Sweet and Low: A Family Story »

A contributor to publications from The New Yorker and Vanity Fair to Rolling Stone, Rich Cohen has also written books that deftly explore little-known aspects of Jewish culture and heritage, including Tough Jews and The Avengers. His latest work, Sweet and Low, is an engaging look at the story behind a little pink packet that's become an American icon.

The invention. The fortune. The payoffs. The convictions. The family.

The New Yorker

Cohen’s unflinching and hilarious account of his family begins with his grandfather, a lawyer turned cafeteria counterman who “built the fortune that would be the cause of all the trouble.” Combining saccharin, a powder three hundred times as sweet as sugar, with lactose, he produced the sugar substitute Sweet’N Low, which went on sale in 1957, in its iconic pink packets. It was aimed at diabetics, but diet mania made it ubiquitous, and by 1975 the family factory, in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, was producing forty million packets a day. Cohen, whose branch of the family was disinherited in a power struggle, acidly narrates the gradual unravelling of the family and its fortune, and detours through the histories of sugar, Brooklyn, dieting, and packaged foods. The nadir came in 1993, when federal agents raided the factory; a reputed mafioso who had been put in charge of lobbying against a saccharin ban had funnelled illegal contributions to politicians and bilked the company of millions.