shug
We had our Sugar Exam today. Sugar Exam. Parang movie. Only, it's too dull to be a movie title. If there was a movie made about sugar, it should be called "When Glucose Meets Fructose...". Or "The Disaccharides". Now that sounds like it can be the name of a band.
Too much sugar information. Did y'all know that shugah ain't just shugah anymore? There's granulated sugar, and brown sugar, and there's powdered/confectioner's/icing, but there's also sanding sugar, crystal sugar, Demerara, Muscovado, et cetera? And there are the artificial sweeteners. Like aspartame. Assucro. Cyclamates. Saccharin, which is 550x sweeter than good ol' sugar. And there are the artificial sugars, the polyols, like Xylit, Sorbitol, Glycerol, Isomalt...hello, are we putting this in our food or in the medicine cabinet?
A guy named Werner Sombart said that whole races died for sugar. As in, slave trade. Not unlike the cotton trade that them Southerners did--except they was makin' sugar. Sugar, in the 14th to 15th century, was a status symbol. If you had sugar in your house, you were pretty damn rich. Sugar was practically synonymous to gold...everyone wanted somethin' else to sweeten their foods besides honey. What I want to know is what was wrong with honey? Not enough beehives to go around?
Then this guy--I forget his name, he wasn't on the exam--discovered that sugar cane wasn't the only source for sucrose. He found out that sugar beets had the same chemical structure as that of sugar cane and so he tinkered here and there and hey. Another source of sugar. See, sugar cane only grew in hot, tropical climates...so before it grew in places like the Caribbean and India. And the richies like the British and eventually the Americas, well they had a ton of colonies, right? So...slave, slave, slave. But because of the sugar beet discovery, now there was more sugar to go around and they didn't have to have such expensive prices for this sweet thing and thus, less need for making slaves out of other nations. Just put your own people to work. Which really, is pretty darn sensible.
I'll stop now. Hope y'all learned somethin'.