(1) Is sugar the world’s most popular drug? It eases pain, seems to be addictive and shows every sign of causing long-term health problems. Is it time to quit sugar for good?

(2) What about the possibility that sugar itself is an intoxicant, a drug? Overconsumption of this drug may have long-term side-effects, but there are none in the short term—no staggering or dizziness, no slurring of speech, no passing out or drifting away, no heart palpitations or respiratory distress. When it is given to children, its effects may be only more extreme variations on the apparently natural emotional rollercoaster of childhood, from the initial intoxication to the tantrums and whining of what may or may not be withdrawal a few hours later. More than anything, it makes children happy, at least for the period during which they’re consuming it. It calms their distress, eases their pain, focuses their attention and leaves them excited and full of joy until the dose wears off. The only downside is that children will come to expect another dose, perhaps to demand it, on a regular basis.

(3) There is something about the experience of consuming sugar and sweets, particularly during childhood, that readily invokes the comparison to a drug. I have children, still relatively young, and I believe raising them would be a far easier job if sugar and sweets were not an option, if managing their sugar consumption did not seem to be a constant theme in our parental responsibilities. Even those who vigorously defend the place of sugar and sweets in modern diets—”an innocent moment of pleasure, a balm amid the stress of life”, as the journalist Tim Richardson has written—acknowledge that this does not include allowing children “to eat as many sweets as they want, at any time”, and that “most parents will want to ration their children’s sweets”.

(4) But why is this rationing necessary? Children crave many things—Pokemon cards, Star Wars paraphernalia, Dora the Explorer backpacks—and many foods taste good to them. What is it about sweets that maces them so uniquely in need of rationing?

(5) This is of more than academic interest, because the response of entire populations to sugar has been effectively identical to that of children: once people are exposed, they consume as much sugar as they can easily procure. The primary barrier to more consumption—up to the point where populations become obese and diabetic—has tended to be availability and price. As the price of a pound of sugar has dropped over the centuries, the amount of sugar consumed has steadily, inexorably climbed.

(6) In 1934, while sales of sweets continued to increase during the Great Depression, the New York Times commented: “The Depression (has) proved that people wanted candy, and that as long as they had any money at all, they would buy it.” During those brief periods of time during which sugar production surpassed our ability to consume it, the sugar industry and purveyors of sugar-rich products have worked diligently to increase demand and, at least until recently, have succeeded.

(7) The critical question, as the journalist and historian Charles C. Mann has elegantly put it, “is whether (sugar) is actually an addictive substance, or if people just act like it is”. This question is not easy to answer. Certainly, people and populations have acted as though sugar is addictive, but science provides no definitive evidence. Until recently, nutritionists studying sugar did so from the natural perspective of viewing it as a nutrient—a carbohydrate—and nothing more.

(8) Historians have often considered the sugar-as-a-drug metaphor to be an apt one. “That sugars, particularly highly refined sucrose, produce peculiar physiological effects is well known,” wrote Sidney Mintz, whose 1985 book Sweetness and Power is one of two seminal English-language histories of sugar. But these effects are neither as visible nor as long-lasting as those of alcohol or caffeinated drinks, “the first use of which can trigger rapid changes in respiration, heartbeat, skin colour and so on”.

(9) Mintz has argued that a primary reason sugar has escaped social disapproval is that, whatever conspicuous behavioural changes may occur when infants consume sugar, it did not cause the kind of “flushing, staggering, dizziness, euphoria, changes in the pitch of the voice, slurring of speech, visibly intensified physical activity or any of the other cues associated with the ingestion” of other drugs. Sugar appears to cause pleasure with a price that is difficult to discern immediately and paid in full only years or decades later. With no visible, directly noticeable consequences, as Mintz says, questions of “long-term nutritive or medical consequences went unasked and unanswered”. Most of us today will never know if we suffer even subtle withdrawal symptoms from sugar, because we’ll never go long enough without it to find out.

(10) Sugar historians consider the drug comparison to be fitting in part because sugar is one of a handful of “drug foods”. Rum is distilled, of course, from sugar cane. As for tobacco, sugar was, and still is, a critical ingredient in the American blended-tobacco cigarette. It makes for the “mild” experience of smoking cigarettes as compared with cigars and, perhaps more importantly, makes it possible for most of us to inhale cigarette smoke and draw it deep into our lungs.

