Sugar Changed the World

These prompts can be used for in-class discussion, exploratory free-writing, or reflection homework before or after reading the book.

Pre-Reading “Icebreaker”

One of the main ideas in Sugar Changed the World is that History is Personal. What might this mean? You are sitting in a classroom right now, for instance, learning a particular subject in a particular way. Historical events shaped our education system, so those historical events are impacting you at this very moment. In what other ways does history affect your life? How did history impact your ancestors and the possibility of your birth? How did history shape the family circumstances into which you were born? How did history shape your cultural practices—the holidays you celebrate, the foods you eat, the clothes you wear, the music you listen to, and so on? How does history impact your identity and beliefs?

Teaching Suggestion: The purpose of this activity is to help students invest in the idea that History is Personal, so reading about historical events can be personally rewarding. Push students to consider that history is not a monolith: Historical events impacted different groups in varying ways, which means that individuals alive today have differing inheritances from the past. Point out that this will be true in the book they are about to read—that even though it is mostly about events from the distant past, it is also about how those events have shaped the individual worlds of people alive today.

Post-Reading Analysis

Go back and look again at the book’s introduction. What “promises” does the introduction make about what the book will cover and the arguments it will support? Does the book fulfill these promises? Why or why not?

Teaching Suggestion: The purpose of this activity is to challenge students to consider the book as a piece of rhetoric. The book lays out premises in its introduction, much as students’ own essays are expected to lay out a thesis, and the rest of the book should support these premises thoroughly. This analytical question may be too broad for some students, so you might wish to narrow its scope by having students work together to identify all of the introduction’s premises and then asking students to choose just one premise to follow up on. For more advanced students, you might introduce terms such as logos, ethos, and pathos, and ask them to offer opinions about the book’s balance of these techniques. This 13-minute video from the YouTube channel “The Nature of Writing” gives helpful information about these terms.