Unrefined

Sugar is everywhere in the western diet, blamed for numerous health issues, yet few understand its transformation.

Deploying the tools and rhetoric of science, industrial forces turned sugar into a pure chemical object, stripping power from workers and enabling new kinds of fraud, corruption, and monopoly.

Taking readers to laboratories, docks, refineries, and the halls of Congress, the book illuminates dark intersections of the histories of corruption, science, and capitalism.