(11) Any discussion of how little sugar is too much also has to account for the possibility that sugar is a drug and perhaps addictive. However it’s defined, try to consume sugar in moderation in a world in which substantial sugar consumption is the norm and virtually unavoidable.

(1) The House of Lords has a charm few people seem able to resist. The more cut-off it becomes from everyday life, the greater its attraction for weary businessmen and politicians. On the road outside the word “Peers” is painted across the car-park in large white letters. Inside a tall ex-Guardsman directs you through the vaulted entrance hall, past a long row of elaborate Gothic coat-hooks, each one labeled, beginning with the royal dukes—one of the many features of the building reminiscent of a school.

(2) Upstairs you come to a series of high, dark rooms, with Gothic woodwork and carved ceilings. A life-size white marble statue of the young Queen Victoria watches elderly peers sitting at tables writing letters on Gothic writing paper. Doors lead off to long dining-rooms, one for guests, another for peers only and to a large bar looking over the river, which serves drinks all day and sells special “House of Lords” cigarettes. Other closed doors are simply marked “Peers”—an embarrassing ambiguity for lady peers, for “peers” can mean the Lords equivalent of “gentlemen”.

(3) There is an atmosphere of contented old age. The rooms are full of half-remembered faces of famous men or politicians one had—how shall one put it—forgotten still around. There is banter between left-wing peers and right-wing peers and a great deal of talk about operations and ailments and nursing homes.

(4) Leading off the man ante-room is the chamber itself—the fine flower of the Victorian romantic style. It is small, only eighty feet long. Stained glass windows shed a dark red light, and rows of statues look down from the walls. On either side are long red-leather sofas with dark wooden choir stalls at the back. Between the two sides is “the Woolsack”, the traditional seat of the Lord Chancellor, stuffed with bits of wool from all over the Commonwealth. At the far end is an immense gold canopy, with twenty-foot high candlesticks in the middle, and the throne from which the monarch opens Parliament.

(5) Leaning back, on the sofa, whispering, putting their feet up, listening, fumbling with papers, making notes or simply sleeping, are the peers. On a full day, which is rare, you can see them in their groups: bishops;, judges, industrial peers. But usually there are only a handful of peers sitting in the room. Though since peers have been paid three guineas for attending, there are often an average of 110 peers in an afternoon.

(6) In the imposing surroundings it is sometimes difficult to remember how unimportant the Lords are. The most that the Lords can do now is delay a bill a year, and any “money bill” they can delay for only a month. Their main impact comes from the few inches of space in next morning’s papers. The Prime Minister can create as many peers as he likes and, though to carry out the threat would be embarrassing, the nightmare is real enough to bring the peers to heel.

(1) The biggest fashion trend in recent years is “fast fashion”—the mass production of trendy, inexpensive clothing with lightning-quick turnaround. This is a hugely wasteful, global environmental and human rights disaster, according to bestselling journalist Dana Thomas in her new book Fashionopolis.

(2) Making the industry’s 80 billion garments per year requires huge amounts of water and toxic chemicals. It employs every sixth person on Earth—most in dangerous conditions for very little money. Fast fashion also produces mountains of clothes that go unsold or are discarded and end up in garbage dumps and landfills.

(3) There is no single solution for these problems of ecological damage, exploitation and waste, but there is hope for the future. Consumers, retailers and innovators are pursuing a variety of options for sustainability, such as buying secondhand clothes; renting outfits; recycling clothes into new, reusable fibers; 3D printing clothes on demand; biofabrication; reshoring; and using organic and natural fibers. And just buying less.

(4) You are probably wearing jeans as you read this. If you’re not, chances are you wore them yesterday. Or you will tomorrow. At any given moment, anthropologists believe, half the world’s population is sporting jeans. Five billion pairs are produced annually. The average American owns seven—one for each day of the week—and buys four new pairs every year. “I wish I had invented blue jeans,” the French couturier Yves Saint Laurent confessed. “They have expression, modesty, sex appeal, simplicity—all I hope for my clothes.”

