Traveling with Sugar
Traveling with Sugar
Chronicles of a Global Epidemic
Amy Moran-Thomas
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
University of California Press
Oakland, California
© 2019 by Amy Moran-Thomas
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Moran-Thomas, Amy, author.
Title: Traveling with sugar : chronicles of a global epidemic / Amy Moran-Thomas.
Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2018054745 (print) | LCCN 2018056398 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520969858 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520297531 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780520297548 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Diabetes—Belize. | Diabetics—Case studies.
Classification: LCC RA645.D5 (ebook) | LCC RA645.D5 M67 2019 (print) | DDC 616.4/62—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018054745
Manufactured in the United States of America
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Travel with (chravl wid): to be troubled with, suffer from; have a recurring medical problem.
Travel (chravl): euphemism for being on one’s death bed.
—Belize Kriol dictionary
A lot of people, countrywide, in the whole entire world, here in Belize and Dangriga, are traveling with sugar . . .
—Anne, reflecting on diabetic sugar across three generations of her family, 2010
Contents
Shorelines—A Global Epidemic as Seen from Belize—Traveling with Sugar—Errata: Methods and Mistakes—Slow Care
Sweetness—Sugar Roads—Chronic Landscapes—Diabetes Multiple—Still. There
Caregivers in an Illegible Epidemic
Foot Soldiers—Non-Traumatic Measures—Displaced Surveillance—Mixed Metaphors—Para-Communicable Conditions—Geographies of Blame—Three Atmospheres
Traveling an Altered Landscape with Cresencia
The Normal and the Extraordinary—Ancestral Discontent—Coral Gardens and Their Metabolism—Sugar Girls—Land Tenure (Is This Legal?)—On the Other Side—Dr. Saldo—Great White Hazards—Healthy Living Made Fun and Easy!—Straddling
Crónica Two: Insula
Technology, Policy, and Other Units of Jordan’s Isolations
Type What?—Islands and Empire—Global Policy Gaps—Other Orphans—Unsteady Units—Many Machines—The Life of Muerte—Design Archipelagos—Counting
Crónica Three: Generations
Approaching “Biologies of History” with Arreini and Guillerma
Scientific Racism: Lineages—Housekeeping—Trans-Plantation—Epidemiological Transition—Hunger and Diabetes—What Is the “Epi” in Epigenetics?—Prevention—Blood’s Sugar—Quicksilver—Sequencing
Crónica Four: Repair Work
Maintenance Projects with Laura, Jose, and Growing Collectives
Halfway Technologies—Phantom Limbs—Sugar Shoes—Dialysis: Pressure—“We Don’t Want to Die”—Food Infrastructures—Between Hurricanes—Prosthetic Hope International—Holding Measures—The Gradual Instant
Epilogue
Dedication
Acknowledgments
About Translations
Image Credits
Notes
Bibliography
Index
PART ONE
Contexts
Approach
Emergency in Slow Motion
Sugar . . . has been one of the massive demographic forces in world history.
—Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power
A lot of people, countrywide, in the whole entire world, here in Belize and Dangriga, are traveling with sugar.
Diabetic is a dangerous thing . . . It’s like cancer . . . It makes you get weak, it makes you get blind, because of the sugar in your eyes and the pressure . . . It makes you get slim, especially if you don’t know . . .
That is the most [serious] thing that is hampering the whole entire world. The diabetic sugar . . .
The whole of your family can get the diabetic. You have to look out [even] if you don’t catch it—maybe your children later on to come . . .
—Anne, expanding on living with diabetic sugar in Belize
I have never seen a good stand-alone picture of “diabetes.” If not for Mr. P’s storytelling, I might never have glimpsed it at all. He was paging through a family album on the kitchen table in his home on Belize’s south coast, showing me pictures of his wife. He smiled back at the old photos of her as a Garifuna teacher standing firm beside a rural schoolhouse. We watched as on the pages she became a mother, then a grandmother. The next time Mrs. P appeared in the album, she was suddenly on crutches. “Sugar,” Mr. P said simply as he paged forward in time, the photographs sharpening in color and filling with grandchildren. In a family Christmas picture his wife’s entire right foot was missing. At one wedding, both of Mrs. P’s legs were gone below the knee. We watched her disappear a piece at a time from