29 thoughts on “Mormondom’s Perfect Food”

1. Ah, NOW we know why sugar is the Mormon vice…

2. Chocolate is my drug of choice. 🙂 Somehow, I think there was more to the death rates of children in Berlin at war’s end than just a lack of sugar. After four years of being blockaded by the Allied powers, I think there was a lot of other nutritional food items they were lacking.

   I don’t know much about the Church’s sugar industry in the early 20th century except the Church tried to promote it for years.

3. I’m going to print out this page, make copies, and give them to kids in the ward on the sly. I’ll be their buddies 4ever and their mothers will think I’m a degenerate, which might be true anyway. But hey, if it’s in a church magazine, it must be true, right?

   This is a good find, Ardis. I think it would be hard for us to overestimate how much weight the endorsement of the president of the church carries. Imagine what would happen today if Thomas S. Monson started endorsing product brands.

4. Ah, how times have changed. Somehow, riding in the back of the SUV, sitting in front of the TV or video game and napping in between to conserve energy just don’t require as many calories as life in the olden days, when the little nippers played all day long at games that required a lot of vitality and taxed their strength to the limit.

5. Oh, and I forgot to add: I think I’ll run up the street and get a doughnut.

6. This is great! I have always “appreciated the food value of sugar”. It is at my suggestion they reverse the food pyramid!

7. I once saw an add that claimed smoking would kill the germs that caused to common cold (can’t find it now). So, what is being advertized today as “good” for you that really is “bad” for you?

8. About sugar and Mormons… I’m happy that we have the tradition of Fast Sunday, because that means that there is one week in the month that my children don’t leave church with their pockets and little fists stuffed with candy.

   Yeah… I’m the Grinch. (But unfortunately not enough of one to confiscate the high-calorie junk and put it in the trashcan where it belongs. If you’re going to spend calories on candy, it should be good-quality candy.)

   Here’s a history of the sugar industry in Utah by no less than the amazing Leonard Arrington.

9. Now that’s the way, Sister Grinch, to turn this silly post into something worth reading — thanks for the link. And I think BruceCrow’s smoking ad must be right: I’ve never smoked, and I do get colds.

   Thanks for the laughs, all.

10. OK, I know I’m going to sound like a naive fool to some, but I was more repulsed by the fact that the corporation was using the name of the Church to promote its product, than by the silly health claims. This is the worst sort of religious infomercial. Blech. I feel dirty. (Yes, I know that Utah-Idaho Sugar Co. was a going concern of the Church itself.)

    Anyhow, speaking of other health claims, my paternal grandmother tells me that back when she was a young single lady, one health fad that she and her friends followed (temporarily) was the drinking (yes, drinking) of vegetable oil. The idea was that if you drank a lot of fat, it would actually slough off excess body fat. She chuckles now and says that she didn’t do it more than a couple of times.

    Still, she’ll turn 91 in July, so maybe there’s something to this “sugar and fat diet”?

11. Researcher: Thanks for the link and background on the sugar industry in Utah. If I remember correctly (and I could be wrong) didn’t HJGrant encourage Reed Smoot to push through the Smoot-Hawley tariff to protect Utah’s sugar industry? Seems I’ve come across that somewhere. Like I mentioned above, I don’t know too much about it.

    BTW: Our fast Sunday tradition is to buy a big bag of chocolate, put it in the freezer and dive into it after church and we’ve broken our fast. Now that’s a fast Sunday!

12. “It will keep them healthy and strong.”

    This is, after all, what we pray that all our food might do.

13. I believe the the phrase is “nourish and strengthen” 🙂

14. Maybe these ads and the resulting sales prompted the huge increase in Mormon dentists over the 20th century.

15. “… and do us the good we need.”

    Hunter, I would very much agree with you if this were a current ad — there would be something very distasteful about a current church leader hawking one brand of anything, in competition with other brands, especially in what seems to us to be a tawdry world of doing whatever it takes to sell. In the context of 1916-17, though, it feels very different to me. For one thing, there was no hard sell about anything advertised in the church magazines of that era (at least, not until the Beneficial ads of a few years later) — it was more like a manufacturer offering something, not insisting that you take it whether you want it or not. There also seems to be a sense of pride in offering home-grown products, kind of like “hey, we can do this as well as anybody anywhere — we’ve arrived!” Or so it feels to me.

16. Ardis,

    I see this as a remnant of some of the thinking that went along with the cooperative movement and home manufacture era of the 19th century, and there is certainly a sense of “home town pride” in these ads.

