Tastes Like Cancer Originally published in The London Review of Books, March 2007. SWEET & LOW by Rich Cohen My mother and grandmother, when I was a child, were both fairly diet-conscious, and I recall them both using Sweet & Low—the saccharin-based artificial sweetener—in their coffee whenever we went out to eat. When nobody was looking, I would sneak one of the pink packets out of its little square plastic dispenser, rip it open, lick my finger, poke the powder, and have a taste. It was disgusting, of course. Irresistibly disgusting. A thick, fake, heavy sweetness that gave way to a wallop of chemical taint. I would drink half a glass of water just to get the flavor out of my mouth, and then, when we went out again, I'd do the same thing. I still go out to eat with my mother and grandmother, but they go for Equal now, or Splenda. Most people do, in fact—as sugar substitutes go, Sweet & Low just can't measure up to its aspartame- and sucralose-based competitors. An unscientific and surreptitious survey of diner patrons would suggest that the people who still use Sweet & Low are the same people who still wear fedoras, or drive Buicks, or voted for Ross Perot. It is forever associated with the past, and blind loyalty, it would appear, is the only conceivable reason to stick with the stuff. It takes Rich Cohen 225 pages of his hilarious family memoir, Sweet & Low, to reveal the results of his own private taste test. It was Cohen's grandfather, Ben Eisenstadt, who founded Cumberland Packing, the developers of both Sweet & Low and the sugar packet itself, and so one could be forgiven for thinking that his results might be more the result of loyalty than of empirical data. Nope. “Tastes like cancer,” he writes, transcribing from his notes on the test. “The aftertaste drags you to the mat.” And then, after he gives Splenda a try: “Cumberland is going to get crushed.” This kind of exuberant bluntness is typical of the best bits of the book, which strives to turn both corporate history and family myth inside-out. Cohen's evident lack of loyalty is made possible by his mother's disinheritance from the family fortune—“I hereby record that I have made no provision...for my daughter ELLEN or any of ELLEN's issue for reasons I deem sufficient” is how his grandmother coldly put it in her will. The reasons for this disinheritance, and for the downfall (still ongoing) of Cumberland Packing are the book's subjects, and they make not only for a great read, but a vivid demonstration of how the personal and political interact, often disastrously, with the economic. * Cumberland Packing was formed in 1945, when Ben Eisenstadt's diner near the Navy Yard in Brooklyn started to fail. The war was over, and the doughboys and dock workers who had been his customers dried up in an instant. Ben tore out the tables and counter, bought a tea-bagging machine, and put up a sign that read Cumberland Packing Company. The company treaded water for a while, slowly losing money, until one day Ben and his wife, Betty, went out to lunch and, struggling with a clogged sugar dispenser, came up with the idea for the sugar packet. Ben sent the bagging machine back to the factory for repurposing, and pretty soon found himself showing his invention to the executives of Domino sugar. They stole it, of course. Ben hadn't bothered with a patent. It was a lesson he didn't need to be taught twice. He landed packing deals with a few smaller sugar companies, and began packaging a few other things as well. Business picked up, the company grew, and Ben hired on his son, Marvin, as a partner. Ben, apparently, was always on a diet, and in the early fifties, the only substitute for sugar was called Sucaryl. It was part saccharin, part cyclamate, and it came either in pill or liquid form, like medicine. Ben wanted to put the stuff on his grapefruit, and he and Marvin hatched the idea that they should find a way to get it into a powder form, so that they could package it much as they packaged sugar. They imagined selling it to hospitals and drugstores, for use by diabetics. Before long, they had hired a chemist to help them with the formula, and in 1957, they filed a patent. The name came from an old song Ben liked, with lyrics taken from a Tennyson poem (“Sweet and low, sweet and low, / Wind of the western sea...”); the package was designed by an aunt. (“Aunt Barbara,” Cohen elaborates, in a typically uproarious one-detail character sketch, “an amateur artist who, on vacations, used to paint funny faces on tennis balls.” (103)) Marvin suggested the packet color—pink. They tossed the new product into the commerce stream and it went through the roof. “Packets were swiped from restaurants and stolen from hospitals,” Cohen tells us. A&P, the supermarket chain, came calling, and pretty soon every diner in America offered Sweet & Low alongside the sugar. Ben, Marvin, and their family, of course, became wealthy. “I think I saw the exact moment,” Cohen writes, “when my mother realized that every member of her family was rich.” The Cohens were touring Uncle Marvin's house, a mansion on the beach in Neponsit, when the sound of piano music reached their ears. The sound proved to be that of an old player piano—but no ordinary one. Rather than merely repeating a sequence of notes, the piano could record, through an elaborate mechanism, the precise performance of a player. Marvin happened, then, to own piano rolls recorded by George Gershwin, which, when played, gave the impression of Gershwin himself being