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Sugar in Mexico: Mascabado

Alcademics reader Warren mailed me a picture of a sugar packet he picked up near Cancun. 

It's labelled "Mascabado," which is the same thing as muscovado.

According to Sugar.org, "Muscovado sugar, a British specialty brown sugar, is very dark brown and has a particularly strong molasses flavor. The crystals are slightly coarser and stickier in texture than "regular" brown sugar."

 

The Sugar Spirit Project is sponsored by Bacardi Rum. Content created and owned by Camper English for Alcademics. For the project index follow this link. 

Cane and Beet Sugar, Revisited

I keep finding information about sugar in unexpected places. Previously as part of the Sugar Spirit project I read this from Sugar.org, the sugar industry's website:

Sugar is simply separated from the beet or cane plant, and the result is 99.95% pure sucrose (sugar). The sucrose from sugar beets and sugar cane is not only identical to one another, but each is the same as the sucrose present in fruits and vegetables.

But I've come across some contradictory statements in a different book. I've been reading Bi-Rite Market's Eat Good Food: A Grocer's Guide to Shopping, Cooking & Creating Community Through Food and learning a lot about buying food. The book is very anti-GMO. In the section on sugar, it says.

Beet sugar falls short in multiple ways: it does not melt as smoothly or caramelize as readily, and in baked goods it produces inferior texture and flavor. For the best flavor, texture, and overall quality, buy sugar that specifically states "pure cane sugar" on the package. 

I suppose the difference between commercial pure cane sugar and beet sugar must be due to processing if once we get it down to sucrose it is identical. Anyone have experience with using "pure cane sugar" vs regular granulated sugar? Maybe I should visit the store.   

Furthermore the Bi Rite book asserts sugar beets are almost always GMO, and any conventional sugar is typically heavily sprayed with pesticides and other chemicals. (Yet that must mean American sugar beets, as there are restrictions on GMO products in Europe.) Thus they recommend buying organic sugar (except when using it to make candy as granulated is better for this). 

Sugar: it turns out there is a lot to know. 

The Sugar Spirit Project is sponsored by Bacardi Rum. Content created and owned by Camper English for Alcademics. For the project index, click on the logo above or follow this link.

Sugar in Italy

As part of the Sugar Spirit project, I am starting to be more aware of types of sugar in other countries. When traveling to Italy recently, I picked up a couple of packets of sugar. 

The "classico" sugar, according to my trip host, would be Italian-produced crystallized beet sugar.

The (slightly racist?) "tropical" sugar is labelled as "zucchero bruno di canna" or "brown sugar of cane," so it's like Sugar in the Raw but the grains are smaller. 

Not a huge revelation but one data point that will hopefully be part of a large collection of others going forward. 

 

The Sugar Spirit Project is sponsored by Bacardi Rum. Content created and owned by Camper English for Alcademics. For the project index, click on the logo above or follow this link. 

Sugar Production in Modern Times

In the Sugar Spirit Project we've looked at the history of sugarcane and sugar production (project index here).

In this post we'll look at sugar production today. Some of this information may be out of date due to the date of my reference books/websites, so please take it all with a grain of salt.

Nowadays, sugar is not longer a major export in the Caribbean except for Guyana, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba.

In India, the sugar industry is not large plantation-based but from small peasant holdings. The cane is processed by private companies or cooperatives. This is because citizens were already occupying the land and couldn’t be forced off when sugar cane was planted. 

In China sugar is not an item of mass consumption. It is also not a plantation culture. 

In Cuba, after Fidel Castro’s revolution, they increased minimum wage for cane cutters, and expropriated sugar plantations and mills. Keep in mind US interests controlled much of the sugar cane production in Cuba. So the US retaliated by importing sugar from elsewhere. 82% of Cuban sugar was exported to the US so it was a major economic problem. Eventually they sold it to Eastern European countries.

But communist employment didn’t inspire the hard labor required to cut sugar, so the harvests did poorly. Eventually the harvest was militarized. Then when the Soviet Union crumbled so too did 85% of their sugar exports. Half of its 156 sugar mills closed and 60% of its fields were converted to vegetable farms or cattle fields.

Brazil is today’s largest sugarcane producer. In the 1970s due to oil shortages, sugar cane was processed into fuel as well as sugar.

The world's biggest sugarcane producers in order are Brazil, India, China, Thailand, Pakistan, Mexico, Colombia, Australia, Argentina, and the Philippines. Half of the supply comes from Brazil and India. 

The sugar industry in Brazil employs over 1 million Brazilians and is more than 10% of the country’s agriculture. Gas there is required to contain at least 25% ethanol. About half of sugarcane grown is converted into ethanol; most of the rest is exported. 

It takes 3 days to transform sugarcane into ethanol.

In the US, corn yields a ratio of 1.3 units of energy produced vs. expended to produce it. Beet sugar yields 8.3. Yet corn is cheaper to grow so it is grown instead. 

