, safety, morals, or the general welfare of the community, the legislative body of cities and incorporated villages is hereby empowered to regulate and restrict the height, number of stories, and size of buildings and other structures, the percentage of lot that may be occupied, the size of yards, courts, and other open spaces, the density of the population, and the location and use of buildings, structures and land for trade, industry, residence or other purposes."
This document was soon complemented in the 1930s with a host of other federally devised strategies to boost housing construction and ownership, with the overarching goal of avoiding the building of any public housing. Long-term amortized mortgages and low interest rates were among the most efficient tools, with the newly created Federal Housing Authority as the backstop for private lending to homeowners. It’s during this era when “redlining” began: realtors would carve up a map of the urban space and mark out areas where the inhabitants were deemed too poor for a mortgage: it just so happened that all of these areas were majority Black. Many whites, with so much of their wealth invested in their homes, deemed the mere presence of non-whites in their neighbourhoods as a threat to property values. Suburbs were ground zero for a new kind of segregation.
Ever since this era, city governments from Edmonton to Austin to Palo Alto have been getting involved at a very intimate level in arranging the entire urban landscape and making it conform to an idiosyncratic model of perfection. The suburban home is the Subway sandwich of housing. There may no longer be the officially sanctioned practice of redlining, but the sterility of suburbia remains, with its attendant mindsets: a fixation with property value, a militant suspicion of outsiders, and a sedentary, home-bound lifestyle.
Human flourishing has never been the point.
As the world watches Trump, Musk and their hired tech-goons sack and pillage the American government, it raises the question of what stage of “development,” exactly, we’ve reached. It used to be said: wherever America goes, so too goes the rest of the world. But I am not convinced that’s true anymore. Over the last week, a rather treasonous thought has entered my head. America is no longer in the vanguard. The goons in the White House are not inventing the future, they’re dutifully following the model laid down by China — badly, of course. The idea of gutting the public service in the name of efficiency makes perfect sense if you’re hellbent on replacing democracy, with its checks and balances and the right to hold public servants to account, with a new form of leadership that uses the power of technology to remove what's left of civic participation. The goal is to force the population to obey the rules of online platform governance. This will be a rule by corporations, tout court, and our new feudal lords have all the tools they need to keep us in line.
As a Canadian, say what you will about the Canada Revenue Agency, at least if you call them you can eventually speak to somebody, and they’ll handle your sensitive financial matters with respect and politesse. Try having a conversation with Facebook or Google, or even a bit player like Fubo (currently in talks to be acquired by Disney). For the pleasure of watching about twenty Premier League football games per year, I give Fubo $280 annually, and yet if the service goes down, there is no one to talk to. The phone line tells you no one is available. You end up in a vicious circle of futility with the chatbot, which keeps referring you to online articles that cannot resolve the problem.
Yet, from the standpoint of the corporate style of governance that the White House is dreaming up, all this is just perfect. It’s an absolutely ideal state of affairs. Labour is the most expensive line item in pretty much any government budget. Labour is also time consuming, complicated, and asks awkward questions. Labour also sometimes goes on strike. For Musk and the generation of tech bros like him, labour looks like the last impediment to the smooth, frictionless rule that they’ve long coveted.
So what’s waiting for us is a model of a “perfect” life that is somewhat different from the one proposed by the Department of Commerce’s zoning advisory committee in the 1920s. It’s going to be a model devised by men whose notion of the good life ceased to develop some time between the age of fourteen and nineteen (exhibit A: the Tesla Cybertruck).
Our new overlords consider the vast mass of humanity to be little more than squishy little larvae, sitting in pods, awaiting inputs of stimulus, food, oxygen and maybe a little light, and presumably producing some kind of output that is valuable from the standpoint of growing GDP. All those squishy little humans will be dependent on tech platforms for all services. And for the reasons explained above, there will never be real humans behind those services. If you have a problem, you’re going to have to go through the online labyrinth, wasting your time, feeling your life force ebbing and ultimately flickering toward darkness. Human flourishing? What's that? When most people's pastimes are actually pathologies — shopping, gambling, drugs, alcohol, porn, doom scrolling and social media — the idea of human flourishing starts to seem archaic.
In 1984, Coca Cola and Pepsi stopped using sugar in their soft drinks, switching to high-fructose corn syrup. It didn’t take long for most other American food and drink manufacturers to follow their lead. In the United States, per-capita consumption of high-fructose corn syrup went from half a pound a year in 1970 to 38 pounds in 1999. Obesity rates skyrocketed.