    I spent a lot of my summers in the 60’s thinning sugar beets on my uncle’s farm in Idaho, and I know U&I Sugar was still a major factor in the sugar business then. Did they ultimately get bought out by ADM or some other huge agribusiness conglomerate? Nonetheless, I am glad I never have to stand there looking at a long row of beets with a hoe in hand, and the hot sun overhead. Cured me of any desire to be a farmer.

17. Worrying in 2009 about overeating in 1917 reminds me of reading about a group of polar explorers, who would eat a half-stick of butter a day to meet their bodies’ needs for nourishment.

    As with certain other things, don’t try this at home.

18. “it builds up the worn-down tissue and nerves more rapidly than do other foods.” WHAT? Who wrote this? Dr. Sponge Bob? Do not let my kids see this post. They are finally buying into my mantra that “sugar is the enemy”.

19. How funny that you posted this today. I seriously was researching sugar on the internet yesterday, because someone told me it is addicting and I wanted to know if it really was. I sure seem to be addicted. Even though I don’t eat chocolate anymore, I find ways to get lots of sugar.

20. Ardis,
    This is an inspiring post. Noting that these “revelations” on sugar appear over the name of a LDS authority, I imbibe the content of these adds with sweet anticipation. I now have patriarchal authority with which to combat an evil movement afoot in my home that attempts to paint sugar as the enemy and in so doing call good evil and evil good.

    Sweet blessed day. Thank you Ardis!

21. And here I was worried that the worst I could be held accountable for was a surge in donut sales.

    The loss of domestic tranquility à la maison Reeve is something I never bargained for!

22. Ardis,
    It is not just a sugar conspiracy that you’ve laid bare, but an underhanded attack on Sponge Bob as well (see #18). I’m distributing copies of this revelation to the Reeve “six pack.” Wait until they learn the true regenerative power of sugar from “great food experts.” To think that we’ve been missing out on one of the best “body fuels” available and have been reduced to reading cereal labels for sugar content below 10g/serving before it is allowed in the home. Masses unite!

23. Paul,

    Not only the best “body fuel”, but also a “concentrated nutriment”. Concentrated Nutriment! Who knew?

24. Sure, a spoonful of sugar is just that: a spoonful of sugar. With all the carbonated water and artificial flavoring and coloring and caffeine, how much Coke you would have to drink in order to get the same amount of pure sugar?

    I do remember trying to follow this rule of nutrition as a missionary. We’d come home at 9:30 p.m., hungry as bears in March, and go right to the bread bag. Two slices toasted, buttered, with a layer of sugar, and we were ready for a feast. If only we’d known how much Joseph F. Smith would have approved, we’d have eaten even more.

    This also reminds me of a song Allen Sherman sang back in the good old days, “The Drinking Man’s Diet.”

    One verses went:

    For breakfast some cornflakes and vodka,
    But cornflakes have carbohydrate;
    So I don’t eat those fattening cornflakes,
    I eat the vodka straight.

    So, skip the water, the veggies, the meat, etc. Just eat the sugar straight.

25. So Paul,

    Do you lock yourself in the bathroom for privacy to sneak your sugar the way I know that some women do with chocolate? I don’t do that, but I do have one desk drawer right next to my computer filled with Hershey Kisses (and some nuts). My kids all know what is in the drawer and start snarfing my chocolate whenever they come home to use my computer.

26. Wow. I need a cookie.

27. Yes. You do. “There’s nothing better for all members of every family.”

28. I spent a lot of my summers in the 60’s thinning sugar beets on my uncle’s farm in Idaho, and I know U&I Sugar was still a major factor in the sugar business then. Did they ultimately get bought out by ADM or some other huge agribusiness conglomerate?

    I checked M. Godrey’s 2001 dissertation on Utah-Idaho for information. Citing a 1999 letter written by a former U-I president, he notes that U-I decided to leave the sugar business in 1979 for financial reasons. U-I then moved its headquarters to Kennewick, WA, where it concentrated on potato processing. During the mid-80s, he writes, the LDS Church sold U-I, and it became known as AgraWest (“Breaking a monopoly: Progressive reform, the federal government, and the Utah-Idaho Sugar Company, 1907-1921,” 272n.6).

29. Maurine, #25
    Yes, I’m a sugar addict. Because of my wife’s “sugar is the enemy” mantra, I’m forced into hiding. I have to sneak my fixes away from the prying eyes of the kids. These adds, however, embolden me.

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