alive and in the room. This particular ostentation—the “Gershwin piano rolls”—came to symbolize, for Cohen's mother, the culture of affluence that had sprung up in her family. But as the Eisenstadt family grew accustomed to its affluence, the American food industry was undergoing its own cultural sea change. The days of unregulated additives were over; people had become obsessively health-conscious, and a series of disasters—including the horror of thalidomide, which in the early 1960's led to thousands of birth defects in newborns—had tightened the FDA's regulatory influence. Next to saccharin, the most important ingredient in Sweet & Low, at this time, was cyclamate, a less powerful sweetener that cut saccharin's unpalatable aftertaste. Studies of this chemical conducted in the late 1960's showed that large amounts of the stuff could possibly cause cancer. The correlation was loose, the amount required to have an effect enormous, but the regulatory climate of the era dictated the cyclamate be banned. Cumberland, however, was prepared. At this time, Cohen's immediate family was living in Illinois, not far from a chemical plant called Abbott Labs, and his mother was friendly with the spouses of some of its employees. Through them, she got wind of the fact that Abbott, a big player in the sweetener market, was not going to fight the cyclamate ban—meaning that it was very likely to go through. She tipped off Ben and Marvin, and they immediately put a new, cyclamate-free formula into production, giving them several weeks' head start on their competitors. (In a foreshadowing of family disagreements to come, Cohen reveals that Marvin's version of the story doesn't involve his sister at all—he claims that he merely “had a gut feeling” about the ban.) Still flexible and willing to innovate, Cumberland not only dodged a bullet but increased its market share. Cohen believes that Cumberland was under the influence of what the business world calls “the founder's effect”—the kind of loving influence that only a company founder can supply. “As long as the founder is in control,” he writes, “God is in the garden. When God goes, no one will ever again speak with the same authority.” The God here is of course Ben, and soon after the cyclamate ban, Ben would turn over the company to his son. Marvin, Cohen lets us know, is no Ben—a sad truth that the next crisis would lay bare. That crisis was the threat of a saccharin ban. Several studies in the early 1970's suggested that saccharin might be connected to cancer, among them a Canadian study in which rats were fed what Cohen calls “monster doses” of the sweetener, “shot directly into their bodies—the equivalent of eight hundred cans of Diet Coke a day.” Some of the male rats developed bladder tumors. It would eventually be shown—much, much later—that the saccharin hadn't caused the tumors, that it was the sodium present in the substance, reacting to the unusually high acid content in male rat urine. Today, in fact, saccharin is considered safe. But the FDA's reaction at the time was to initiate a ban. Cumberland might have innovated, as it had before. Instead, it chose to fight the ban. Ultimately, it won this fight—Congress enacted a series of moratoriums putting off the decision indefinitely, and the company was able to continue manufacturing Sweet & Low as it had before. Indeed, business was unusually brisk at this time, as devoted consumers began hoarding the product, fearful they wouldn't be able to get it anymore. But the competition did innovate, and what they came up with, as Cohen's taste test indicates, were better products. Cumberland had peaked—their market dominance would slide, and American tastes would move on. It is at this point that Cohen's book takes an unusual turn. We know, at this point, that there's going to be some kind of scandal attached to Cumberland Packing—Cohen has broadly hinted as much. But now details of it begin to emerge. Why, a reader might wonder, would Cumberland choose to fight the saccharin ban, when changing its product had succeeded so spectacularly before? Part of it, we're led to believe, was Marvin's management style, which was cruder and less adaptable than his father's. But the main reason turns out to be that Cumberland fought because they believed they could win. And they believed they could win because they had influence—much of which was not, strictly speaking, legal. * Early on, Cohen treats us to a history of Brooklyn—its settlement, its growth, its importance as a center of trade. And he touches, briefly, on its criminal fabric—the thugs, players, and wiseguys who have historically insinuated themselves into all business that goes on there. Ben Eisenstadt, we're told, played by the rules, period: He was unquestionable, beyond corruption. In a recent survey, 82 percent of American CEOs admitted to cheating at golf. Ben never played golf, or tennis, or bought a nice car, or a new house, or a nice suit, or went on vacation. He was austere. Marvin, on the other hand, liked to throw a little money around, and his taste in associates was not quite as conservative as his father's. His right-hand men at the company were a couple of guys named Gil Mederos and Joe Asaro. Mederos was a handyman and mechanic who knew Marvin from his first days at Cumberland, when they both still worked on the factory floor. By the 1980's, however, Mederos had been promoted to the company's chief financial officer, and was responsible for all its cash flow. Asaro, Cumberland's