Oh Sugar, Sugar!

Filed in archive Morsels of Info on February 16, 2006

I just got back from a food trip in a place known for its sugar plantations. Oh did I have a taste of sweetness, literally and figuratively! I didn't really bring home that many of their confectioneries but what I bought would last me more than a month with a lot to spare!

Before I go off on a sugar high, let me dig up a few historical facts about this "spice" - yes, it was referred to as the "new spice". Oh, but that's getting ahead of the story.

Sugarcane (Saccharum officinarum L.) is native to Polynesia and it is where sugar in the plant was discovered, the some say in New Guinea, thousands of years ago. Nowadays, you still see children in the Southeast Asia chewing on peeled, raw cane.

From there it spread throughout Southeast Asia and the Pacific and also took a western route towards India.

It was in India where sugar processing by pressing out the juice and then boiling it into crystals was developed around 500 B.C..

It was thus in India where the mightiest empire at that time, Persia, discovered sugar in 510 B.C. A reference dating to 510 B.C. mentions soldiers of the Persian Emperor Darius saw sugar cane growing on the banks of the River Indus. They called it the "reeds which produce honey without bees".

Sugarcane was later grown in Persia and then taken to Egypt and spread throughout Europe.

Christopher Columbus took sugarcane to the New World and has since then been extensively grown in the Caribbean.

In the second half of the 1747, Magraf, a German scientist discovered sugar can be extracted from sugar beets (Beta vulgaris), the main source of our current supply in Europe and western Canada.

Through the centuries, sugar has been the subject of wars, the invasion of countries, an object of political activity, the cause of the rise and fall of nations. Sugar however, will remain on our tables as it has also been romanticised i.e. it is given as a present to lovers in southern France, has entered the vocabulary of many languages to connote love and so on, the list is endless! I suppose if our brains are hard-wired to sweetness, sugar will be here to say. Let's just hope we don't fight over it anymore. ;-)