A bit of news to start out with. My recently published article Cr’itter Cakes(Latitudes and Attitudes Seafaring, May, 2011) is now available on my website. If you’d like to see what you eat on a boat when all the food is gone and even the rats are looking gaunt, click here. Recipes are included but you can substitute, say, chicken in place of rodent.

Which segues fairly nicely into this week’s completely unfocused rambling narrative. Sugar has been in the news that I read lately. It seems the crunchy sweet crystals we have all come to know and love are turning out to be more complex than previously thought. In addition sugar has wedged itself into – of all things – healthy eating, which means, of course, we Americans are paying even more for the dulcet kernels, relatively speaking, than we do for what passes for health care in the United States. It seems that even today, to paraphrase H.L. Mencken, no one ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the American Public.

Historically, sugar is a relative newcomer in the Land of Sweetness. Sugar cane, the largest of the grass family, is native to tropical Asia. Originally, it was cut and chewed raw which not only leaves you with the sweet taste but also with a mouth full of splinters. It is still available this way in many places and I can attest – through personal experience – about the splinters. But people still do this so I’m assuming that after a while you just get used to the sensation of having a hedgehog in your mouth. About thirteen-hundred years ago somebody in India figured out that if you squeezed the juice from the cane, you could get at the sweetness without the splinters and the sugar industry was born. The incipient industry remained local and the secret stayed cached in India until smuggled therefrom by the least likely of industrial spies: Buddhist Monks. In Europe, meanwhile, sugar was a high-priced and highly prized luxury item for centuries. It had to be transported all the way from Asia on the backs of animals or in small ships. Considering that for the fifty or so millennia that humans inhabited Europe nobody had ever tasted anything sweeter than honey, this new exotic treat was a sweetener fit for royalty, about the only people who could afford it, and given the small quantities available in the Middle Ages, sugar remained as hard to find as a decent bath.

This demand spurred both the conquest of the New World, and its vast tropical landscape oh-so-suitable for sugar cane cultivation, as well as the African slave trade needed to harvest the crop once all the Indians had been wiped out. Still supply couldn’t keep up with humanity’s apparently insatiable demand for sugar. Britain, by this time effectively the only power left in Europe, did what they had proven so adept at elsewhere: they went to India and conquered it.

Ever since, the world has been swimming in sugar. Prices dropped faster than a diabetic slipping into a sucrose coma because not only was sugar cane being grown everywhere it could, but new plants, like beets and corn, were providing even more sugar to an ever expanding population. World prices are now so low that, in the U.S. anyway, sugar producers have to be paid to grow the stuff. Otherwise they wouldn’t make any money at it.

Given the centuries of experience with sugar you’d figure we’d pretty much have it all worked out. It turns out that we are still learning curious new things about sugar. I stumbled across some research done at the University of Illinois by the alliteratively named Shelly Schmidt titled: “Illinois scientists learn startling new truth about sugar”. This sounded like something from the front page of “The National Inquirer” right next to the headline about the bat-boy who sleeps hanging upside down in a closet, and my curiosity was piqued. It turns out that for the last millennium and a half confectioners and scientists the world over had thought that sugar, when heated up, melted. But these clever wags at the University of Illinois found out that no two studies had ever agreed on the temperature at which the phase change occurred. In Illinois, being Illinois and all, studying sugar is probably the most exciting thing to do on a Saturday night, so the Fighting Illini decided to take a closer look. They found, unbeknownst to other sucrose savants, that sugar does not melt when heated, it “decomposes”.

That may be technically correct but, come on, isn’t there a better word than “decomposes”? The synonyms that pop into my mind are things like “rots” and “decays”. When I first read the sugar research the image that came to me is the Zip-Lock with the chicken breast that you pull out of the freezer to cook for dinner and then your plans are changed by an invitation to go out to eat and the bag ends up in the bag of the fridge where it lays untouched until February. By then the contents resemble a ball of gray Jello with bones protruding at anatomically incorrect angles. All I’m saying is that they should have picked a different word. “Disassociates” comes to mind. It may not be chemically correct but at least there’s not so much baggage attached.

In any event the researchers reported with glee that this discovery opens up all possibilities for candy makers to further increase sugar consumption with a whole host of new, subtle flavors heretofore impossible to create. While the manufacturers of blood-sugar test equipment and diabetes treatments are probably doing handsprings at the prospect, I would think that, given the current obesity crisis, we would probably be better served by figuring out how to make sugar less palatable. Please forgive my editorializing.

While not being a thermodynamic substance, one which can be melted and recrystallized repeatedly, sugar is nonetheless a hydrophilic compound which will readily dissolve in water only to perfectly recrystallize when you take the water away. This property is the basis of how cane juice is processed into the dry product languishing in your cupboard. The use of water is the concern of the second study I uncovered in the news. The American Chemical Society’s journal Environmental Science & Technology published research by Michael Blackhurst, Chris Hendrickson, and Jordi Sels i Vida in the excitingly titled “Direct and Indirect Water Withdrawals for U.S. Industrial Sectors”. In it the authors looked at how much water was required to process various products, one of which was sugar. It turns out that 270 gallons of water are used to produce one dollar’s worth of sugar.

Now, if we project that water use along with the average American’s consumption of some seventy-five pounds of sugar annually we see that all 312 million of us are chowing through some twenty-three billion pounds of sugar requiring six-point-two trillion gallons of water to process.

Which begs the question: Why?

I mean if you look at the process, sugar starts out as a sweet liquid, it gets heated up to crystallize out the sucrose, the slurry is spun in a big centrifuge yielding sugar and molasses –which, thank God, is mostly turned into rum. The crystals are dried and rendered to a uniform size ready to sell. Where’s the water?

Well, I was never able to find out why they needed that much water. But it turns out that in some places people prefer white sugar. If you take raw sugar and further treat it with calcium carbonate (chalk) or calcium phosphate (fertilizer), some of the “impurities” in natural sugar are removed. These impurities go by the technical term “mud”. As you might imagine, when you take the mud out, it gets whiter. If the sugar is further processed using activated carbon (charcoal briquettes) it ends up being whiter than a holiday beach on the first warm day of summer. At this point it is once again heated, with steam so it happens gently without all that “decomposing” mentioned earlier, and the end product is the sparkly-white sweetener we dump into our coffee by the ton. Maybe all the water is the steam for processing? Dunno. 

I did stumble over another interesting factoid while reviewing the research. The basic raw sugar that everybody else in the world is buying at retail for about two pounds for a dollar is costing you about two dollars for a pound. Or more. In the US, raw sugar costs more than refined sugar, even though they don’t have to process it. This apparent disparity comes about because some savvy marketer figured out that since raw sugar is an appealing shade of brown, people will think it’s better and healthier. Ah ha! The “brown”, as we learned earlier, is actually “mud”; but because the sugar’s not processed we think it must be better. The American Shopper, so easily convinced of the health benefits of a substance which, in the quantities we consume it, is essentially poison, lines up to pay a premium for the exact same stuff that the rest of the world buys just because it’s the cheapest product on the shelf.

I detect a trend.

The next time you’re spooning your Florida Crystals consider that there’s about a dollar-fifty of pure, tasty, unearned profit in each pound. We get to pay more, not because our raw sugar is better or purer or tastier than everybody else’s, but just because we live in the USA. I don’t know who gets the money, but they’re certainly getting a sweet deal.