The use of corn syrup as a sugar substitute initially took off in the 1960s, as the technology to manufacture it was introduced to the United States and the international price of sugar skyrocketed, leading to the search for an alternative. But when the price of sugar went down again, corn syrup didn’t retreat. American farmers were ill prepared to scale back their corn production. Big government intervened on their behalf, with a host of federal measures in the 1970s and 1980s to subsidize corn production and to impose high tariffs on sugar imports. The effect of the government assistance was to make high-fructose corn syrup permanently cheaper than sugar.
This is one of many instances in which the United States was indeed in the forefront of global change: after the negotiation of the free trade agreement known as NAFTA, both Mexico and Canada became big importers of soft drinks laden with high-fructose corn syrup. Obesity edged upwards in both of those countries as well.
Multiple research studies — from Yale, Princeton and Guelph University — have shown that corn syrup is actually worse for consumers than sugar. It causes them to gain more weight and does not trigger the same feeling of satiation that sugar does. As the fast food market reaches a saturation point in North America, the American companies responsible for the prevalence of corn syrup are obliged to open up more of the rest of the world to their products in order to sustain growth. All of this is quite intentional.
So it is that corn syrup spreads to nation after nation, fuelling desires that can never be fully satiated. We have come a very long way from the era of Marcel Proust. How many of us will experience the exquisite memories that surface when he bites into a perfectly delicious, perfectly sweet madeleine?
“No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory – this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. ... Whence did it come? What did it mean?” Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust.
Everywhere that American-style capitalism has proliferated, it has been a sworn enemy of such moments. It doesn't admit to an adversarial position, of course. You are free to do whatever you want, say the proponents of this system. If you want a madeleine, go buy one! But volume matters. Accessibility matters. Cultural influence matters. Social influence matters. Slowly, pleasures that were truly sweet have been replaced by those that only taste sweet.
If the hostility from the current American administration toward countries that have traditionally been allies, such as Canada, leads to those allies striking out on a new path, then it could be one of the best things that ever happened. Personally, I have had my fill of being the target demographic for the promotion of lifestyles and products that are merely knockoffs of the good life. I want the real thing.
NOTES
Here is a more fulsome excerpt from Proust’s memory of the sweet, sweet madeleine from “Remembrance of Things Past.”
Sometimes I find some real gems on the Internet and I often bury them down here in the notes section where almost no one clicks on them. So it was with my post, “From the Air,” in which I unearthed a 1963 article from the Saturday Evening Post called “The Problem with the Suburbs.” Look at this: “The most common residential unit in the suburbs is a single house set back 25 feet from the sidewalk on a 60-by-120-foot lot. The owner cultivates only his front yard. Because it is so public, however, the front yard is completely unsuitable for outdoor living. The rear yard, on the other hand, is too small for growing children to play in, and frequently becomes nothing more than a place for hiding the garbage and hanging out the laundry.” So what that teaches us is that many of the fundamental flaws with the suburbs have been glaringly apparent for over half a century and yet we keep building them with almost the exact same specifications anyway. Human flourishing!
Articles, etc.
Cinq à sept
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinq_%C3%A0_sept
A Standard State Zoning Enabling Act Under Which Municipalities May Adopt Zoning Regulations
https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/GOVPUB-C13-c1525bdbe21763c5cf69010cfab02846
“How corn syrup took over America.” Mark Dent, The Hustle, January 10, 2025
https://thehustle.co/originals/how-corn-syrup-took-over-america
“Make Them Eat Cake: How America is exporting its obesity epidemic.” John Norris, Foreign Policy, September 3, 2013
https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/09/03/make-them-eat-cake/
“How NAFTA may have made Canada fat,” Toronto Star, July 11, 2017
https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/how-nafta-may-have-made-canada-fat/article_f3f581f6-1a75-5164-a016-91d9a6fb9746.html#
Photos
Beautiful, modern life before plastic, corn syrup, and Walmart May 3, 2020 by Joshua Spodek
https://joshuaspodek.com/beautiful-modern-life-before-plastic-corn-syrup-and-walmart
"Florida fleet of Tesla Cybertrucks vandalized with 'F*ck Elon.'" Matthew Guy, Driving, June 24, 2024
https://driving.ca/auto-news/crashes/tesla-cybertruck-vandalism-elon-musk-spray-paint