Sugar Flashcards
Sugar
Associated with desserts/drinks, holidays, baking goods
A person avg 25-35kg of sugar per year
Associated with love, comfort food for some people
Comes from sugar beets, sugar cane, maples, palm, corn
Used t be more expensive than gold
Fruits also have very high glucose, fructose, and sucrose
Natural sugar in plants and fruits are better than the table sugar
But too much sugar is not good for diabetic people (in any form)
Sugar Uses
Sweet additive
Enhances texture, color, appearance
Perservative => inhibits micro-organism growth
Non-food uses
Fermentation -> alcohol products, wine
- Ingredient in printers’ inks
- Pharmaceuticals
- Bioplastics
Sugar plants and sweets from stems and roots:
- Sugar: commodity
- Kitchen – daily sweetener: crystallized, syrup is different from honey
- People take sugar for granted, never wonder where it comes from
- Masking medicinal and food tastes
- Average consumption per capita: 25 -30 – 35 kg/yr. => cause osteoporosis, kidnney and heart diseases, dental caries, obesity, type 2 diabetes
- Eating sugar is addictive because brain secreate dopamine
Where does sugar come from?
From plants (C3 and C4) - Photosynthesis: H2O + CO2 => C6H12O6 + O2
Table Sugar
Sugar Plants
Sucrose: disaccharide (glucose + fructose)
Water soluble, fermentable
Cellulose
Starchy Plants
Starch: Polysaccharide: Water soluble
Sugar has any link with:
social, technical, political, cultural, and economic aspects
History of Sugar
Sugar cane is a main source of sugar, have been linked with trading with royalty rich people
- Produced in small quantities
- Luxury products
- 16th century: 0.5 kg = 1/3 ounce of. Gold (=600USD)
1tsp = 25-30$ USD
- Current cost => 3$/kg
First sugar mills
Sugar making: 1st record in India- about 3000 BC
- A crown made of sugar cane – described in a scared book of the Hindus (the Atarvaveda) – approximate 800 BC
- Ancient Greeks: “Saccharum in panibus” = loaves
- Alexander the Great ca. 370 BC, introduced SC to the Mediterranean from India – honey without the aid of bees
- Ancient sugar mills in Cyprus and India
Arab development in sugar Cane Production after A.D. 700
Sugar expand its colony when Alexander travels around, brought from India to the Europe contries
Arabs:
Art of extracting sugar from cane => crystallized loaves
- Spread sugar cane in the Mediterranean to Eastern Africa, Spain, and Canary Islands.
- Crusaders -> Ca. 1100 -1300 Europe and England novelty
- C,Colmbus 2nd trip (1493) to new world (santo dgo.)?
What are sugar plants?
Store large amount of fructose and glucose => sucrose
Glucose is not converted to starch
Sugar is collected form the vegetative stages
Taxonomic distribution of sugar plants
Poaceae = Sacchrum officinarum - Sugarcane
Chenopodiaceae - Beta vulgaris - Sugar beet (cousin of amaranth pseudocereal)
Aceraceae - Acer saccharum -Sugar maple
Collect the sap from the trunk of the plants
Sugar Cane
Saccharum L.
Poaceae - Southeastern Asia / New Guinea, ca 10,000 years ago
Cultivated species:
S. officinarum, S. edulis, S. sinese
High polyploids n=60-194
Perennial harvested annual
Rhizomatous
Seedless => Asexual propagated - each node and internodes have the small axiliary buds that can grow into plants
Leaves serraste margin leaves
Stalk content: sugar: 14-25%, fibers 16%, water 67-58% and other 3%
Sugar cane propagation
Nodes and adventitious roots
Water demanding
Not environmentally friendly
Requires high herbicide pesticide and fertilizer
Asexual propagation, axillary buds at each nodes and adventitious roots
Monoculture, semi-perennial (9-20 months => ratoon crops)
Plants not allowed to bloom -> burn the crop to kill the stalks and leaves and remove excess water in the stem -> increase sugar content, harvest & transport to the mill right away.Leaves and Bagasse of the sugar cane after extracting sugar can be for diesel or feeding animals/life stock
manual harvest
burning process, kill the fuana in crop, pollute air of that region
The most environmentally friendly crop
co2 absorption: 1 ha ~ 60 tons of CO2 per year
BUT input to raise this crop like water, fertilizer, herbicides, and burning process
Leaves / Molasses: Animal feed
Bagasse = Paper / cardboard industry, fuel for mill boiler’s
Mud from cane juice and ashes from boilers -> fertilizers
Australia: greens => burning to generate power
From sap to crystialized form:
Extraction, Reduction, and crystallization
Cane collected, washed, shreeded, milling with water to extract juice, remove bagasse, collect juice, juice thru heaters, lime added.
Juice mix is then evaporated to remove water, the vacuum pans, centrifiugal: collect molasses for making rum or white raw sugar
Raw sugar then goes through the process of clarification, bleaching substance to make crystal and pure colour.
Brown sugar has more molasse
Sugar in Canada
We buy raw sugar
Vancouver, Calgary and Toronto and Montreal have processing plants that refine raw sugar to the white crystals
Produce 1.2 m tons a year
1 ton of cane produce 90-120 kg raw sugar
Brazil, India, China, Thailand, Mexico
Sugar Plants
Sugar cane plantation and human slavery - associated for 400 years
Monument abolition of slavery - 16 millions people were enslaved
Sugar and Slave trade
Arab developments in sugar production after A.D. 700 XII and XIII century
Expansion of sugar plantations Mediterranean
Master-slave relationships = human treatment
from domestic servitude to plantation slavery
Sugar cane brought to Southeastern Asia. At first, they use the local labour but not enough, so they brought the prisoners + African slaves to work in the sugar plant.
The Slave Trade Triangle
The slave trade triangle = Maafa Holocaust => European navigation (enslave African for 400 years).
Transatlantic trade (1450 – 1800s)
London (1600s), Bristol (1730) centers operation for slave trade
The outward passage, The middle passage, and the return passage
1st and 2nd Atlantic systems:
(Spanish, Portuguese, UK)
The outward passage:
The African slaves treated as a commodity to trade for goods like cloth, cotton cloths, barrels, pistols, …
The middle passage:
Slave started to fight back for their freedom
10 – 15 million carried across; 3-5 million buried in the Atlantic, 9/10 abducted due to the bad conditions on the ships (die or kill themselves)
7 week = 3 months journey
After getting on the land, the slaves were fed. The better shape/ stronger slave, more expensive to sell
The slaves will work in the sugar plantations and mines for 18 hours.
Due to the high skills, the slaves started their own community with houses and chickens… seems like having better life, a bit more independent but still being control by bad guys
New World good and the conquistadores: The return passage
The more land people discovered, the more resource, the more people got enslaved.
The equation: how much did it cost to produce sugar:
1600s (21 months – 450 pounds of sugar) = the life of two slaves
1750s parity 1-ton sugar = life of 1 slave
End of 18th century: 2 tons = 1 slave’s life
Few slaves = humane treatment
Many slaves = cheap lives, inhumane treatment, fear, …
Is human slavery over?
Child slavery, slave work, female slavery, human trafficking
