Gail and I are currently taking a course in nutrition that includes dieting and, in particular, knowing how the body reacts to food. At this point sugar is taboo. At least I can read about it!
The Story of Sugar
By
A. Hyatt Verrill
From Everyland magazine, Oct. 1918, researched
by Alan Schenker, digitized by Doug Frizzle, Mar. 2012.
DID
you know that it was only a couple of hundred years ago that sugar was
discovered, and that at first it was used only as a medicine? And yet we
already depend on it to such an extent that no boy or girl would be happy
without it. The children of Europe like it as much as we do; so let us eat
honey and maple sugar, dates and raisins, and other
sweet things to help our Food Administration save the
sugar to send across the ocean.
DID you ever realize how
interesting sugar is? When you sprinkle the
white crystals on your cereal or drop the
white cubes in your cup, do you ever stop to wonder where the sugar came from
and who sends it to us? Perhaps it came from
the South Americans or the West Indians; it may have come from
our Hawaiian neighbors, far out in the
Pacific; perhaps the people from distant India sent it to us, or even the Japanese or the
Filipinos; and then again, it may
have come from
our own folks in Louisiana or even from
Kansas or California. For, while the
best sugar is made from sugar-cane
which grows only in tropical or warm lands, yet great quantities are made from a kind of beet which is raised in many parts of the United States
and Europe.
Most of our sugar comes from
the West Indies and especially from Cuba,
for Cuba
is the greatest sugar-producing
country in the world. So let us take
a little trip down to these tropical
islands and follow the story of
sugar from the
time the canes are planted until the crystals are ready to sweeten our foods and
beverages. On the big estates the men plow and prepare the
ground by machinery, but a great deal of the
sugar is raised by native farmers who are very poor and have little land and
who still plow their ground with
crooked sticks drawn by big, lumbering oxen. Perhaps you think that the sugar is planted by sowing seeds just as we
raise corn; but this is not the
case, and instead of planting by sowing seeds, the
sugar-cane farmer plants what are known as "suckers." These are the little shoots which spring up about the bases of the
canes; they look like little
sections of corn stalks or bamboo. If you saw a sugar-cane field just after it
was planted, you would never guess that it was anything but a field full of
little dry sticks; but very soon tender green leaves spring up from the
suckers, and in a short time the
field is a beautiful mass of green ribbon-like leaves and great bunches of
stout, curved stems of green, red, and yellow and often very prettily striped
with several colors. But to see a sugar-cane field at its best, you should see
it when the canes are in blossom—or "in arrow," as the farmers call it—and when above the green leaves the
great pink and purplish plumes wave gently in the
breeze like millions of soft feathers.
All the
time, while the cane is growing, the workers are kept busy cultivating the soil, keeping away the
weeds and brush and caring for the canes,
and as the canes grow large and the leaves become
drier, great care must be used to see that the
fields do not catch fire. Then at last the
canes are "ripe" or are ready to harvest, and hundreds of workers go forth
to cut the cane. In some places they
are brigandish-looking Spanish men with swarthy skins, keen black eyes, and fierce
mustaches and dressed in white cotton and broad straw hats; in other islands they
are laughing, chattering negroes in rags and tatters with turbanned heads and
bare feet; while in still other places
they are picturesque Hindu coolies, the men clad in strips of cotton and with huge
turbans, the women
in brilliant skirts and short jackets and with ankles, arms, and noses loaded
with silver jewelry.
But in one way all these various people are alike, for they all carry heavy, curved, sword-like knives, or machetes.
Reaching the fields, the little army of cutters commences
to work, some trimming away the masses of leaves, while others
cut down the juice-filled stalks,
and each and every one constantly munching bits of the
sweet cane.
After the
cutters come the
workers with mule cars or the
huge-wheeled ox carts. Into these they pile the
masses of canes, until presently the
field looks as if it had been swept by a hurricane, and in place of the green sea of leaves is a vast expanse of brown
earth littered with the dead and
dried leaves and dotted with the
sharp stubs of the canes. From each of these
stumps new shoots will spring up to form new canes, and if left to themselves, they
would soon grow so thickly and so closely together
that the canes would be small and
have little juice. So the shoots or
suckers are thinned out, and those cut away are planted in new fields.
But to return to the canes which have been cut and are being carted
off toward the mill. On some estates the
men cart the canes directly to the mill, but on the
large estates where there are miles
and miles of fields, the canes are
carted to the estate railways which
run here, there, and everywhere.
Here the canes are picked up by big
claw-like hooks and are lifted and swung onto the
cars by derricks, or else the men
back the carts up beside the tracks and toss the
canes into the flat cars. Then, when
the train is loaded, the little engine snorts and puffs, the cars rumble off, and at last reach the big mill with its huge chimneys, where men are waiting
to make the juice of the canes into sugar.
In the
old days these mills were run by
huge windmills. In Barbados many of these
are still used, but in most places the
mills are driven by steam and the
fires for heating the boilers are
made of the waste from the
canes, so that very little is lost. Reaching the
mill, the cars are run into a shed
where huge iron teeth move slowly forward, and grasping the
canes, pull them from the
cars and carry them inside the big building. Here they
are dumped on a moving belt and a moment
later they are seized and crushed
between immense iron rollers. As the
great rollers crush the canes, the juice runs out in a steady stream into vats
below and the canes are carried to other rollers to squeeze out the
last of the juice, until finally
only a dry, sawdust-like substance known as bagasse is left. This is
conveyed from the
rollers directly under the boilers,
where it is burned to make the steam
for operating the mill.
The juice which runs from the
canes is strained and drawn or ladled into big vats or boilers, where it is
boiled and boiled until it turns into a thick dark sirup, or
"molasses." Then this is drawn to other
vats and heated until it becomes a
brownish sticky mass of crystals. This is the
raw sugar. A small part of the juice
is still left, a black tarry mass known as "black strap" from which alcohol or rum is distilled or which is
mixed with other materials for
cattle food.
The raw sugar is a very
dirty, unappetizing mess, and as the
barefooted negroes walk about in it or shovel it about like dirt, you might think
that our sugar was a very dirty thing. But there
is much to be done to this raw sugar before all the
dirt and impurities are removed and it reaches our tables. Very few of the mills prepare sugar as we see it, or in other words, refine it, but nearly all partially
refine it. By boiling it, treating it with chemicals, and running it through a
machine known as a "centrifugal," the
dark-brown, wet, sticky mass is transformed to buff-colored or golden yellow
crystals which are known by such names as "Muscavado," and
"Demerara crystals," according to their
purity and where they are made. In the countries where sugar is made, most of the people use these
partially refined sugars on their
tables.
When the
sugar in the mills has gone through
all these processes, men pack it in
big burlap bags and send it by carts or by railway to the
docks. During the sugar season you
can see the great warehouses and
docks piled with thousands and thousands of these
sacks.
From
the docks men load the sugar first on barges and from these
into the big steamships, as you see
in the picture—thousands of tons to
a ship. Far across the seas the steamers carry the
sugar from the
tropical land where it grew to the
big factories in the cities of the north.
Here the
raw sugar is unloaded, and by machinery and processes which you could not
understand, it is made white and pure and comes
forth in the snowy cubes and
glimmering crystals which we use. One part of the
process will interest you, for it seems perhaps the
strangest thing of all. In order to make the
sugar pure white it is mixed with the
blackest of black soots. After all the
impurities are removed the melted
sugar is still yellow, but by running it through long cylinders filled with
charred bones or "bone black," all the
yellow color disappears and the pure
white sirup is crystallized into the
snowiest of snowy sugar. Now don't you think that this is really the most wonderful part of the
story of sugar?
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