But the largest source of new sugar in American history first appeared with the advent of “convenience foods”—a term coined by General Foods in the 1950s to describe their new line of foods and beverages that were “easy to buy, store, open, prepare, and eat.” These ready-to-eat meals and snacks have come to dominate the supermarket aisles, gas station shelves, and vending machine racks of America. As of 2010, half of the money that Americans spend on food goes to convenience foods.
Convenience foods are loaded with sugar. Packaged cakes, cookies, and candies are more or less based on sugar, but sugar is also added to the cheese and sauces that season ready-to-eat meals, as well as to the sausage, bacon, and ham that go into them. At present, three out of four of the food items that Americans purchase have had refined sugar added to them in order to make them more attractive to the consumer.
In the 1970s, the average American was ingesting almost one pound of sugar per week in the form of sweeteners added to convenience foods. During the decades that followed, the American workday got longer. As families relied more heavily on convenience foods to meet their needs, the average intake of added sugar spiked to an all-time high of nearly one and a half pounds per week in 2004.
The year 1956—of “Coke with chow; wow!”—seems very far away now. It is difficult to imagine a time when a person’s reaction to seeing a can of Coca-Cola sounded anything like “Wow!” In the 1960s, Coca-Cola ads became more existential when statements such as “Things go better with Coke” replaced references to actual things such as “chow.” Coca-Cola progressed to become “the Real Thing” in 1969, and by 1982, Coke was simply “It.” In 1993, Coke’s slogan was unsparingly categorical: “Always Coca-Cola.” And by then, for many American refrigerators, this was more or less the case.
As recently as 2007, the average American was consuming one can of Pepsi or Coca-Cola every 43 hours, and though consumption has decreased since then, every American man, woman, and child still drinks upward of one liter of cola per week, on average.
In fact, most of the rapid increase in sugar consumption between 1962 and 2000 came not in the form of food but as beverages: sodas, sports drinks, fruit punch, and lemonade—Americans increased from an average intake of one can of sugary beverage every other day in 1977 to drinking one can every seventeen hours by 2000. Today, sugared beverages are the cheapest (and emptiest) calories that can be purchased and make up a full 10 percent of all the calories that Americans consume.