The Daily Zeitgeist - How Big Sugar Runs The World 06.21.23

Episode Date: June 21, 2023

In episode 1504, Jack and Miles are joined by journalist, author, public speaker, and host of Big Sugar, Celeste Headlee, to discuss… Big Sugar's Influence On The World and more! LISTEN: Soapbox Soliloquy by Speakers Corner Quartet  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In California during the summer of 1975, within the span of 17 days and less than 90 miles, two women did something no other woman had done before, try to assassinate the President of the United States. One was the protege of Charles Manson. 26-year-old Lynette Fromm, nickname Squeaky. The other, a middle-aged housewife working undercover for the FBI. Identified by police as Sarah Jean Moore. The story of one strange and violent summer,

this season on the new podcast, Rip Current. Hear episodes of Rip Current early and completely ad free and receive exclusive bonus content by subscribing to iHeartTrue Crime Plus, only on Apple Podcasts. Hey, I'm Bruce Bozzi. On my podcast, Table for Two, we have unforgettable lunch after unforgettable lunch with the best guests you could possibly ask for. People like David Duchovny, Jeff Goldblum, and Kristen Wiig. We're doing all the dessert. We're doing all the dessert. We'll just skip right to it. Our second season is airing right now, so you can catch up on our conversations that are intimate and often hilarious.

Listen to Table for Two with Bruce Bozzi on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In 1982, Atari players had one game on their minds, Sword Quest, because the company had promised 150 grand in prizes to four finalists, but the prizes disappeared, leading to one of the biggest controversies

in 80s pop culture. I'm Jamie Loftus. Join me this spring for The Legend of Swordquest. We'll follow the quest for lost treasure across four decades. Listen to The Legend of Swordquest on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, the internet, and welcome to season 292, episode 1 of Third Nightly Night Geist Day, production of iHeartRadio. This is a podcast where we take a deep dive into America's shared consciousness, and it's Wednesday, June 21st, 2023, which of course means, Miles. It's the longest day. Summer begins today. The solstice is upon us.

Longest day is summer begins today. The solstice is upon us. Get ready. Put on your big sun hats like I did that I got for Father's Day. I will be wearing this woven hat for the rest of the summer. That has UCLA branding all over it. Very cool. Also, National Peaches and Cream Day.

Yeah, exactly. National Selfie Day. National Daylight Appreciation Day. Makes sense. World Giraffe Day. Shout out to those long necks. National Smoothie Day. World Humanist Day. makes sense world giraffe day shout out to those long necks national smoothie day world humanist day uh world hydrog hydrography hydrography day we'll ask our expert guests what what that means yeah and let's go skateboarding day too and also if you're in arizona national arizona day so

how about that there's a lot actually yeah it's also birthday time the time of the year that all my I always talk about how I don't believe in astrology and yet all my favorite people in the world have birthdays around this time today it is my best friend since I was 12 years old Chris Chris yeah and Jose who you also met at the Brooklyn show and then a couple days ago, my wife. And the day before that, one of my best friends, John. So shout out to all the Gemini. In a few days. Big Gemini energy.

Her majesty. Her match. In five days. You know what I mean? It all, look, it's all happening. It's all happening. Well, my name is Jack O'Brien, a.k.a. I saw your thighs. And it openedk.a. I saw your thighs and it opened up my eyes.

I saw your thighs. Zeit is demanding all the plumper standing. I saw your thighs and it opened up my eyes. I saw your thighs. No one's going to plump you up to pull up the shorts where they belong. Up where they belong up where the up where they belong that is courtesy of elise with the hot takes our expert guest is wondering what she got herself into what manner of show what manner of show is this uh i'm thrilled to be joined as always by my co-host mr miles gray it's miles gray the first

time father's day celebrator and belgian experimental visual artist your boy kusama but yeah shout out to a few people who sent me uh father's day well wishes i don't even know y'all but thank you oh i appreciate that that's nice yeah Father's Day. I don't remember mine, but I'm sure it was a trip. All I do is think about it. It's so weird. All I do is run back stuff my dad did. And I'm like, would I do that? Is that good?

Was that bad? And half the time, I'm like, wait, is that trauma? I'm trying to parse through it. But it was normal. Huh? But overall, fantastic time. Fantastic time. Well, Miles, we are thrilled to be joined in our third seat by an award-winning journalist, author, public speaker, the host of the new show, Big Sugar.

Please welcome Celeste Headley! Celeste! Nice! Welcome. I can't have you guys do that intro all the time. You can. Anytime you enter a room, we are available for, you know, a small fee. Yeah.

Just walk in and shout my name. That would be awesome. Yeah. Yeah. We moonlight as town criers for any kind of dynamic intro. Yeah. We can read from a scroll and everything. Wow.

That's, I don't know how much work there is for that, but you know. I'm not going to lie. It's, it's feast or famine. It's feast or famine. It really is. It's feast or famine lie it's it's feast or famine it's feast or famine it really is i'm sure we don't have to ask you this but this is that is the dumbest opening to a show that you've ever been on i have to imagine i probably don't even need to confirm that but that that's correct okay you can take that no confirmed the crown on thank you yes here's your crown king uh well thank you so much for joining us. Your new show, Big Sugar, is fascinating, kind of mind expanding, also just kind of crystallizes, to use a sugar industry term, crystallizes a lot of the things that we already suspect about the world of capitalism and industry in these United States.

So thank you, first of all, for your work on that show. It's really cool. Thanks. Thanks so much. I mean, I learned a lot doing it also. It's one of those things where you kind of pull the thread and it just keeps... And you're like, it's still going? Pulling. Exactly. Everything's unraveling. Exactly. Yeah. But, you you know it's important this is stuff you know i know okay so this is all stuff that we should know but without diving completely

feet first into it i should say that one of my big takeaways after doing two years of work on this is that I don't think we should have to know this. I think that with all the other stuff we have going on as citizens, as consumers, I don't think we should be responsible for also policing our industries. I think that we shouldn't have to be the ones constantly having to keep watch over whether industries and employers are following basic ethical rules and regulations, both environmental and human. Yeah. So, yeah. But I got good news, Celeste. We don't have to because that's what the regulators in the government do, right? Yeah. And they're super well-funded and always up to the task, as we'll get into. Yeah. Right. All right.

