High-Priced Coffee

[chris abraham]

thanks david -- i am from hawaii (HNL) and grew up there...  spelled the
burning fields and went to north shore and it was mollasas city -- made me
weep from homesickness...

its all protein its all love...

now stand up "sugar free since 1983" and give your side!

chris

At 2:43 PM -0500 01/14/1997, David Casseres wrote:
>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


--
chris abraham <chris at artswire.org> +1 20 24 52 74 42 district of columbia