Sweetness & power

Sweetness & Power is the story of how Europe's taste for sugar transformed the world and developed a model of agriculture and labor that is defining our current and future existence.

Sugar is possibly the largest geopolitical actor in recent human history, transforming the way people farm, manufacture and eat. The set of relationships developed on the sugar plantations in the Americas during European colonization are key to understanding climate change and the cascading mass extinction event that is currently underway.

Sugar only recently became a ubiquitous part of the world’s diet and culture and it happened through the brutality and violence of chattel slavery. The rise of the sugar plantation in turn went on to define both modern agriculture and the conception of the factory. Today, the profits associated with sugar’s products, which include the costs of medical treatments from its devastating impact on global health, are in the trillions of dollars. The contemporary production of sugarcane continues in plantation conditions that are brutal and exploitative both socially and ecologically.

A constellation of informed and interdisciplinary voices in concert with illustrative imagery, invites the sensible viewer to consider these complex and intersectional histories. The film addresses questions like; How did we arrive at this period of social and ecological ruination? What are the drivers in this unprecedented global health crisis with so much of the population experiencing chronic illness over the course of their lives? How do the multi-trillion dollar sugar and ultraprocessed foods industries obfuscate the implications of their products? And how are the legacies of plantation logic manifest and consequential in the present?

Director: Perry Shimon

Editor / Composer: Dustin Lynn

Composer: Skooby Laposky