GRAILS by Jonas Palekas (context: Ubiquitousssssssssssssssssugar)
Grails
Jonas Palekas
Ubiquitousssssssssssssssssugar, SIGN Project Space, Groningen, 2026
Instead of the Introduction
My name is Jonas and I am a sugar addict. Indeed, I am a professional chef, a food researcher working on and observing various historical and environmental complications some certain foods cary (and in all this it is impossible to not notice how bad reputation sugar has). And yet, I can not say no to it. I do eat good food, the farmers veggies and free range eggs, quality meat and no avocado, but sugary sweets, the gummy bears, chocolate bars and caramel candies always manage to somehow sneak in. It appears that in my diet and moral value system guiding it, sugar is not even seen as food. It’s something else.
The goal of this research and text written as a result of it will be to share opinion and discuss what it may be if it is not food and how it works. I am very happy to be here among the like minded thoughts and see that the works of the show in both their research and aesthetics are in a conversation with each other, it seems that there is certain agreement on a critical position here and I specifically will be elaborating on sugar from two perspectives: Speculative evolutionary nutrition and critical food history. However, I will concentrate on the sugar cane history part, not on sugar beets, which you have here abundantly. And one may even claim that the sugar beet growing industry’s appearance in Europe helped stopping some nasty historical processes I will be talking about. But about this latter.
To additionally introduce myself and expand on my background and a position, I must tell that I am from Lithuania, a place that even though very much westernized nowadays, has historically always been on the margin of western europe and the modern elements of its wealth. For instance, in the average farming family of my grandmother, who sadly passed away recently, refined sugar products were something fairly rare.In her generous stories told about her pre-modern childhood in traditional village setting, she points out her rare interactions with sweets and sugar. She talks about her father bringing home a bag of bon bon style candies or a kind nazi soldier, from a retrieving German army, gifting her a chocolate bar.
Even with abundance of local sugar sources like honey or plentiful seasonal fruits and wild berries, which were and still is part of north-eastern european diet, strongest marks in her memory was connected to the refined sugar products. She seemed to live through the dietary shift, over course of her life, sugar in various forms became ubiquitous.
The modern paradox of refinery
Sugar metaphorically helps us to understand what digestion, cooking and food processing is in their very foundation. And to explain why I am using words digestion and cooking and even food processing in parallel, I should point out that I see cooking and food processing as external and culturalized forms of digestion. After all, we are a little bit like mushrooms – we are digesting things outside of our bodies – externally and then absorb the extracted nutrients. When cooking we are breaking things down with tools and energy, we start the process of extracting nutrients and that process later continues in our bellies, which are given to us to absorb them. We are peeling off the unwanted or lesser wanted layers, the fibers, the skins, removing veins and bones, wanting that white thing in the middle only, they filet, the pulp, the core. And we want to reach that core fast, eat fast and digest fast and then want it more.
The idea of refining sugar fits in this logic perfectly. It is also an external digestion. We are peeling and cleaning, crushing and pressing to get that central nutrient, in this case the simple carbohydrate. So by consuming sugar we are not allowing our bodies to digest much, we are outsourcing that digestion process and just injecting the final result – the carbohydrate delivering us pure energy. However, digesting, in literal and metaphorical ways, is always about both, the core, and everything around it – the complex context. The mistake we make is that we diminish the context which is often more important than the core itself. And such ignorance only leads to development of unsustainable, always energy hungry, progress-only focused, cruel, societal mechanisms which now we finally start to question.
Our bodies are entities of nature and by a modern division between nature and culture, and with settings favoring the culture, we tend to overprocess our food. We see these processing technologies and this external digestion as our cultural advancements and signs of progress. It’s very unusual for a chef to say that, but to be honest, I think we should cook and process food less. Interestingly our bodies are designed to appreciate this complex process of breaking things apart themselves and hates when food is overcooked in any way. With the help of a million little helpers – the microorganisms who also need a job, it loves to slowly extract the nutrients and needs that complexity.
Yes, to some degree we still are these monkeys (sorry, I shouldn’t call us monkeys, we are apes). We love the sweet juice of fruit, and love it even more when someone brings it to us, or at least chimpanzees, our closest relatives in nature do. But why can’t the cultural progress, and the move away from nature narrative, manifest in finally helping us to deal with our old bad habits? Even if we agree with progressionist thinking stating that evolution made us leave the trees, climb down and seek for a better future, then sugar is a trap which brings us back.
Daniel Lieberman, who is an evolutionary biologist at Harvard university, uses the idea of mismatching and hypermatching the foods to the population diets. Generally this idea talks about mismatch of certain new groups of foods and their abundance to our bodies which over thousands of years were developed for different kinds of eating patterns. Going back to chimpanzees, the fruit-favoring diet was set aside when we started to evolve into by-pads, roots, seeds, grains and meat appeared in our diets and we eventually (about half a million years ago) all became cooks. These processes are very slow and have determined the ways our bodies are able to accept certain foods. Refined sugar is something that very intensively crashes into this slow evolutionary pace. Sugar is a substance disproportionately fast for us. This statement also fits with the fact that high consumption of sugar makes our cellular processes faster and us age quicker. It is likely that in the future tolerance for such high public sugar consumption will be seen as a policymaker’s mistake. Recent sugar tax implementation in Europe could lead into DDT, Mercury, Lead or Asbestos like situations. The never ending human obsession with the idea of eternal life, which now shows up in trends of longevity, might be one of the stronger arguments against sugar. Human body evolution is having a hard time catching up with the pace of modern food processing including sugar refinement. At the same time, food industry companies are hypermatching their products to other old, primordial and evolutionary coded needs and poking that inner monkey, still remembering that low hanging fruit and wanting that candy and the easy energy fix. The modern paradox of refinery appears and we once again are getting dragged around by the food system in which we live. When stripped of the surrounding complexity, pure sugar is not the energy we need, it’s quite the opposite, it’s something that induces laziness and turns our bodies off. It’s a very suppressive and depressive nutrient, it’s a tunnel of light which moves you on, wears you out and does not carry you anywhere. Sugar is an energy striped of food.
