Fructose may be exacerbating the obesity epidemic in the country, but it was sugar that patterned the consumption levels currently existing in American and European diets.

In Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, Sidney Mintz documents how sugar transformed the diets of American and Europeans. Sugar, produced from sugar cane or sugar beets of the Atlantic islands, was a luxury import, available only to the affluent as a spice. However, the increased production changed the status of this to a staple of the working class diet. The efficiency of sugar as a crop is unsurpassed in terms of delivery of calories.

To these remarkable calculations, we must add something concerning sugar’s relative efficiency as a calorie supplier. As agricultural yields have risen with better modern scientific methods, sugar cane’s long-standing superiority to other crops has grown proportionately. An acre of good subtropical land will now produce more than eight million calories in sugar beyond other products it yields. (Mintz, P191)

The efficiency of the sugar crop means that to promote increase of its consumption makes good economic sense, though not necessarily good nutritional sense. Sugar enabled a modern method of preparing food to supplant traditional methods in which sugar is used in foods where the taste of the food isn’t necessarily sweet. It adds bulk to processed foods, like meats and dairy. Although it doesn’t add any nutritional value, it adds calories in a economical fashion:

The high sucrose content of many prepared and processed foods that do not taste sweet (such as flour dredged meats, poultry, and fish that are baked broiled, or deep-friend) is an important source of the increase in sucrose consumption and substantiates the astonishing versatility of sucrose. When used in non-yeast-raised baked goods, we are told, “texture, grain and crumb become smoother, softer and whiter….This tenderizing effect of sugars has long been recognized.” Sucrose also supplies body to soft drinks because “a heavy liquid is more appealing to the mouth than water.” Sugar inhibits staleness in bread—“shelf life” is important in a society that wants its supermarkets open twenty-four house a day for “convenience”—stabilizes the chemical content of salt, mitigates the acidity of catsup, serves as a medium for yeast.”(Mintz, P206)

The legacy of sucrose is the transformation in what Mintz called the “grammar of eating.” Consumption increased in fats and sugars with an overall carbohydrates. In the past 20 years, High-Fructose Corn Syrup has supplanted sucrose because because it surpassed sugar in efficiency, lower cost, and shelf life. We may argue about dangers of HFCS and its part on the growing obesity rates in the country. It will be difficult to counteract this trend unless we redefine the 20th century sugar-driven "grammar of eating."