I was casually listening to the radio the other day. Geraldene Holt, an internationally famous food writer and author of the unambiguously titled “Cakes” was making a carrot cake. An ambitious idea for the radio you may think. Anyway I had only a passing interest as she and the presenter discussed whether the inclusion of carrots made this a healthy option. (The answer, in case you needed to be told, is no!) But then, as she ticked off the ingredients one by one, she said something which did cause me to stop and pay more attention. ““Lovely natural Muscovado Sugar,” she purred, “now this is healthy of course.” The presenter clearly shared my skepticism about this claim and, barely managing to control her splutters of incredulity, she challenged the writer on it, causing Geraldene to change her assessment, “Well, I think it’s healthier for the environment; it’s not sugar beet.” That is of course an altogether different point, but it got me thinking, and I quickly realized how little I really knew about this everyday product which is eaten by almost everybody. Where does sugar really come from? Is there a difference between beet sugar and cane sugar? What are the social and environmental impacts of growing and producing sugar? Since then I have been on something of a journey of discovery which is going to provide the theme for the blog over the next few days.
History
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| Sugar Cane |
Sugar Cane (Saccharum)
seems to have originated somewhere in the islands of what is now Indonesia and
New Guinea. For possibly thousands of
years the cane was grown and chewed raw to unlock the sweetness before anyone
thought of processing the plant to extract crystalline sugar. The first written mention of sugar, is in the
1st century AD in Rome where it is described as a medicine for the
stomach, bladder and kidneys produced
from ‘reeds’ in India, obviously sugar cane.
Its production is first documented in India during the Gupta Empire
around 350 AD. The very name sugar is derived
from a Sanskrit word sharkara meaning
sand or gravel, which reminds us that the refining process was less efficient
in those days.
From India it travelled to China around 630 AD when the Tang
dynasty emperor T'ai-Tsung sent special envoys to the Gupta court to learn the
art of sugar making. Shortly afterwards
it spread to the Arab world and was carried west by the Muslim expansion of the
seventh and eight centuries under the Rashidun and Umayyad Caliphates, reaching
the whole of North Africa and Moorish Iberia. It was a very popular trade item because, in a
world where goods were transported by camel caravan, sugar’s price relative to
weight or volume was extremely high.
For over 1,000 years
the cost ensured that sugar remained a luxury item, a ‘fine spice’ available
only to the super rich. Mainly this was because of the labour intensive nature
of cultivating and processing sugar cane and that is also why sugar production
has always been inextricably tied up with slavery. The Venetians began growing sugar
cane in Cyprus in the 10th century, using slave labour imported from
the Black Sea region, but output remained low until around 1450 when the
Catholic kingdoms of Portugal and Castile began production using African slaves,
particularly in the island territories of Madeira and the Canaries. By 1490
Madeira had become the largest producer in the western world.
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| Workers on a sugar cane plantation in Louisiana |
Sugar then was well placed to make the next hop across the
Atlantic to Spain and Portugal’s new territories in the Caribbean and
Brazil. Some accounts say sugar cane
plants were even carried by Christopher Columbus on the Santa Maria.
The Spanish began growing sugar as early as 1501 in
Hispaniola and shortly thereafter in Jamaica and Cuba. Over the next hundred years sugar plantations
were established from Brazil to Florida and almost every island of the
Caribbean. In addition to the Spanish
and Portuguese territories, Dutch, French and English colonies were established
to produce and process sugar cane. The
native peoples of the Americas however succumbed readily to European diseases such
as small pox and influenza, leading once again to labour shortages. Sugar producers turned at first to indentured
workers from Europe, but they proved equally susceptible to tropical diseases
such as malaria and yellow fever. The
solution was to import slaves from Africa, resistant to both old world and
tropical diseases, and so the infamous triangular trade was established.
This increase in output finally brought sugar within reach
of the ordinary citizenry and they loved it. It must have brought
about something of a revolution in European cookery. By the
end of the eighteenth century sugar accounted for 20% of all European
imports. In money terms from 1750 until
1820 sugar remained Britain’s biggest single import. The average per capita consumption in Britain
in 1800 was 20lbs per annum. The
historian Niall Ferguson says “The rise of the British Empire…had less to do
with the Protestant work ethic…than with the British sweet tooth.” The British Empire, he claims, was launched
on a “sugar rush”.
Sugar beet
Unlike the maritime powers of Western Europe, Prussia didn’t
have an overseas empire. Instead they
had Franz Karl Achard. Achard studied physics and chemistry in Berlin and went on to become a member of
the Royal Academy of Sciences and a favourite of King Frederick II, who took a
keen interest in his research. Having
carried out ground breaking work on the acclimatisation of tobacco to
the German climate, in 1789 Achard turned his attention to producing sugar from
beets which could be cultivated in a European climate. Silesian White Beets (Beta vulgaris) used for cattle feed, had been known for some time
to contain sucrose, but Achard developed a commercial process to refine and
extract it. |
| Sugar Beet |
Sugar beet received a huge fillip due to various embargoes, blockades and other interruptions to the Atlantic trade resulting from the Napoleonic wars, in Germany and also in France.
Today 30% to 35% of all sugar is made from Sugar Beet and
beets are grown in Europe, Canada, USA, Russia and the Ukraine.
Meanwhile cane sugar is grown throughout the
world in tropical and sub-tropical regions.
The biggest producers are Brazil, India, China, Thailand, Pakistan and
Mexico, but sugar is important locally to the economies of many other countries
from the Caribbean to the Philippines.
Sugar is now one of the most basic foodstuffs in the
world. It is a key ingredient in baking,
brewing, soft drinks and almost every other processed food from ketchup to breakfast
cereals to ice cream. Increasingly it is
fermented to produce ethanol for biofuel and is even used in a wide range of
industries from leather tanning, inks and dyes, textiles, pharmaceuticals and
precast concrete.
It's been an extraordinary march towards world domination for this humble condiment.
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