vice president for governmental affairs, was in charge of handling the saccharin ban and its series of moratoriums. These two men lived on the same block of the same street in Old Westbury, Long Island, long a haven for the city's robber barons and new-money millionaires. Their houses were huge and garlanded with bling—“the three-story foyer,” Cohen writes, “that makes a man feel like a god; the seventeen-thousand-dollar front door imported from northern Italy; the curvy backyard pool fed by a waterfall; the hot tub; the gazebo.” All these nouveau-riche amenities came from money stolen from Cumberland Packing. It's unclear—both to the reader, the author, and the world at large—just how deeply Marvin was involved in this conspiracy. But it's certainly clear that he was. What seems most likely to have happened was that Asaro, Mederos, and Mederos's brother, Mario, hatched a plan to set up shell companies—“fake businesses that would interpose themselves in the Cumberland flow chart as phony middle men”--that would buy raw materials and sell them to Cumberland at inflated prices, with the balance going to the conspirators. They faked invoices and work orders, charged the company for nonexistent deliveries, and used the shell companies to pay contractors for personal work—such as installing seventeen-thousand-dollar doors. The scheme fell under the scrutiny of the FBI, which had been investigating corruption on the waterfront. As it happened, Marvin had tried to keep the entire scandal under wraps—tamping down the damage and clamping a lid over the whole thing. Asaro and the Mederos brothers were kept on at the company after a promise to play nice. Needless to say, they didn't. The Mederos brothers would eventually take the brunt of the punishment, ending up in prison; Asaro and Marvin escaped with only fines. Cohen is very, very interested in the degree to which his uncle knew what was going on at Cumberland. The testimony from court seems to indicate that Marvin wasn't personally involved, that the extent of his criminal behavior was to cover up what had already gone on. Several things, however, suggest otherwise. For one, Marvin took advantage of the same personal contractors that Asaro and the Mederos had. And then there was the extra set of accounting books, and the fact that the real books were hidden inside a wall in the Cumberland offices. And there was the fact that Marvin, Asaro, and Gil Mederos had their offices all in the same stretch of hallway, all within shouting distance of one another, and spent every day in one another's company, running Cumberland. Was it even possible that Marvin didn't know what was going on right under his nose? And then there was Alfonse D'Amato. D'Amato was a famous, and famously corrupt, republican senator from New York, known for his mob ties, underworld poker parties, and cozy relationships with lobbyists. Among these lobbyists was one Joseph Asaro. D'Amato's voice in Congress was powerful, and his sponsorship of the continuing saccharin ban moratoriums would have been extremely helpful to Cumberland—and indeed, D'Amato did sponsor such legislation. It was found that Asaro had skirted campaign finance laws by collecting checks from individual Cumberland employees and their family members, then giving them all to D'Amato's campaign at once. The donations were technically separate, but it would have been clear to the senator that the money—$76,500—was coming from Cumberland. How, Cohen wonders, could Marvin not have known about that? * Researching his family, Cohen writes, he often “felt the thrill of the private detective,” and to some extent, the reader feels this thrill along with him. But if this book has a weakness, it's that the political and corporate intrigue that is ostensibly its selling point just cannot hold a candle to the material about Cohen's family. In a sense, it's all of a piece—the company is the family, and the family is the company. But one senses that Cohen's heart is not really in it when he writes about the saccharin ban, or the history of sugar, or the settlement of New York. It isn't that these portions of the book are uninteresting or badly written—on the contrary, they are neat, efficient little glosses on complex, unwieldy subjects, and well worth reading. It's just that they can't measure up to Cohen's ecstatic, hilarious glimpses into character, and I get the feeling that, if he could, he would just write that stuff all day long. As an example, I'll quote most of a paragraph about his grandma Esther. This is Cohen's father's mother—not an Eisenstadt, and thus not a major player in the story at all. In fact, this paragraph is the only time she comes up. But the reader cannot stop thinking about her, and wishing she'd insinuate herself more into the narrative, thanks to the sheer comic brilliance of the sketch: Grandma Betty [Cohen begins, by way of comparison] was careful about what she said and to whom. Esther said everything to everyone...She took an afternoon to tell a story that could be told in five minutes, then wound it up by saying “That's it in a nutshell.” For me, an early memory is my father on the phone saying, Ma, Ma, please, Ma, oh, Ma! Ma! Ma! I once heard her ask a woman in her condo complex, “Why do you hate me, fatso?” I once heard her say to a Holocaust survivor, “You are one Hitler should not have let get away.” When she took me and my sister to see Yentl, she asked for three tickets, one senior, two children. My sister was thirty, I was twenty-two. The