So we live in a system which feeds us these extreme amounts of sugar and we are failing in handling it. Both the sugar and the system. Now, let’s dig into a few historical reasons why and how it happened. And especially the processes preceding the sugar beet.
A short note on history
As you may guess it would be pretty complicated to point into a particular time of history and say that this is when sugar has started. Instead I would rather in a very quick manner talk about some elements of sugar history in the western world that deserve to be discussed more often and you wont gonna find them on a candy bag.
It all started with the crusades to the holy land. And the crusades, instead of finding the Grail, found the sugar. In many ways similarly holy and in many ways similarly tempting to go to extremes for obtaining it. The conquered sugar fields and processing technologies of the middle east was inspiring for many Europeans and the sugar cubes, blocks and sculptures quickly gained popularity among western elites of the late medieval. However, there was one very serious issue: the new favourite of the court could not be grown in their own land. That meant that conquering territories in warmer and humid areas, became more and more needed. First came the islands in the Atlantic, The Canaries, Madeira and when they reached the Americas they were not even sure what land they ‘’discovered’’, but they already knew that they were gonna be growing sugar on it. Cristopus Columbus’ father in law was one of the biggest sugar plantation owners in Madeira.
But what about the labour? Interestingly first record of enslaved people to be sent to work in the sugar plantations were a group of several hundred jewish kids of very young age whose parents were killed in pogroms in Europe. But I guess one can not build sustainable business operation on the workforce of 7 year olds, so with several minor attempts to ship in prisoners of european countries and even try paying people for their work, plantation owners discovered that the most economically viable choice is to start kidnaping people in Africa, ship them to the Americas and force them to work until they die. One very gruesome number says a lot. Approximately 70% of all black slaves brought to Americas during the slave trade era were brought to sugar plantations. Not cotton, not tobacco, not indigo, but sugar.
Another aspect of this terrifying history opens up when you look into a problem European elites started to face when slave trade became not a fragmental part of the transatlantic business operations, but a foundational element in the steady production of sugar and other colonial goods. Enlightened and early Modern thoughts couldn’t handle the fact that their very own peers are doing such terrible things to other human beings. Unless some human life, wellbeing and freedom is of lesser value. And we know very well how good our beloved western countries are at selecting whose life is valuable, who’s not and how much we do this to this day. So yes, the answer was found. It may seem quite shocking, but if you start looking into theories analysing the history of racism, you immediately bump into something called colonial justification. Most scholars nowdays are agreing that during 17th and 18th centuries, European elites: British, Dutch, French, Portugese, owning slave trade businesses and plantations, invented the concept of biological race to justify explotation and enslavement of African people.
So you kinda can state that sugar is to blame for the invention of racism.
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And where did it all go? capitalist means of existing blinds us in the same way as this wild seek for pure sugar does. The free market becomes a mechanism feeding on that addiction. All the familiar sugar rush making you reach for another candy, over history and time got multiplied by the entire population of Europe and later the whole world. So the grail was found.
The table setting and comments regarding sweets for the reception
The glasses are individually hand made and little bit inconsistent to each other, their origin is not known exactly, but they are either from Iran or from India and likely were ordered by members of English Jewish community to be used as Kiddush ritual glasses. What we know is that it must be up to a hundred years old.
The dessert selection on the table includes vintage style bon-bons likely similar to ones of my grandmother’s childhood. Also, we have some chocolates. Including Dutch famous Tony Chocolonely. It is an interesting case and it is something that in chocolate bar branding changed images of tall ships and depictions of dark skinned workers in the plantations. You may remember those. Yes, sorry I think I said you wont gonna see the history of sugar on a candy bar… Also, there are some ritualistic fishing luck waffles of mine. Called Fortuna. Back there where I am from, every autumn we fish for salmon and I eat these every day. Not sure if they are working. But if you need some luck, have a go. Ritualistic and symbolic meanings of sugar is something that still surrounds us.
Another important addition is the apple cake. I started using its recipe (which is of a mysterious origin) when I was a child only discovering my love for cooking. It was the 90s and with my Mom we called it “Italian”. I guess at a time it was a part of imagining what the western desserts could look like. Now we all know very well what Italian cultural export in the form of their gastronomical achievements looks like, however bear in mind that we are talking about the times in Lithuania when even Pizza there was yet to come.
Also, for the visual and design guidance, shout outs and kisses goes to my partner Ani Gandžumian who helped me with this project. And to finish my presentation, would like to make a short toast:
To this gathering and to the show. To the hospitality and professionalism of SIGN, to participating artists, to Marie-Jane and Ron, to Diego. Toast of the very blackness we managed to strip from the white, the liquid in which all the minerals and vitamins stay after refinery – Molases. The flavour of a sugarcane itself. Is in it strange to strip food of its flavour? It is one of the many symbols of the foolishness of the western enlightened thoughts who sacrificed diversity, complexity and fullness for the sake of cleanness and purity. Sugar is ultimately modern element of nutrition and it tricked modern Western thought running away from its animality into very worse of animal-like behaviour. So to the diversity and complexity – the diversity and complexity of our diets and of our thoughts. Thank you.