Well, we are going to get to know you a little bit better. We are going to hop into all of that feet first. We're going to talk about, you know, there's just right chock-full of conspiracies. There's a conspiracy to, you know, under. Real ones. Real, real conspiracies. Yeah, I guess people now think just conspiracy means conspiracy theory. It's like something you're these are real vast conspiracies to keep the truth about at the center of the story and basically like slavery that exists in the United States you know but basically to this day some of the worst working conditions so we'll talk about all of that but before we get into the new show we do like to

ask our guests a little bit about themselves such as what is something from your search history that's revealing about who you are? So I just went through my search history and what I found was me looking up specific answers to the crossword question for today. OK, so I looked up a very specific Irish word, for example, which was the name of an irish god in order to answer a crossword and that's personal because i do the crossword every single day and get very very long strings the crossword and wordle every day so there you go oh you don't know wordle wordle wordle is about where i max out i i'm excellent i'm pretty good at word i mean i guess i'm pretty good at my average I get by the third line. Okay. That's good, right?

That's par, right? What is that? No, that's a birdie. That's a birdie? Celeste is averaging a birdie over here. Wow. Okay. That's pretty good, right? Tiger Wordles. Yeah. Yeah. That's pretty impressive. And then

on the crosswords, I do that too i i google for help on specific answers because some of them are like names and like specific yeah yeah all right i don't know that stuff yeah that actually makes me feel better about myself i was like wait you know about like celtic gods yeah wow yeah what is something that you think is overrated avocados okay what do you mean okay well come on expand on that just i mean i say this i'm gonna get i'm gonna get email i'm not because i'm from california i just think they're overrated they put avocados on everything thinking an avocado is improved gonna improve everything And avocados do not improve everything. So example, okay, what's something that you're like,

this isn't that different. You just put avocado on it. Is there something specifically you're like, knock it off with avocado on that? I'm just going to say in general, like there's things, like there's sandwiches that shouldn't have avocado on them. Like there's hamburgers that shouldn't have avocado.

I mean, sometimes maybe, but like you bite into a hamburger and avocado is a squishy piece of food, right? Like that's going to be a mess, you know? So maybe cool it with the avocados. Yeah. How are you on avocado toast? That's just toast? I'm a no on the avocado toast, right? You know? Okay okay favorite avocado dish if you got to give it up to avocados in one form or the other where is it perfect i i'm from i'm from california i mean it has to be a guacamole but yeah yeah yeah okay yeah i'm just

bad at picking i'm bad at timing the ripening of them. Unless they're ripe at the store, I fuck up. They're like, oh yeah, three days. Then I wait the fourth day. It's like I got worms having a party on the inside. I'm like, I'll fuck this up. You can't go by color. You have to go by firmness.

Squishy, yeah. I like it firm like an apple. I like to just bite into my avocado and just have it crisp it should have a crunch in my book interesting and gen z i i love all of your avocado creations and you know save your save your mail for celeste because i'm team avocado okay team avo over here i'm a coward oh by the way celeste i'm a coward just in case. Yeah, that'll be come clear. But there'll be a lot of disclaimers where I'm like, Big Sugar, we actually are big fans on this podcast. but yeah i feel like i see now it's funny how like the avocado wave like it became a thing i feel like in california like 15 years ago where it was just like you will not avoid it and we're like

okay fine and people are like okay this is cool and now it is to a point like for me avocado tuna i like a tuna sandwich but i see a lot of avocado on tuna sandwiches now. And I'm like, that's a little too much for me. For me personally, not a big fan. But then I see how now like it infects the rest of the world. Because when I travel like abroad, you'll see them like add an avocado for five euros. And you're like, man, that's fucking expensive. But like, yeah, exactly. I think this pasta dish is fine without the avocado.

Absolutely. Spaghetti bolognese with avocado. With avocado. You got to have some avocado slices thrown in there. I would say just generally like sliced avocado on a sandwich. Like I actually really love avocado toast, but like that's a great like to guacamole that avocado up so that it's almost like a spread that just like stays on there real nice is I feel like we should see more burgers that have like avocado spread. I think that probably the issue there is that so many avocado spreads are just like green, like mayonnaise that's been dyed green. And so people are distrustful of it but i don't know yeah when the when the little chunk of avocado is like squeezing out every

which way right that's hard yeah because it's already like a it's like it's like the slipperiest food anyway it is and sandwiches are known if when they're made incorrectly you are like ejecting elements of a sandwich out the size if you bite too hard or at the wrong angle. Yeah, it's like avocado and cooked mushrooms. Like those two slippery things. You have to be careful how you use them. Yeah. Like banana.

If a banana wouldn't like work on the thing, the avocado probably isn't going to work either. Yeah. But we didn't have generations of, you know know avocados being slippery the way we did with bananas and cartoons so right yeah all right what is something that you think is underrated so i'm gonna stay with food and say iceberg lettuce so i'm you know i'm a child of the 80s yeah and iceberg lettuce got such a bad name, right? Like, everybody was all about the romaine and the kale. And, like, it had to have color.

Arugula. Yeah. But I got to say, I'm coming back around to iceberg. Like, I think it's gotten a bad rap. So, I'm all about the wedge salad lately. I love a wedge. I know, right? Like, I think it's pretty underrated.

That's fantastic. Oh, quick question we like to ask. If you're a big wedge head, you fork and knife in it, or are you just taking like a big melon slice? I am definitely not melon slicing. That is a question we ask all our guests. I feel like the last time the wedge came up, I was like, you ever eat it?

