CHARMAIN NAIDOO: How 'sugar' has become a rude word

My grandpa, Frank Sewlall Maharaj, was a mechanic. His mocca hands were covered with patches of pale pink – Vitiligo it’s called, where there is a loss of pigment in the skin – and a film of brown/black. The oil from the engines he took apart and put back together again had seeped into those calloused hands, the thick wodges of squidgy black stuff that he smeared onto the turning parts under the bonnet had joined with the pink and brown bits to add its own pigment, an indeterminate colour that is at once dark, and not.

Some people called my grandpa a grease monkey; it annoyed him. He thought it a pejorative term.

Disrespectful, he’d say, about the noble art of work. Grandpa thought work, all work, noble. Work gave people a sense of their place in the world, a sense of importance and of belonging.

But Granny doesn’t work, we’d say. Then he’d take us by the hand to the rickety old wooden table on the stoep and show us the well-worn stone slab with a dent where Granny used the large round stone pestle to grind ginger and garlic and chickpeas and herbs and all things that needed grinding.

That’s work Grandpa’d say. And then he’d point to the Aga which needed to be fed with logs of wood, its fire gently coaxed into life like a reluctant new born refusing the teat. Work.

In the winter, the Aga was the centre of life in my grandparents’ home. It was beside that Aga that we gathered for meals, where stories were told, children bathed in an enamel bath, where water boiled on the gentle heat letting off steam that rose and moistened the air.

My mother tried on her wedding dress in front of this Aga. It’s where she sat with the breathless baby me – with a bowl of steaming water scented with a foul smelling eucalyptus brew, and a towel to drape over my head when my asthma flared up.

In the next room, Grandpa would play Hindi songs from the films he loved – Dil Ek Mandir with the gorgeous Meena Kumari; Asha Bhosle singing Zindagi Ki Uljhanon Ko Bhool Karin the 1963 film Nartakee… There’d be a tear in his eye as he rose to move the stylus on the turntable back to the beginning of a favourite song, then hurry back to his wonderfully comfortable chair with its wonderfully comfortable bum-fitting cushion beside the Aga.

None of those things are to be found in my home today.

Granny’s grinding stone has been replaced by a food processor, the Aga by gas and electric stoves, the turntable by… well… alarming technology that replaced long-playing records; DVDs and MP3s and all that new fangled stuff that you get on YouTube and can download onto your phone…

Disruptive, all of them. Literally.

A disruptive innovation is an innovation that creates a new market and value network and eventually disrupts an existing market and value network, displacing established market leading firms, products and alliances. Phew. Try saying all that in one breath.

The term was coined at the start of 1995 and sort of gave a name to something that is, essentially, change.

I remember my own incredulous experience with disruption. In 1985 I was standing in the Joburg newsroom at the Sunday Times when the news editor asked me to fetch him the court papers from a case being heard in Cape Town.

I laughed. Should I pop out and collect them I asked Gary Dixon. No, just collect them off that machine there.

And as I stood there, in front of this magic machine, the documents that had been fed into it in Cape Town emerged before me.

I had never before, or since, been so utterly entranced by a piece of machinery. It seemed like sorcery, an act conducted by wizardry. Alakazam! Or Abracadabra!

Things change. Fashions come and go.

My grandpa, for example, got to work at the crack of dawn and did all the heavy lifting of engine parts himself. So, when he popped back home in the middle of the morning, he wanted something substantial to eat. Porridge with heaps of sugar. Sweet tea. A piece of my grandmother’s legendary Victoria sponge, a thick smothering of granny’s home made strawberry jam in the middle.

He’d earned his sugary treat. After all, he’d been working physically hard all morning so he needed the sugar to give him energy, right? Wrong, according to modern wisdom.

Grandpa’s abuse of sugar and its sickly substitutes would be blamed for his dicky heart and the clogged arteries that finally led to his heart attack and early death.

Sugar. It’s the new arsenic.

The disruption army marches on – although, perhaps, the disruption theory is falling prey to disruption.

Melamine took over from wood – now wood is back in favour. Synthetic Sunfilter curtains took over from damask and heavy linen and real fabrics. Now real is in.

Television booted radio into touch, the computer put the typewriter out of work…

I brought back the no processed carb idea from New York where, in 1998, as the Sunday Times correspondent, I joined a 12-step programme for fatties and lost a huge amount of weight

My mother remodelled my father, he fought back and went back to his old ways.

Nobody these days bothers with landlines – cellphones with their ease of use have seen to that.

What is clear is that sugar is out of fashion. Not just that. It’s vilified as an addictive killer and the new fad is to cut it from one’s diet altogether.

You know something has taken hold when it moves into the public space as an accepted (and universally understood) concept.

Standing in line at the supermarket on Valentine’s Day, I heard an obviously smitten acne faced teenage boy call his teeth braced teenage girlfriend Sugar.

Affronted she turned to him, her indignant hands on slender hips: are you calling me fat? Do you think I eat sugar?

Sugar has become a swear word, a derogatory term. The young woman, with her hair in braids, her branded takkies and her fashionably ripped jeans found being called Sugar insulting.

There is a hulabaloo about Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan’s announcement in his Budget address that a tax on sugar will definitely be imposed later this year.

The sugar industry is up in arms. Jobs will be lost. Profits will fall.

And yet, does disruption not bring the chance for growth and diversification and change?

Now that sugar is out of fashion, perhaps its time for the sugar industry to morph into something different.

On the no sugar score, I feel a little smug.

I brought back the no processed carb idea from New York where, in 1998, as the Sunday Times correspondent, I joined a 12-step programme for fatties and lost a huge amount of weight.

Not compulsive overeaters – which most fat people are familiar with and which is the mother programme – but a stricter off shoot of OA called CEA-HOW. This programme demanded a rigid sugar, carbohydrate free diet as well as the consumption of very few calories. It worked! I was thin within months. Then fat again when I returned to chocolate and cake.

Remember this was years before Tim Noakes revolutionised the way we think and Banting became the new word for diet.

Tim Noakes’ disruption of the theory that Sugar Gives You Go – a sugar industry ad from a few decades ago – began a movement that worships fat, deplores gluten or carbohydrate, encourages the consumption of animal protein….

Hold onto your hat. There’ll be a new fad in a little while.

Maybe those sugar farmers should hang onto some of their seed.