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Studying my sugar package at a Starbucks branch in downtown Toronto recently I saw something that made me  think twice about drinking the coffee I had just bought and was about to "sweeten". There on the package was a brown figure in a festive outfit apparently happily dancing. And there at the top of the packet was the word PLANTATION. Did somebody at \Lantic Sugar, the Canadian company whose name also appears on the package forget something about the history of sugar? The alternative, that they never knew about it, is unbelievable.

Hello, Lantic - Sugar was a slave-based industry in both of the major producing countries, Haiti and Brazil. And these slaves worked to harvest sugar grown on plantations. Was this really forgotten or ignored by the marketers at Lantic? Are we so  far away from the slave trade times that they think we can or should forget and believe that the lives of slaves were joyous and full of music? Maybe the brown sugar package for brown sugar featuring brown slaves was too much of a marketing opportunity to ignore, Hard to  believe all this was unconscious, but just as bad even if it was. Plnatations were never happy. The sugar trade was an ugly blot. The opposite of sweet.

The Plantation packages must go. And as a coffee drinker we suggest you ignore them, or throw them away or better still go to a chain like Second Cup which uses their own brand sugar packages,until Starbucks, Tim Hortons and other Plantation supporters get on the right side of history.

** MOST IMPORTANT** Please send us your Plantation sugar package sightings. We will forward them to Lantic witth this message.