Just like a big, like a wedge of melon it's already made my opinion clear on messy eating so i'm gonna go with the fork and the knife and how are you on blue cheese on your melon slices though are you are you a fan of that i i have recently devised a blue cheese vinaigrette dressing. So I don't like creamy dressings very much, but the blue cheese vinaigrette I'm all about. Yeah. Plain God. With a blue cheese vinaigrette. Yeah, right. Yeah.

What was the thing, though, like, when people were just off iceberg because they're like, it has no flavor and it's like devoid of any nutritional... There's zero nutritional value to it, which turns out to be not true. Ah. There's a little bit uh stuff like what does that mean like what do we get from iceberg but there is this like ridiculous idea that romaine lettuce had way more nutritional value than iceberg and no i mean if you're going to

say iceberg has no nutritional it's not like romaine has way more right that it's like a super food or something right yeah it's just a leafy issue right exactly yeah so yeah it's you're just choosing one leafy green over another so yeah i mean as a child of the 80s i mean the i remember the first time someone put like a mixed green salad in front of me and i almost had a panic attack because like what is this was yard trimmings like where's my crunchy ice also a child of the 80s you know and in my you know my cafeteria lunches it was all that light pale green yeah you know but that was all limp and watery and had been sitting in their walk-in cooler for i don't know seven eight weeks i don't know how long it sat in there becoming goop. Yeah. And that's kind of how it got a bad rep.

The iceberg needs to be fresh because it's got all that crisp water in there. Yes. It is the crispy. It's water in crisp form. And refreshing. Yes. Very refreshing. I just like to, after a jog on a hot day, just bite into a big handful of just a big head of iceberg lettuce.

Yeah. You love it. I mean, that's why you're I think you still can't go to the Whole Foods by your house, right? Yeah, they get mad. Yeah. Well, look, they don't understand. Yeah, they shouldn't have that mister there being so enticing, you know. But, you know, it's wild, though wild though too like because of factory farming and stuff

like rome i remember just how romaine lettuce used to have a flavor and now it doesn't like when you buy it at the store or like arugula too like i know when i've had like good arugula because you're like whoa shit like some peppery rug yeah but now i feel like the rocket you know as it's described in other places it's not coming the same way as it used to yeah so you know i'll go back to iceberg i mean i will just say just in in defense of iceberg it does have potassium and vitamin a and vitamin k and calcium and vitamin c i mean it is not devoid of nutritional content right so i wonder who started saying that that feels like such a weird take because it's like it's still lettuce y'all like probably big sugar big probably like you guys

should have jello instead like wasn't that a big movement in the 50s where everything was green jello replace all salads and yeah you have your vegetables and fruits in jello form. You don't need these lettuce. Let's forget about the cuisine in the 70s. Yes. Oh, man. What a time to be alive. I've heard. And the fashion. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'd always heard the other food that I feel like I'm slowly waking up to the fact that it has a nutritional value is potatoes. Like I had always heard potatoes were just like wonder bread, essentially like the wonder bread from scurvy.

Yeah. They, they have like a ton of different nutritional value. Am I the only one that I just maybe like associate too hard between potatoes and French fries. Potentially. Yeah. Maybe you might have,

but then I'm like, you know, like the Incans gave us potatoes. You know what I mean? So like then I'm like, you know, like the Incans gave us potatoes. You know what I mean? So like, I'm like, yo, I'll fuck with them. So there's got to be value there. Potatoes have a lot of nutrients in them. Yeah.

Yeah. Like I said, and I always knew that. I earned it. So just adjusting, you cut out that part where I said I didn't know that. Okay. Cool. All right. Celeste, let's take a quick break and when we come back

we are going to talk about your new show big sugar we'll be right back i've been thinking about you i want you back in my life it's too late for that i have a proposal for you come up here and document my project All you need to do is record everything like you always do. One session. 24 hours. BPM 110. 120. She's terrified.

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We passed the review board a year ago. We're not hurting people. There's nothing dangerous about what you're doing. They're just dreams. Dream Sequence is a new horror thriller from Blumhouse Television, iHeartRadio, and Realm. Listen to Dream Sequence on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, everyone.

I am Lacey Lamar. And I'm Amber Ruffin, a better Lacey Lamar. Boo. Okay, everybody, we have exciting news to share. We're back with Season 2 of the Amber and Lacey, Lacey and Amber show on Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network. You thought you had fun last season? Well, you were right.

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on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. How do you feel about biscuits? Hi, I'm Akilah Hughes, and I'm so excited about my new podcast, Rebel Spirit, where I head back to my hometown in Kentucky and try to convince my high school to change their racist mascot, the Rebels, into something everyone in the South loves, the Biscuits. I was a lady rebel. Like, what does that even mean?

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And we're back. And we're back. And all right, Celeste, there's so much good information in your new show, Big Sugar. I do want to start with the health conference that I think is in episode seven. It's a conference about the connection between gum disease and diabetes. Miles, what is the Venn diagram there? Thank you. Those two things, like sugar is the thing that pops into my mind immediately. Oh yeah, for sure. Even with my very cursory knowledge of anything healthy, I'm like, sugar?

Sugar? Right. And so, you know you know as you tell it there's this dentist kristin kerns who's watching these keynote speakers and they're like handing out brochures and like the brochures don't mention sugar and like they even mention like trying to avoid too much salt and which you know always a good idea yeah but like it's just wild and she kind of has this experience where she finally like after somebody from i think first keynote speaker is cdc the second one is from like the diabetes a diabetes education foundation and hands out a form that is like how to eat fast food healthfully. And yeah, I mean, the crazy thing is, I mean, think now about, you know, all the the bad dad jokes about dentists and Halloween candy. Right. Like so many. But we're talking about a time when she's at a conference about dental health and they're not even mentioning sugar.