three of us saw Yentl for four dollars. She could defrost a three-course meal in six minutes...Cubans made her nervous. She believed there was a book in Jerusalem in which her name was inscribed in gold. Cohen goes on to describe the dementia of her late years with the sentence, “She was old, but then she got really old.” In passages like these, Cohen takes the timing of standup comedy and applies it to his Chekhovian eye for character, and the result is just stunning. A lot of his best writing, in fact, is concentrated in throwaway bits of the story, as if he's embarrassed to bring out the killer chops when you're paying close attention. In a footnote about the girth of former US President William Howard Taft, he says the man was “famous as the president who got stuck in a bathtub, which is easy to picture, but hard to picture clearly.” “I knew the kid who lived there,” he says about a mansion in his home town. “His father had a handlebar mustache and stood in the driveway without a shirt.” A “straitlaced and stern” lawyer is wearing “the kind of big class ring I sometimes imagine opening a cut beneath my eye.” If Cohen has one weakness as a writer, at least in this book, it's that he tends toward fragmentation. He has a hard time keeping up any narrative momentum. You could protest that this is complicated, fragmentary material, and you'd be right—but a writer ought to be able to find the thread and follow it. It's common, in Sweet & Low, to find yourself whisked off to the sixteenth century for a history lesson at the very moment you most feel the pull of the story, or battered by asides when the primary material is most powerful. As a result, the book never really gripped me—Cohen writes like a guy who keeps going out for a smoke. By the time you get to the end, though, you can see why. Cohen is really taking the stuffing out of his own family here, which is not an easy task to stay focused on. Nowhere is this more evident than in the last forty pages, where he addresses at last his mother's disinheritance. Ultimately, this is the story that drives the book—it's the offense that, in Cohen's view, stands for all the others. In 1995, Ben Eisenstadt was diagnosed with a failing heart valve and was scheduled for surgery to have it replaced. He was 88. To prepare him for the procedure, his doctors prescribed an antibiotic, and it sent him into anaphylactic shock. It nearly killed him. At the time, Cohen's parents were staying on Long Island, in a rented house in Amagansett. Ellen, Cohen's mother, thought that Ben had been poorly treated at Maimonides, the hospital that had given him the medicine (and of which Ben had for many years been a generous benefactor), and she suggested he instead see a cousin named David Blumenthal—one of the best cardiologists in the country. Blumenthal ran a series of tests, told Ben his heart would soon fail, and quickly put him under the knife. The valve was replaced successfully. But there was a problem. A few weeks later, a stitch popped, and became infected. Because of what had happened at Maimonides, Ben hadn't been given an antibiotic, and now, again because of his apparent allergy, the infection would be very hard to treat. Long story short, he fell into a coma, and died five months later. It turned out he hadn't been allergic to the antibiotic after all—Maimomides had probably administered it wrong. You might remember Gladys, the shut-in aunt, who lived in the old family home with Betty, Ben's wife, and never left her room. Gladys began to blame Ellen for Ben's death—after all, Ellen was the one who had recommended her cousin in the first place. She went on to accuse her of not visiting the hospital enough (Gladys herself, of course, had never visited once) when Ben was in his coma. When Ben finally died, Ellen and her husband were in Paris on a business trip, and ended up flying home on the Concorde in order to attend—Gladys, Cohen suspects, had scheduled the funeral immediately so that his parents wouldn't make it back in time. Later, Gladys would use this incident to denounce Ellen, telling Cohen's sister, incoherently, “Your mother is the richest woman in the country. She goes to Paris...She flies on the Concorde. Where do we go? What do we do?” The answers to those questions appeared to be, “Nothing whatsoever,” and “Stay rich,” for Betty disinherited Ellen and left everything of any value to her other children, including Gladys. Evidently Gladys had managed to poison her mother against her sister. Ellen got nothing of the business from Ben, and nothing at all from Betty when she died. And neither, of course, did Rich Cohen. It seems crazy. It is crazy. This, presumably, is why Rich Cohen wanted to write about his family: they're crazy. Late in the book, he asks right out: “Just why were Ellen and her issue disinherited?” He answers his own question in a rambling paragraph, starting with Ben's illness and death, and continuing: ...because Ellen married too young, because Morris wanted to buy Herbie into the business, because Ellen left Flatbush for Bensonhurst and Bensonhurst for the world...because if Ben loved Ellen, how could Ben love Betty, because Ellen tried to steal Ben away from Betty, because Gladys was there and Ellen was not...It's like infinity. If you think about it too deeply, you go crazy. The same could be said about this fascinating, chaotic, intermittently brilliant memoir. Read it, but take breaks; it might just send you right around the bend. c2007 by J. Robert Lennon.