(5) Denim remained a niche textile until the early 1870s, when a tailor named Jacob Davis asked his fabric supplier, Levi Strauss, for help mass-producing his most recent design: workpants with metal rivets at key stress points. If Strauss would cover the hefty $68 patenting fee, Davis proposed, the two men could be business partners. Today, Levi Strauss & Co. still design and sell the majority of jeans. It is one of the most successful apparel brands, ever.

(6) And blue jeans’ popularity steadily grew, until they received an unexpected bump in the 1970s—from all places, Seventh Avenue.

(7) With the women’s liberation movement and the popularity of more casual dress, New York’s fashion designers dreamed up a new fashion category: designer jeans. “Jeans are sex,” Calvin Klein said. “The tighter they are, the better they sell.”

(8) To hammer home his point, in 1980, Klein cast 15-year-old actress-model Brooke Shields for his jeans commercial. “You want to know what comes between me and my Calvins?” she purred in her childlike voice, as she sat spread-eagle in a pair of his jeans and a taupe blouse. “Nothing.” The ad was so provocative, the New York affiliates of ABC and CBS promptly banned it. But it had already worked its spell: Klein sold 400,000 pairs the week following the ad’s debut, then two million a month after that. Jean sales rocketed to record heights: more than half a billion were purchased in 1981 alone.

(9) Until the 1970s, a good many jeans sold had been made of stiff, shrink-to-fit—or “unsanforized”—denim. To soften them, you simply had to wear them. A lot. It took a good six months to properly break in jeans. After a couple of years—years—the hems and pocket edges might start to fray, or a knee would split open. The fabric faded to a powdery blue with some whiskering—the sunburst-like streaks that radiate from the fly. Time and dedication were required to push your jeans to peak fabulousness.

(10) That is, until the popularization of stone washing in the 1980s. Unsanforized jeans were thrown into industrial washers with pumice stones and tumbled until the denim was sufficiently abraded. Sometimes jeans were further distressed with acid, sandpaper, rasps and files to mimic the previously hard-won wear and tear.

(11) Distressed, whiskered jeans continue to drive the global market and have been the cause of ecological and health calamity. What could be done about finishing? Surely, in our world of rapid technological advancement, there must be a way to solve the problem.

(12) Denim industry consultants Jose Vidal and his nephew Enrique Silla, based in Valencia, Spain, set out to develop a cleaner, safer three-step process called Jeanologia.

(13) Silla led me to the lab to see the system in action. In the laser room, in 10 or 11 seconds, the jeans were as faded and destroyed as my old shrink-to-fit 501s after three years of hard living.

(14) Next, a dryer-like tumbler uses ozone to fade jeans. Using stratospheric ozone, or “good ozone,” in finishing is “like putting a garment in the sun for a month, except we can do it in 20 minutes,” Silla explained, and with a fraction of the energy or water the old process required.

(15) Finally, we visited the washroom, where the e-Flow machine washes jeans among microscopic bubbles. “Nanobubbles do the softening, tinting and stonewash without the stones, all at once,” Silla said. There is no water treatment afterward and the water that is used can be recycled for 30 days. “We are not at zero water stage yet,” he said. “But we are getting there.”

(1) It was the spring of 1985, and President Reagan had just given Mother Teresa the Medal of Freedom in a Rose Garden ceremony. As she left, she walked down the corridor between the Oval Office and the West Wing drive, and there she was, turning my way.

(2) What a sight: a saint in a sari coming down the White House hall. As she came nearer, I could not help it: I bowed. “Mother”, I said, “I just want to touch your hand.” She looked up at me—it may have been one of Gods subtle jokes that his exalted child spent her life looking up to everyone else—and said only two words.

(3) Later I would realize that they were the message of her mission. “Luff Gott,” she said. Love God. She pressed into my hand a poem she had written, as she glided away in a swoosh of habit. I took the poem from its frame the day she died. It is free verse, 79 lines, and is called “Mothers Meditation (in the Hospital).”

(4) In it she reflects on Christ’s question to his apostles: “Who do you say I am?” She notes that he was the boy born in Bethlehem, “put in the manger full of straw…kept warm by the breath of the donkey,” who grew up to be “an ordinary man without much learning.”