Right. The crazy thing here is her describing going to these archives and finds the archives of the Great Western Sugar Company. Right? Yeah. And just sitting in these boxes that I guess nobody had ever looked in were all these confidential files. Right. And I guess they never realized anybody was ever going to look in there because there was all this information in there. The backstory of what the sugar industry had kept hidden from the public for so long.

And it was, I mean, it was shocking. You know, the fact that, that all the, the fact, the reason why sugar wasn't mentioned at this dental conference was intentional all along and had represented a decades long campaign,

you know, a ton of money, a lot of influence, a lot of effort, not only speaking to politicians but influencing scientists on the part of the sugar industry to blame it on everything else as you say salt but also to make fat the bad guy when it came to obesity for example right yeah i remember growing up in a world where like the products were fat free, like you always had a fat free option for your cookies that like I remember the snack well cookies, the snack well sandwich cookies that were like on the verge of just bursting into being crystallized sugar. Or they would put a box of licorice and it would say fat free.

Yeah, right, right, right. Like, oh, good. Oh, great. Well, this is healthy then. Right. Sugar. Oh, filled up to the gills. Absolutely. Yeah. It's OK. It's just healthy sugar. And, you know, we found these ads dating from, you know, the 1950s, 60s and 70s where they literally said some good natural sugars, you know, and you're like what what are you talking about it's it's it's refined sugar i mean that's literally yeah yeah we did it for a while with corn syrup right where we were like well as long as it doesn't have corn syrup then it's okay and you know sugar corn syrup was originally seen as a health food product right it was an enriching yeah it's three game uh three carb monty right they're just like moving things around and you know trying to make it as confusing as possible to the point that there's a conference about the connection between gum disease and diabetes and nobody is mentioning

sugar and like that's this how recently was that conference that she was at? I can't remember. I hate to say it, but it would have. I mean, I'm going to completely guess and say it was the 80s. OK. But, you know, then we head back and sort of try to trace some of this and talk about sort of the rivalry between two scientists, John Yudkin, who'd grown up in this very poor Orthodox Jewish family in London, who very early on spotted the dangers of sugar and began to connect it to obesity, like really early on. And then he and Ansel Keys, and Ansel Keys took a huge amount of money from the sugar industry and he said it was fat.

Right. And John Yudkin published this book called Pure White and Deadly. And that was the 1970s. And Ansel Keys made it his mission to just ruin Yudkin's life, his reputation. He just it completely, completely derailed his career. He just completely, completely derailed his career. So it would have been, I think Kristen Kerns was working in the early 2000s now that I think of it. Yeah, it was like shockingly recent. It was very recent now that I think of it. Because, yeah, his book was published in the 70s, which is what I was thinking of. And she was working in the early 2000s yeah yeah and i mean it really seems to come down to there's no

individual consolidated like powerful lobby for fat right but there is one for sugar and so the guy who tells the truth that like sugar is really bad for you and the amounts that people are consuming it and could drive a obesity epidemic if it's not controlled. He just really like has his career dismantled in a way that is pretty startling. Like he is a star heading into the publication of this book. And the book, by the way, is like currently very popular 50 years after its publication and he's dead yeah right and but this other guy ansel keys you know like on the one of the very first health studies or like collaborations between a major sugar industry lobbying group and, the medical establishment, like, he is one of the first people who does that. And this is, he becomes a superstar. Like, it's, like, I don't know. It's just, I think a thing that Hollywood movies have treated us to this, or have implanted this idea in our head that, like, the person who does the bad thing might win in the short run but in the long run they lose it all like comes out or something yeah the truth comes out and like i guess that's true in this case but it's like the very long run like this person was

a massive celebrity for all his like fat-free diet advice he was like the number one most covered and like media saturated dietitian in for like decades and wealthy and think of all the lives that were ruined they were marketing sugar as a way to lose weight and that entire time the documents that kristen discovered they were basically running the same kind of campaign that tobacco ran to try to disguise the damage that smoking does to your health. And so what she found out was that the sugar industry basically spent what would be the equivalent of millions of dollars today on somewhere between 15 and 20 studies that were designed to show that sugar is not bad for you bad for you to exonerate sugar as, as the bad guy.

In fact, they even had one study that was supposed to link sugar to, to say that sugar was a, could be a treatment for depression. Right. And, and, and so keys at the meantime was receiving financial support from the sugar

industry. Right. Right. So when you because like we talk i mean like any industry that has like a tangible product has like a you know substantial lobbying arm because they need to kind of get ahead of any kind of messaging about their products whether it's tobacco or fossil fossil fuels or sugar what like what is how did the formation of the sugar lobby even come about?

Like, was there like an impetus for them to be like, holy shit, we got to get ahead of like we need to start obscuring the facts like immediately? Or was this just kind of a natural thing? Because like any industry, they have to throw their influence around like and to get political favors. It started because, you know, in Europe, there was a leader there who very early on started an investigation into sugar and wanted to put some limits on sugar consumption. Basically, at the same time that sugar started to become really affordable, they started to see some of these real health problems emerging. And so as soon as sugar producers start, at the same time that they're seeing their profits really going up, right, because it was going to be affordable, spreading all over the world. Here's this guy in Europe who's like, oh, let's start regulating this. And that's when they started kind of came together and said, we need to do something about this. And by the way, we should mention that Kristen Kearns herself was labeled as a conspiracy theorist.

She was herself smeared by a lot of people, even though all those people she has been held up since then as being correct. And his book has been reissued. John Yudkin's book has been reissued, has been doing really well. And his son talks about it's a victory for him since his death. Right, posthumously. Yeah, posthumously. But yeah, this all started because there was a danger to their profits from the beginning. Yes. Yeah.