Per hectare (2.47 acres) sugar cane yields about 20 tons of dry material, half of which is in sugar of some form; the other half is bagasse – trash for fuel, etc. 

Four U.S. states produce sugar cane:Florida, Hawaii, Louisiana and Texas. Sugar beet farms can be found in California, Colorado, Idaho,Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota,Oregon, and Wyoming.

According to Sugar.org, we now use more of other sweeteners (I'm guessing high fructose corn syrup) than sugar from cane and beets. "Sugar remains the predominate sweetener in every country except the United States, where in recent decades man-made sweetening agents have been created and mass produced."

 

The Sugar Spirit Project is sponsored by Bacardi Rum. Content created and owned by Camper English for Alcademics. For the project index, click on the logo above or follow this link. 

Sugarcane and the Environment

For the most part rum is made from molasses, the byproduct of sugar production. So when we study the issue of the environmental impact of sugarcane production we need to keep in mind that molasses is the waste product of sugar production. Rum is recycling!

That said, we're studying not just sugar but sugarcane production so let's look at its impact. Most of this information comes from Sugar: A Bittersweet History by Elizabeth Abbott (2008). See the references page for more information.

In Cuba where they couldn’t purchase pesticides and fertilizers due to economic issues, they made their own version of organic sugar farming. 

Sugar beets are a rotational crop so they don’t need much fertilizer or pesticide. It doesn’t cause much erosion or contamination. 

The sugar industry ruined the Everglades. It was protected by President Harry Truman, but sugar planters drained it and plantations' phosphorous runoff hurt much of the topsoil. 

Abbott writes about sugar's impact: “The World Wildlife Fun reports, cane has likely ‘caused a greater loss of biodiversity on the planet than any other single crop, due to its destruction of habitat to make way for plantations, its intensive use of water for irrigation, its heavy use of agricultural chemicals, and the polluted waste-water than is routinely discharged in the sugar production process.’”

 On the other hand, “Although Brazilian cane production is notoriously destructive to the environment, cane-derived fuel is precisely the opposite. It is much cleaner than fossil fuels and contains no contaminants such as sulfur dioxide. It emits much less carbon dioxide and protects the climate by vastly reducing carbon emissions, hence reducing pollution. It is sustainable. It yield 8.3 ties as much energy as as that expended to make it and, as new cane varieties are developed, will yield even more. Even its by-products are valuable, and Brazilian mills process them into electricity for their own use and to sell to the national grid.... Cane-based ethanol is the Twenty-First Century’s miracle-in-waiting.”

 

The Sugar Spirit Project is sponsored by Bacardi Rum. Content created and owned by Camper English for Alcademics. For the project index, click on the logo above or follow this link. 

The Sugar Spirit Project: Enter the Sugar Beet

In studying sugar and sugarcane (go here for the project index) we need to study the sugar beet; sugarcane's competitor. 

Here we'll look at the sugar beet's early history. 

Sugar beets were not economically important as a source of sucrose until the mid-1800s. 

In 1774 a German scientist discovered the sugar from beets was the same as from cane. 

Napoleon, due to the economic and real war with England, bet big on sugar beets. In 1811 he supported vast increase in sugar beet production. Within 2 years they built 334 factories and produced 35,000 tons of sugar.

To process sugar beets, they are sliced, dried, drenched with alcohol (I know the feeling some nights),  heated to boiling, and filtered. Then crystals formed after several weeks. But this technology was later refined.  

By the end of 1800s sugar beets were planted in North America. Sugar beets best regions to grow in the US are part of California extending east to Michigan, and in Canada from British Columbia to Ontario. 

The Mormons tried to grow sugar beets as part of their independence movement, but they failed to produce any crystallized sugar with it.  There were many other successes and failures trying to grow sugar beet in US.

By 1902 41 factories produced over 2 million tons of sugar from beets. by 1915, there 79 factories in operation, partly due to high war prices. 

The first American farm workers’ union strike was over sugar beets in 1903 at the American Beet Company in Oxnard, California. It employed 1000 Mexicans and Japanese, who went on strike basically against the white workers who formed organizations to keep the wages of the others low. 

During the Great Depression, sugar beet harvesting provided lots of jobs. 

After Pearl Harbor, thousands of Japanese and Japanese Americans were sent to internment camps: actually sugar beet farms in Oregon, Utah, Idaho, Montana, Alberta, and Manitoba, to work the fields. 

 

Later we'll look at sugar beet production in recent times. 

 

The Sugar Spirit Project is sponsored by Bacardi Rum. Content created and owned by Camper English for Alcademics. For the project index, click on the logo above or follow this link. 

Sugar in Early American History

In studying sugarcane and sugar, we've looked at its biology, origins, spread to the West, association with forced labor, how it was processed in the olden days, and how the English developed a taste for it. (Go here for the project index.)

Now we'll look at sugar in America. Again I have used these resources for my facts and understanding of history, as I'm certainly no expert and I welcome your comments.