(5) Donkeys are not noble; straw is common; and it was among the ordinary and ignoble, the poor and sick, that she chose to labor. Her mission was for them and among them, and you have to be a pretty tough character to organize a little universe that exists to help people others aren’t interested in helping. That’s how she struck me when I met her as I watched her life.

(6) She was tough. There was the worn and weathered face, the abrupt and definite speech. We think saints are great organizers, great operators, and great combatants in the world.

(7) Once I saw her in a breathtaking act of courage. She was the speaker at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington in 1995. All the Washington Establishment was there, plus a few thousand born-again Christians, orthodox Catholics and Jews, and searchers looking for a faith. Mother Teresa was introduced, and she spoke of God, of love, of families.

(8) She said we must love one another and care for one another. There were great purrs of agreement.

(9) But as the speech continued it became more pointed. She asked, “Do you do enough to make sure your parents, in the old people’s homes, feel your love? Do you bring them each day your joy and caring?” The baby boomers in the audience began to shift in their seats.

(10) And she continued. “I feel that the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion,” she said, and then she told them why, in uncompromising term. For about 1.3 seconds there was complete silence, then applause built and swept across the room.

(11) But not everyone: the President and the First Lady, the Vice President and Mrs. Gore, looked like seated statues at Madame Tussauds, glistening in the lights and moving not a muscle. She didn’t stop there either, but went on to explain why artificial birth control is bad and why protestants who separate faith from works are making a mistake.

(12) When she was finished, there was almost no one she hadn’t offended. A US senator turned to his wife and said, “Is my jaw up yet?” Talk about speaking truth to power! But Mother Teresa didn’t care, and she wasn’t afraid.

(13) The poem she gave me included her personal answers to Christ’s questions. She said he is “the Truth to be told…the Way to be walked…the Light to be lit.” She took her own advice and lived a whole life that showed it.

(1) To get a chocolate out of a box requires a considerable amount of unpacking; the box has to be taken out of the paper bag in which it arrived; the cellophane wrapper has to be torn off, the lid opened and the paper removed; the chocolate itself then has to be unwrapped from its own piece of paper.

(2) Butthis insane amount of wrapping is not confined to luxuries. It is now becoming increasingly difficult to buy anything that is not done up in cellophane, polythene, or paper. The package itself is of no interest to the shopper, who usually throws it away immediately. Useless wrapping accounts for much of the refuse put out by the average London household each week. So why is it done? Some of it, like the cellophane on meat, is necessary, but most of the rest is simply competitive selling. This is absurd. Packaging is using up scarce energy and resources and messing up the environment. Little research is being carried out on the costs of alternative types of packaging. Just how possible is it, for instance, for local authorities to salvage paper, pulp it, and recycle it as egg-boxes? Would it be cheaper to plant another forest? Paper is the material most used for packaging—20 million paper bags are apparently used in Great Britain each day—but very little is salvaged.

(3) A machine has been developed that pulps paper, and then processes it into packaging, e.g. egg-boxes and cartons. This could be easily adapted for local authority use. It would mean that people would have to separate their refuse into paper and non-paper, with a different dustbin for each. Paper is, in fact, probably the material that can be most easily recycled; and now, with massive increases in paper prices, the time has come at which collection by local authorities could be profitable.

(4) Recycling of this kind is already happening with milk bottles, which are returned to the dairies, washed out, and refilled. But both glass and paper are being threatened by the growing use of plastic. More and more dairies are experimenting with plastic bottles, and British dairies would be producing the equivalent of enough plastic tubing to encircle the earth every five or six days!

(5) The trouble with plastic is that it does not rot. Some environmentalists argue that the only solution to the problem of ever growing mounds of plastic containers is to do away with plastic altogether in the shops, a suggestion unacceptable to many manufacturers who say there is no alternative to their handy plastic packs.

(6) It is evident that more research is needed into the recovery and reuse of various materials and into the cost of collecting and recycling containers as opposed to producing new ones. Unnecessary packaging, intended to be used just once, and making things look better so more people will buy them, is clearly becoming increasingly absurd. But it is not so much a question of doing away with packaging as using it sensibly. What is needed now is a more unimportant function.

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