And so they fought back. talk about like how you know people when they talk about ai worry about the singularity and like this idea that someone's going to create a computer program that's going to like start you know become smarter and more advanced than humans and then like after that it'll just like run away from us and like start doing things that aren't in humanity's interest. And it feels like we're there with capitalism, just like unrestrained hyper capitalism, like that is basically how it operates. And there's this quote from Kristen Kearns at the end of, I think, episode seven, where she talks about the sugar industry, just like constantly being on guard, always scanning for threats, always ready to take on the next challenge.

And it truly sounds like you're listening to John Connor, like talk about, talk about a terminator. Like it's just, it's just always seeing, never stopping, always aware. And like, you know, it just basically in the form of capitalism that we have in this country, it's the thing that is more well funded. The thing like they can hire the smartest people out of the best law schools to work around the clock to keep everyone quiet and or, you know, pay for studies on how sugar is good for you. And then, you know, the outcome is not that like they have a couple good paychecks like the outcome is like generational wealth like brett brett kavanaugh's dad was like a lobbyist for j and j and helped them get around regulation to sell a carcinogenic product and like his legacy is like his fucking son is on the Supreme Court. It's just it's like a really hard system to shake.

But your show in particular, like makes makes a good case for like we at least need to be able to see it for what it is. And I don't think we even get that usually. And I think your show does a good job of actually showing us like how this thing actually operates. And part of the time it's how we suspect, but it's even more flagrant than we might yeah and that's one of the reasons we wanted to keep pulling at this thread you know because at one point i tried to eliminate sugar from my diet yeah and i gotta tell you it took the vast majority of my time like it was so hard yeah it's in everything i had to bake my own bread number one it was so hard. It's in everything. I had to bake my own bread. Number one, it was expensive. And number two, it was really time consuming because it's in everything and they

call it by different names. So you don't even recognize it. So there's this huge amount of research where I had to start making lists of all the different names they give to sugar so that you can recognize it when you're looking at the nutritional labels. Sometimes they have proprietary recipes that you're not allowed to know. So you can't even be sure which things have sugar and which don't. I mean, that's how successful they've been. Wait, so what are some of the alternate names of sugar that you'd look for on a label? I'd have to go back to my sneaky

I called it sneaky names for sugar. There's a lot of things like sucrose or something. There's ones that you expect. There's things like galactose. There's ones you expect like maltose, glucose, dextrose. Those are the ones you know. But then there's like, and then there's things like dextrin.

There's diastatic malt. There's ethyl maltol. There's malted dextrin, which I kind of, you know. There's sucanat. There's barley malt. So malt is a sneak word. Any malt. malt there's treacle which people in the uk would i thought that was a word for poop on last week's episode that we did yeah it sounds like it possibly you know there's a lot of different words for it right yes you know and and you have to

start learning how to spot it yeah i mean that mean, that is the result of, you know, just hundreds and hundreds of people who are working for the sugar industry and paid really well to come up with different ways that they can get their product in all the food. Like, it's just it's so massive. Yeah. The average American eats almost 60 pounds of sugar a year. Yeah. 60 pounds. That's gnarly. That seems like too much sugar. It is too much sugar.

Okay. It's way too much sugar. I think of like like sugar just as like a lover of history has kind of been like the magnetic force of a lot of bad things, whether that's like the original crop that helped explode slavery in the United States or like why we annex places like Hawaii or Puerto Rico. Environmental disasters. Yeah, it's does it like is there I get that there's the big sugar lobby, but is there like a is there like a darker like is there a figurehead or is there like a group of companies or families or something that kind of are sort of have an outsized influence within the sugar industry? Because I feel like anything there's probably like everybody participating and then you have like the real movers and shakers of sugar. So can I talk about just one scene that blew me away because it kind of goes into this question. So Bill Clinton, remember him, Miles? He was the president of the United States when we were my president.

Yes. Is in the Oval Office breaking up with Monica Lewinsky. Like because he's like, look, this I've made a mistake. This is like not all bad. Yeah. So bad. Oh, no, I've made a mistake. This is not all bad. Yeah, so bad. Oh, no, I messed up big time. And as he's doing that, he's pulled away to a phone call with one of the sugar magnates at the center of this story that Big Sugar is about. Like, that is how powerful.

He's pulled away by this person who's like the prince of sugar um they're called the first family of corporate welfare because of like how much taxpayer money goes into their pockets but like that is the level one of these people decides to call the president right he's like sorry i know this is a career threatening scandal that i'm trying to deal with here but i gotta i gotta take this call from the this guy who is the prince of of sugarcane alfie fungool who are the lannisters of the sugar game so that's who we focus on here and and surprisingly enough, much like media companies, there's a small number of people pulling the levers in sugar. And two of them are the Fun

Hool brothers. And one of them is who you were just talking about. And that was February of 1996. And Alfie Fun Hool calls Bill Clinton and they say, Alfie Von Hul's on the phone. And he tells Monica Lewinsky to wait a minute. And he picks up the phone and takes that call. So the Alfie Von Hul brothers are Pepe Von Hul and Alfie Von Hul, who are the sons of extremely wealthy Cubans who were unseated. They lost all their property and everything when Castro took power in Cuba and they fled to the United States. lost all their property and everything when Castro took power in Cuba and they fled to the United States. And, you know, they bought some land here and they eventually built a, an empire here. There are fewer than 4,500 farm businesses that actually produce sugar in the United States, but the United States taxpayers pay more than $4 billion a year in subsidies.

Yeah. We're paying more than, and, and sugar in the United States is more expensive here than it is anywhere else in the world. So not only are we paying more than $4 billion to the people who make sugar, we're also paying more for the sugar than anywhere else. Yeah. You were saying that like when you check the markets,

like the sugar prices are like in the 20s in other countries and in the u.s it's like in the 40s or something like that it's like double it's twice as expensive it's so expensive and we eat so much more sugar like we should we should get credit for all the sugar we eat at least yeah right like so much more sugar than any human species at all or any human civilization at any time in history. Give us a deal on all this sugar we're eating. Don't charge us more. Wait, why are the prices locked at that rate?