Jamestown, Virginia was founded in 1607. Sugarcane was brought there by 1619, but the colonists couldn't make it grow. 

As it was a new country, the United States started their sugar production late in the game versus the forces of England, France, and Portugal. However they had their own sugar islands in Puerto Rico, Cuba, Hawaii, and The Philippines. 

Around the time of the US Civil War, we got half our sugar from Cuba and half from Louisianna. After the American Civil War (that ended slavery), Cuban slave owners wanted to end slavery but wanted to be compensated from Spain for each slave freed. Spain refused, and this lead to the Ten Years War. This didn’t end up freeing Cuba (that was 1898) from Spain but it did end slavery in Cuba in 1886. 

After this, the US imported 82 percent of all Cuban sugar, so sugar interests in Cuba became controlled by American interests. Eventually 2/3 of Cuban sugar was controlled by American interests. 

In the US, it was sugar producers fleeing the Haitian revolution who made Louisiana’s sugar plantations profitable.  

In Hawaii as land leases were granted to grow sugarcane,  native Hawaiians were displaced.  Irrigation for sugarcane cultivation diverted streams from their land, so many younger Hawaiians immigrated to California. 

The US marines, acting for the sugar interests, deposed Queen Lili’uokalani. Hawaii was annexed to the US mostly so that the sugar planters could have free access to the US market. 

At the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, Miss Louisiana was carved from a five-foot sugar lump. Jell-O created new fans. Fairy Floss, aka cotton candy, was also introduced.

In the 1800s in the US, grocery stores had portable mills to grind lumps of muscovado sugar into granules.

In 1858 the Mason Jar was invented and canning took off. Canning required white sugar, increasing the demand for it.

The ice cream craze also increased demand for sugar through mid-1800s.

Milton Hershey, the chocolate guy, built a factory town named for himself. Then in 1916 he duplicated it in Cuba and bought more than 100,000 acres of sugarcane and built the world’s largest refinery. 

Now sugar is challenged by high-fructose corn syrup, which is cheaper to produce and transport. In the US (as of the writing of my source book) it takes only 1.4 minutes of work to buy a pound of sugar. 

 

The Sugar Spirit Project is sponsored by Bacardi Rum. Content created and owned by Camper English for Alcademics. For the project index, click on the logo above or follow this link. 

The English Sweet Tooth and Ties to Coffee, Chocolate, and Tea

In studying sugarcane and sugar, we've looked at its biology, origins, spread to the West, its previous association with forced labor, and how it was processed in the olden days. (Go here for the project index.)

Now we'll look at how people in England developed a taste for sugar. Much of this information comes from the book Sweetness and Power (resources list here) by Sidney Mintz.

Naturally the British taste for sugar not only drove the taste of the citizens of its colonies for sugar, but also determined how its sugar-growing colonies were used. 

In 1000 AD, few Europeans knew about cane sugar. By 1650 only wealthy British enjoyed it . By 1800 it was costly necessity. And by 1900 it was supplying nearly one-fifth the calories in the English diet. 

Mintz writes that after 1850 price of sugar dropped sharply making it available to everyone. “A rarity in 1650, a luxury in 1750, sugar had been transformed into a virtual necessity by 1850.” In the 1800s there was a fivefold increase in sugar consumption by the British people.

There have been no reports historically on any group with a nonsugar tradition rejecting the introduction of sugar, sweetened condensed milk, sweetened beverages, etc.  

Nearly all mammals like sweetness. Breast milk is sweet and this could have something to do with it.

Sugar in England is closely tied in with three other food introductions: tea, coffee, and chocolate.

• All of them are bitter and are transformed by sugar.
• However none of them were consumed with sugar in their primary cultural settings. 
• The Chinese didn't put sugar in their tea, but Indians did. This probably explains why the sugar-with-tea tradition was introduced to British sailors.
• The first coffeehouse opened in London in 1652. Chocolate was served in coffeehouses also. Typically at this time chocolate was served as a beverage, not a solid.
• Alcohol purifies water and beer tended to be safer than water to drink. But boiling water for tea also purified the water. Temperance drinkers naturally preferred tea and perhaps helped it and sugar become more popular. 
• Mint writes: "Sugar as a sweetener came to the fore in connection with three other exotic imports- tea, coffee, and chocolate – of which one, tea, became and has since remained the most important nonalcoholic beverage in the United Kingdom. All are tropical products, all were new to England in the third quarter of the seventeenth century, all contain stimulants and can be properly classified as drugs (together with tobacco and rum, though clearly different both in effects and addictiveness). All began as competitors for British preference, so that the presence of each probably affected to some extent the fate of the others."

Though the English took to sugar and spread that love for it around the world, at the same time the French (a competing superpower) consumption never neared English levels. One theory is that the French already drank tons of wine and never bothered to switch to tea, which could have called for sugar with which to sweeten it.

 

The Sugar Spirit Project is sponsored by Bacardi Rum. Content created and owned by Camper English for Alcademics. For the project index, click on the logo above or follow this link.