Special note: This is not your normal post for the blog but to limits in the number of characters I can use to talk about this weeks YouTube Episode. I will post the full description info here. The description was almost 10k and the limit is 5k characters and well you can't really discuss Sugar Cane in short form. So here's the full thing, link to the channel is below this text.
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Season Seven, Episode 00302
Botanical Latin Name: Saccharum officinarum
Today I have a special video for you that has been long in the making. Instead of doing this in a exposé format with a chunky script in an overly serious tone, I’ve opted to handle it like a normal video because honestly, I hated all five scripts written to cover the topic. Today we are talking about Sugar Cane, a member of the true grass family Poaceae. This plant isn’t a perennial in my climate (Zone 8b) but some close relatives are. This means it has to come in for the winter and since it’s a grass with razor-edge sawblade-like leaf edges I have to keep it away from the cats and be very careful handling it. I found that it grows just fine in regular potting soil but is very thirsty needing water almost every day and it responds to liquid fertilizer rapidly. Although in the ground Sugar cane can get as tall as sixteen feet, the specimen shown in the video which is Pink Sugar Cane is about six or seven feet from soil surface up. It’s not a hard plant to grow however I’ve been growing it as a novelty in a garden. In the process of researching this plant and it’s very checkered past I found out that the plantation system of growing it is very different than what I was doing. For instance the average Cane stand lives about five years, the plants are typically harvested for their stems before the plant’s bloom. In the video I do say that and an acre of well grown Sugar Cane can yield about thirty nine tons of sugar, this is partially incorrect, that’s tons of stalks. A single box car filled with Sugar Cane can hold up to forty tons, which processes down to two-thousand pounds or a single ton of refined sugar. According to some sources this means there are about thirty teaspoons of refined sugar in every Sugar Cane Stalk.
How do you get the sugar out? Well the stalks have their leaves and other unneeded greenery removed and they are then crushed, soaked and squeezed to wring out every drop of juice which is then boiled until syrup is created. The Sugar syrup is then spun in a centrifuge to get rid of the fluids and impurities out and create raw sugar. The raw Sugar is then melted and filtered again to take out any remaining impurities and extra color and the remaining sugar is then crystalized and spun in another centrifuge to remove liquids. In the process of the second spinning a side product is made, Molasses and after this the sugar is dried and packaged for distribution. Notice where I talked about filtration and removal of color? That process can be rigorous for white ‘bleached’ sugar, or less so for the naturally colored sugars like you find things like Turbinado, Demerara and Muscovado. The light, medium and dark brown sugars are normally just regular Sugar with varying amounts of Molasses added back into get the color and sticky texture. I need to mention that there is also Panela, a traditional solid block or cone of unrefined Sugarcane juice that you can find in the Spanish section of some grocery stores or in Spanish Markets that is another form you can get Sugar in. Now briefly I’d like to talk about the ugly side of how the table sugar is made because it’s as much a part of this discussion as is health effects of consuming the stuff (links about that below).
Sugar Cane isn’t native to the Americas at all despite it being grown here and Brazil being the lead world producer followed by India. In the United States alone, the top producing states are Florida, Louisiana and Texas. How did Sugar Cane get here though? Well you can blame one of history’s worst navigators Christopher Columbus who brought it to the New World in 1493 on his second voyage. He brought it in from the Canary Islands and planted it in what was then called Hispaniola which is now the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Before that though, before any European had ever heard of the stuff, the original Sugar Cane was Domesticated by the Papuans from the native Robust Cane (S. Robustum) around 6000 BP*. This strain of Sugar Cane was spread to Maritime Southeast Asia after contact was made with the Austronesians and it hybridized with Wild Sugarcane (S. spontaneum). From there it spread into mainland Asia and the second centers of domestication were Southern China and Taiwan. The earliest known production of crystal sugar like we know it was in Northern India from around the Eighth century, it was in Mesopotamia by the Tenth Century and transported to the Canary Islands by the Spanish in 1420, where they used forced labor (slavery) to force the native Guanche People to farm the plant for export to Europe. Sugar Cane arrived in the Americas by two vectors, I already mentioned Columbus, but the Portuguese brought it in from their fields in the Madeira Islands in the early 1500’s. The original Brazilian plantations growing Sugarcane were started in the 1530’s by the Portuguese who used guess what? They used Slave Labor of course, because you can’t talk about colonialism without the slave labor and genocide. Some folks will brush that off and claim the Conquistadors were ‘civilizing’, or elevating people out of a less fortunate standard of life, some will say that the conditions were not that bad or even try to peddle manifest destiny or some other bigoted nonsense. So now in brief because of that I have to mention the Taino Genocide. In the seven seasons of this YouTube channel I never thought I’d have to talk about Genocide in any serious level of detail, but here we are.