That's because of the subsidies that the lobby is able to extract, like through their lobbying efforts, essentially? Yeah. So what we're talking about now is the Farm Bill. And the Farm Bill is a piece of legislation that comes up to be reauthorized every five years. And in fact, this is the year when the Farm Bill comes up for reauthorization. So there's actually quite a bit of lobbying that's going on right now. lot of people, including citizens like yourself, who are writing letters to their representatives saying, please do not include sugar subsidies in the farm bill. That's what's in there. And part of the reason they're doing that is because sugar farming is the way that we do it right now is

environmentally catastrophic. They plant sugar cane and because it's cheaper to do it at the, after they pull all the cane down, they burn the fields, they burn them. Yeah. And there's even places in, in Florida where they literally have legislation written in where the, that you can only burn them. So the smoke aims towards the poor part of town and it can't go.

The app spoken ash can't towards go towards the wealthy parts of town and it can't go the spoken ash can't towards go towards the wealthy parts of town yeah we visited a sugar town in florida where we walked toward this elementary school we walked in the parking lot of this elementary school and in one of the lower socioeconomic places and i was covered in ash yeah in this elementary school parking lot, covered in it. Yeah, just like, you know, apocalyptic. It's truly like an apocalyptic landscape that is the result of this system that is just funneling money to these, like, you know, oligarchs. You know, they are oligarchs.

They are, you know, are on. They can get get Clinton whenever they want. I'm sure things haven't changed that much. We just like know about that instance because it was such a famous meeting between him and Lewinsky. But they you know, there's just so much about like so much just wild stuff in the show. And I should mention that Alfie Von Hul's personal net worth is over a billion dollars. Oh, yeah. He had gone to that sugar town after visiting his yacht and house. Super yacht. Yeah. Yeah. His super yacht. Yes.

His private jet. Yeah. I mean, massive, massive estate. You can't. We could not get anywhere near him. And this is one of the things that I came away with after all this reporting is that if you're wealthy enough, the United States, you don't have to answer questions about your behavior. You don't have to answer questions. Miles, you mentioned the Lannisters and I do just, you know, in when, when you guys dig back into like how their, you know, sugar empire was built, like they built their fortune by like marrying different sugar producing families, like very much just this soulless kind of power consolidation thing that happened over the course of many generations.

generations and then they built their u.s fortune by getting tax benefits from the farm act and you know that and then they claim to be self-starters who you know came here and you know castro stole everything from them and they came and rebuilt their thing but it's all you know built from this generations and generations power consolidation, self-mythologizing thing that there's that one interview where they're talking to one of them. I think it's Pepe is talking about a hotel where he spends like millions of dollars on a, on a pretty regular basis. And he says,

it's just, it's a, it's a great quote. You have to listen to the podcast, which I'm sure is clear by now. But he's like, it's not as grand as the Ritz in Madrid or Paris, you know, which has a wonderful outdoor space to have lunch. But the people here, they treat you like family. What are you talking about? Olive Garden?

They know what I like. They know what I like. They keep they have like. They know what I like. They do photographs. They take photographs of the room when he leaves so that everything's exactly where he wants it to be when he comes back. And that is what you are buying, I guess, with this just soulless, horrifying of of power and wealth and this is i should also mention that pepe fun who was friends with uh jeffrey epstein and was in his infamous black book of contacts of course that they found as well if you read jeffrey tubin's book on the subject, you would have found that in there. So, you know, it's just a, it's the whole thing is very, and we haven't even started talking about the labor

issues. Yeah. So that's what I want to get to next. Yeah. I want to get to next, that next, but, and kind of in transitioning to that, there's one moment where someone asks if he, Alfie, I think it is the one of it is, the other brother, billionaire brother, is asked if he'd ever cut sugar cane before. Like the process that is required to make this product that he has built an empire on. And he laughs. And he says he lasted like 10 minutes and it was so overwhelmingly difficult he had to like give up so that's and it's not like the irony of that seems to be totally lost on him and and everything involved in this system or at least it's like buried under so many layers of wealth and influence that they

don't have to acknowledge it but yeah let's take a break and we'll come back and we'll talk about labor But yeah, let's take a break and we'll come back and we'll talk about labor. I've been thinking about you. I want you back in my life. It's too late for that. I have a proposal for you. Come up here and document my project. All you need to do is record everything like you always do.

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Dream Sequence is a new horror thriller from Blumhouse Television, iHeartRadio, and Realm. Listen to Dream Sequence on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. How do you feel about biscuits? Hi, I'm Akilah Hughes, and I'm so excited about my new podcast, Rebel Spirit, where I head back to my hometown in Kentucky and try to convince my high school

to change their racist mascot, the Rebels, into something everyone in the South loves, the biscuits. I was a lady rebel. Like, what does that even mean? I mean, the Boone County Rebels will stay the Boone County Rebels with the image of the Biscuits. It's right here in black and white in print. A lion. An individual that came to the school saying that God sent him to talk to me about the mascot switch is a leader. You choose hills that you want to die on. Why would we want to be the losing team? I'd just take all the other stuff out of it. On the segregation academies,

when civil rights said that we need to integrate public schools, these charter schools were exempt from that. Bigger than a flag or mascot. You have to be ready for serious backlash. Listen to Rebel Spirit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, everyone. I am Lacey Lamar. And I'm Amber Ruffin, a better Lacey Lamar.

