High-Priced Coffee

[David Casseres]

I wrote

>> more of this thread and I'll cut loose with my
>>canned sermon on how sugar is produced and why, if you're gonna eat sugar
>>at all, you want the whitest, purest, most heavily processed and refined
>>sugar you can get.

now chris abraham sez

>David:  PLEASE, don't make me BEG for it!
>
>cut LOOSE cut LOOSE!

Awright awright awright.  First, what follows is about Hawaiian cane 
sugar, which is most of what you get in the U.S.  (If your sugar comes 
from somewhere else it is almost sure to be produced under the most 
horrible of neo-colonialist conditions, and soaked so to speak in the 
blood of the people who harvested it, so don't use that kind, please.  
(Cuban sugar may well be a different story but we can't get it in my 
glorious country because we're saving the hemisphere from Communism, 
don'tcha know.))  Hawaii is a labor-union state, though, and the sugar 
industry there is heavily unionized and the workers have halfway decent 
lives.  So much for the moral aspect of sugar consumption.

Now the way they produce sugar in Hawaii (and most of those other places 
too) is to grow the cane in cane-fields, which resemble miniature jungles 
in some ways.  The stalks are very close together and the foliage is 
dense a few feet above the ground, so the understorey is a perfect 
habitat for any number of creatures -- insects, snails, rodents of all 
sorts (especially rats), toads and frogs, reptiles, ground-dwelling 
birds, small predators such as mongooses and cats.  But nothing bigger 
can go in there and there is lots of food just outside the cane-field for 
many of these creatures, who come out to feed at night and then take 
refuge in the cane.  But many of them also feed on the sugar-cane, and so 
they are pests.

So what do They do about pests?  They napalm them with copious amounts of 
the deadliest possible pesticides, applied from the air.  And these 
pesticides kill many but not all of the creatures, so by the end of the 
growing season the field is still filled with living creatures but also 
with the corpses of the creatures that have been poisoned during the 
season.

And now it's time to harvest.  The most economical way to get the leaves 
off the cane stalks is to just torch the field, and that's what They do.  
The whole of the cane country is filled with huge fires creating a pall 
of stinking dense black sooty smoke, to the great inconvenience and 
displeasure of the Elect tourists, who a day ago were cooing to each 
other about the beauty of the green canefields.  And in these fires die 
the vast majority of the surviving creatures in the field, from the 
preterite wee bugs up to the cunning but still preterite mongoose.

When the fire has burned out the field is an array of standing black 
stalks and a mostly invisible necropolis of tiny burnt corpses, which are 
immediately bulldozed up into a vast and noisome heap at one corner of 
the field -- burnt cane, corpses of varying age, and considerable 
residues, you gotta believe, of those terrible swift long-chain, 
polycyclic and abundantly halogenated pesticide molecules, in varying 
states of transformation, some unaltered, others broken into smaller 
chunks, others polymerized and otherwise fused into Who Nose What.  Go 
read that Pynchon passage about the bombed-out IG Farben Chemical 
plant....

And then the heap is shoveled by front-loaders into trucks which blast 
over the cane haul roads to the refinery, where the still-smoldering 
loads go into a series of processes that first extract dirt and other 
debris, you know what kind debris, bro, or anyway they extract *most* of 
it, and the scorched cane (which by the way *also* contains by now a 
population of emergent chemical species, Imipolexoids, oneirides usw, 
produced as byproducts of the cleansing fire) is crushed to extract the 
sugary juice.

Which goes into a sequence of vats and boilers and pots and stills and 
centrifuges and filters and strainers and whatnot with the eventual 
result that you get on the one hand your Highly Refined White Sugar, Bane 
of the Body, Worse Than Heroin (that's a quote), Devoid of Nutritional 
Value, Made of Empty Calories....

... A-and on the other hand your Blackstrap Molasses, scraped as a 
bad-tasting black and sticky goo from the sides of one of the processing 
pots at a stage of the process where, They will tell you most solemnly, 
all the dirt and debris and corpses both fresh and rotten and 
insecticides and rat-poison and combustion byproducts -- all that other 
shit -- has been *totally eliminated* so the stuff can be sold at high 
prices in health-food stores.

For that blackstrap is a long-renowned health tonic, don'tcha know, 
especially for cases of Female Disorders and other ills involving anemia, 
because it's rich in iron having been scraped off the sides of that iron 
pot over there in Hawaii.  You could chew nails and get the same benefit, 
and you gotta wonder -- if it really isn't composed mostly of All That 
Shit plus some burnt sugar to make it sweet, well then what exactly is it 
that makes it so black and sticky and smelly, huh?

But some of it doesn't get to the health-food store.  Instead, it is 
stirred back into some of the Highly Refined (usw) White Sugar, to 
transform it, hey presto, into Lovely Healthy Tasty Homey Brown Sugar to 
sell to the health-conscious and hopelessly preterite health-conscious 
consumers.

And that's the sugar story with a few peri-Pynchonite tropes kind of 
squoze into it.  Enjoy your sugar!


Cheers,
David