The Taino Genocide was an organized campaign of subjugation and eradication applied against the Taino people by the Spanish during their conquest of the Caribbean in the 16th century. It is estimated that the population of the Taino on what the Spanish would start calling Hispaniola before Columbus showed up was around ten-thousand to a million people. Records on the population numbers are unclear because a lot from that time period was destroyed by the Spanish and of course as a conquering force they killed a lot of people who could have passed that information on to a new generation or historians. After about 1504 the Spanish began to enslave, and massacre the local population at a level that indicated that whatever their prior population numbers were, there were about thirty-two thousand Taino left in 1514, and by 1565 200, and then by 1802, they were declared extinct by the Spanish. Three other factors played a part in the extinction of the Taino people, Disease, Famine and Colonial Classification. As with any encounter with Europeans during the time period, the Spanish brought their diseases with them and that caused fatalities in the Taino Population. The activities of the Spanish (theft, tribute conquest) on Hispaniola disrupted the normal agricultural practices of the Taino resulting in Famine. But perhaps the most insidious of things done to the Taino People was paperwork. People of mixed heritage were not counted as Taino by the Spanish colonial authorities and simply were erased from history by way of intentionally inaccurate population accounting. Disease Famine and Colonial Classification paled in comparison to the violence perpetrated on the Taino people. I’m not sure I can go into fine detail here about this because of how YouTube is, but there is a link to a Wiki article to get you started further down. The point is that the Sugar Industry in Europe and the Americas was originally built on slavery, murder and conquest. In the present times there is no shortage of credible articles covering how bad the Sugar Cane plantations are. Even in the best of circumstances it’s not easy work there are a lot of hazards and workers battle with heat stress, kidney disease (from Pesticide exposure), chemical exposure (Herbicide), physical injuries and smoke inhalation from field burning. This is all not counting the financial debt that sugar cane farmers often carry, then there’s the pollution of the air, and the runoff from Sugar Cane fields that gets in local water sources. It’s estimated that about two-hundred and thirteen gallons of water is wasted to produce a pound of refined sugar. Amidst all this there are a number of companies in the USA lobbying against sugar regulations such as Coca-Cola. So I urge you to check out the links below and do some reading, I stand by my belief that Sugar Cane might be the legal crop with the most messed up history of violence and exploitation.
*Before Present i.e. before January 1st 1950. This is a time scale used in Archaeology and Geology used to indicate that something existed before the origin of reliable radiocarbon dating in the 1950’s.
Here are some links with extra information:
https://plants.ces.ncsu.edu/plants/saccharum-officinarum/
https://plantfinder.mobot.org/PlantFinderDetails.aspx?taxonid=285293
Here are some links to information about the history of Sugar Cane:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/sugar-slave-trade-slavery.html
https://kauaitourguy.com/reason-hawaii-gave-up-sugar-cane/
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12992-023-00963-4
https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/sugar-a-killer-crop.html
https://www.vitalstrategies.org/not-sweet-seems-real-costs-sugarcane-farming/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_plantations_in_the_Caribbean
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ta%C3%ADno_genocide
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_sugar
LITFM is intended as a series of videos highlighting a specific plant/family in the Botanical Testing Gardens. The Gardens are located in North Carolina (Zone 8b). Hopefully this video gives you some good garden ideas and if you have questions or comments let me know.