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Listen to the Amber and Lacey, Lacey and Amber show on Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we are back. And yeah, I mean, there's so many scenes. The trip to the town that is like the sugar cane plantation town that is like just you know covered in smoke and you know just just a minute there there's also like a scene i think it's in the 80s maybe 90s in florida like the dog war where like workers strike and the police come in and start arresting everyone and sticking police dogs on them and like basically deport them at the point of a shotgun and like usually when people think about labor being threatened at the point of a gun by like state power we go back to like the 1920s yeah pinkertons and shit but this is happening now like this is happening in our lifetime within our lifetimes

yeah yeah yeah yeah yes the whole thing is just even for me and i've been a journalist for over 20 years even for me there were so many points in this where i was like are you are you kidding me yeah like it honestly it has put me off sugar i I can't not eat it is, as I mentioned, that's really hard to do. Right. But it has it has put me off sugar. Yeah. Yeah. It feels like, again, like just even the historical context of it. You're like it's it started off as like a justification for the use of slave labor and colonization. justification for the use of slave labor and colonization yeah and now and like it's still in this like obscure place where like even right now i'm like looking up the fawn hole brothers and the first thing will come up it's like hey part of the like florida like agricultural hall

of fame and there's nothing like so these people are allowed to still live in this like very weird like you know semi-obscurity while being you know like at the wheel of one of the most fucked up industries uh in terms of like health outcomes and labor and yeah i mean i guess so now we are in a what when you say slavery now with sugar cane or sugar uh plantations and the the farming of it are we talking what what kind of slavery which is so weird to ask like what what is what are the demand like what kind of slavery, which is so weird to ask, like, what does that look like in this modern context? At the center of our podcast is this long, years-long case that was on behalf of a large number of cane cutters. For a long time, American sugar producers used immigrants from H1N1 workers from Jamaica.

And part of the reason they admitted that they used workers from Jamaica was because, A, they couldn't get American workers to do the work for that low of pay. It was incredibly dangerous and hard work. And also American workers would faint from the heat. So they brought in Jamaican workers and had them do it for a long time. And it gave them a lot of control because if they ever angered the boss, they could immediately deport them. So after this long case, they automated the fields. So even though the machines are not as thorough, they don't get every single cane the way that the workers did. In the end, they found it to be more cost effective than using workers because machines don't file class action lawsuits against you.

Right. And they don't need water when it's hot. Exactly. They don't chop their fingers and limbs off. Although they never, it's not like they got them real medical attention. So when we talk about slavery, A, this is an industry that is just intertwined with the history of slavery. It's impossible to tear them apart. Right. Yeah.

For me personally, I think that the United States is kind of in an era of wage slavery in a lot of different industries, just kind of writ large, which is a whole separate subject. sugar, our cane, is cut in other countries like Dominican Republic and elsewhere where it is still the same kind of conditions as we had here on these farms that we were talking about in the podcast. So that's what we're talking about. Right. So in this case, early on, there is this, you know, first of all, lawyers who are advocating on behalf of farm workers are treated just you know it's very like at one point one of them one of the lawyers who's advocating on behalf of labor like gets a call from you know uh somebody now i don't know that it was in the sugar industry but they say listen i'm about to leave town and I want to kill you. I want you to drive down to my farm so I can shoot you. Yeah. Which he politely declines. But it's just there's so much going against anybody trying

to advocate on behalf of people who are being abused or enslaved by these massive industries. And so these lawyers get together this class action lawsuit. They win a case and then, you know, immediately, like because it's very clear cut. It's like the sugar company said they were going to pay one thing in this contract and then did not pay that to them and accurate, like see the truth, because presumably like she wasn't the industry hadn't bothered to buy her off or something because it's like as it gets higher and higher, like these judges just suddenly start making these kind of questionable, baffling decisions that really favor the sugar industry? So a couple of things. First of all, it was, and I'm saying all this to the best of my ability,

none of this is obviously proven. So for as far as I can tell, in my opinion, it looks as though, possibly intentionally, things were made as confusing as possible when it came to recording hours and wages. We know for sure that the hours people worked were not always accurate. And we know that for sure because they found record books in which there were changes made to how many hours people worked in order to pay them less per ton, right? Like if someone had worked a certain number of hours per day, it was changed to six hours per day instead so they could pay them less. And if this sounds confusing, even with the way that I'm saying it right now, you can understand why maybe the sugar companies thought the judge wouldn't get it.

So it seemed to me as I was reading through all this stuff and I had to read through it four or five, six times. That possibly they banked on the fact that the judge wouldn't get it. Now, I will say that it was only the fun rules actually let it go to court. The other sugar company settled. So the fun rules insisted on fighting this and they fought it for years. I would guess they probably spent well, a lot more in fighting this than the other companies had settled for. more in fighting this than the other companies had settled for. Yeah. But they had this idealistic vision of themselves as like, you know, we came and built this thing from nothing. Principled. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But it does. I don't know. It does feel like the low level, lower level judge was able to figure it out. Right. Yes. But, you know, here's the thing. If you follow this whole and I don't want to figure it out right yes but you know here's the thing if you follow this whole and i don't want to give it away because frankly it's a really compelling story this case as you follow

it through but in the end the only way they end up being able to prevail. And when you finally realize when you get to the end that that's how they are able to keep from paying these workers, you know, it just feels so spiteful to me. I mean, these are workers who, even the smallest amount of money would have made such a difference to their lives. Yeah. You know, and they spent more than that on lawyers fees. And for what? For what?

Right. Yeah. To improve their margin a little bit. Well, you know, for the $23 million. I mean, it wasn't even for the 23 million dollar yacht sitting behind his house because again they spent more than that on their attorneys right i mean you you know like i was just looking at the political donations of this family because i was just like oh let me let me see and like oh you guys are that big because

you give it to everybody you know they're not just like we're into we're into conservative politics they were giving money to Maxwell Frost, the youngest member of Congress out of Florida, like maxing out. And you're like, Oh shit. Okay. Like people,

I'm sure they know you like if, especially if you live in Florida, cause they, I mean, it's like every single person in Congress is getting money from them. And I'm sure many people just probably think of them as like, Oh yeah. They're like a farming family. And I wonder if what someone like,

like a more progressive politician would think about being like, yeah, do you know, like, what's up with that? Do you understand, like, like where that money's coming from and how that might be a little bit problematic in terms of someone's politics. But again, we're in the age of corporate funded entities in Congress. So it's not that surprising. See, but now you see the purpose,'re in the age of corporate funded entities in congress so it's see but now you see the purpose one of the purposes of the podcast like this is the whole reason for this yeah so that people do know yeah what's going on here yeah because i'm like wow you're giving to like dr oz joe mansion any but debbie wasserman schultz like everybody that basically has any kind of say and i'm sure

they i'm sure there are people who run their pack or whatever their political spending are savvy enough to know where to send that money based on committee assignments and all that but yeah it's wow yeah it's why not playing well celeste thank you so much for coming on and talking about the show the show is called big sugar and it drops this week, right? It does. Yeah. So you can go find that wherever fine podcasts are published. Where can people find you, follow you, find out more about all this stuff?

So my website is just CelesteHedley.com. For the moment, I'm still on Twitter. We'll see how long that lasts. And that's almost the only social media besides Instagram where I post pictures of my dog. And your dog, is there sugar in our pet food too? Not the pet food I buy. Okay. Good to know.

Yeah. But you got to read the label. Read the label. Oh, one question though. When they say added sugar, is that like another, is that another ploy of the industry? Or that's more just to say about the process? Because other times you'll see no added sugar aside from the stuff that's naturally occurring. That's already in it.

Yeah. Is that a way to be like, we're not adding it to that? Yeah, it's just a ploy. Makes sense. That's all it is. Celeste, is there a work of media that you've been enjoying? A work of media? Actually, I just shared on Twitter today this really short video from a guy named Michael Vaughn.

And you can find it. Actually, I retweeted it, but he sent it out on Instagram. And he made it a satire video about a product called could you fucking not and it's for people who men who have correctile dysfunction and and correct women who know more about a subject than they do so it's pretty brilliant and i have probably watched it like 10 times amazing yeah miles where can people find? What is the work of media you've been enjoying? Uh, you can find me on Twitter,

Instagram, other at based entities at miles of gray. Uh, also, if you want to hear some basketball chatter, check out Jack and I's basketball podcast, miles and Jack got mad. Uh,

you don't talk about the off season. There's still a lot to talk about, believe it or not, because there's so much happening. And I saw Victor W wendon yama get absolutely swarmed at the airport as he touched down for draft day um and then also if you want to hear me talk about my favorite trash reality shows check me out on 420 day fiance with sophia alexandra uh tweet that i like you know just like this there's this tweet of just like one of the strike signs from the writer's strike that's happening. And Joe at Joe Russo tweets just put up a screen or like a picture of one of these like picket signs with a quote from an Apple executive that said, quote, writers think they're the center of the fucking universe.

And you're like, wow. Well, yeah, you kind of need that uh for your little ideas but but go off apple executive uh it's just interesting to see you know how just their perspective all the time about being like they think they're this it's us we have the money and i'm sure they have the ideas that help make the money but come the fuck on good luck to them good luck a couple mcdonald's based tweets will senate tweeted losing my lust for life just ate a big mac and didn't grin or chuckle at all i only said who has it better than me two times which is no way to eat a big mac and then hexing crafts tweeted pronouncing grimace like Versace. So Grimace.

Grimace. Good way to put a little pizzazz. Yeah, exactly. Like saying like Aspartame. Aspartame. That's right. Exactly. You can find me on Twitter at Jack underscore O'Brien. You can find us on Twitter at Daily Zeitgeist. We're at The Daily Zeitgeist on Instagram.

We have a Facebook fan page and a website DailyZeitgeist.com where we post our episodes and our footnotes we link off to the information that we talked about in today's episode as well as a song that we think you might enjoy miles is there a song you think people might yeah i've uh stumbled upon a really cool i think court yeah it is i'm like i think they're a quartet. They're called Speakers Corner Quartet. They're a quartet. I'm like, I think. Yeah, they're a quartet from London. Really great musicians.

Like if you like hiatus coyote or bands with like high musician fluency kind of vibes, this is a great band. And this track is called Soapbox Soliloquy. Really, really great track. If you like live bands with that hip hop feel and good musicianship, this track's for you. So check out Soapbox Soliloquy by Speakers Corner Quartet. All right. Well, the Daily Zeitgeist is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you list your favorite shows. That's going to do it for us this morning. Back this afternoon to tell you what is trending. And we will talk to you all then. Bye. Bye.

In California, during the summer of 1975, within the span of 17 days and less than 90 miles, two women did something no other woman had done before. Tried to assassinate the President of the United States.

One was the protege of Charles Manson. 26-year-old Lynette Fromm, nicknamed Squeaky. The other, a middle-aged housewife working undercover for the FBI. Identified by police as Sarah Jean Moore. The story of one strange and violent summer this season on the new podcast, Rip Current.

Hear episodes of Rip Current early and completely ad-free and receive exclusive bonus content by subscribing to iHeart True Crime Plus only on Apple Podcasts. Hey, I'm Bruce Bozzi. On my podcast, Table for Two, we have unforgettable lunch after unforgettable lunch

with the best guests you could possibly ask for. People like David Duchovny, Jeff Goldblum, and Kristen Wiig. We're doing all the dessert. We're doing all the dessert. We'll just skip right to it. Our second season is airing right now, so you can catch up on our conversations that are intimate and often hilarious.

Listen to Table for Two with Bruce Bozzi on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In 1982, Atari players had one game on their minds, Sword Quest, because the company had promised $150,000 in prizes to four finalists. Atari players had one game on their minds, Sword Quest. Because the company had promised 150 grand in prizes to four finalists, but the prizes disappeared,

leading to one of the biggest controversies in 80s pop culture. I'm Jamie Loftus. Join me this spring for The Legend of Sword Quest. We'll follow the quest for lost treasure across four decades. Listen to The Legend of Sword Quest on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.