High-Priced Sugar

[deedle at loop.com]

Fascinatin'!  From the fields to the body, it seems sugar's poisonous in
every respect.  I've been ingesting maple syrup, honey (in moderation), and
concentrated fruit juice as sweetening for years.  Eating the "whitest,
purest, most heavily processed and refined sugar you can get" doesn't seem
like the answer, to me, but, whateverrrrrr.  And if you really don't want
ground up scorched animals and mounds of chemical residue with your
comestibles, eat organic, support small farmers, be a happy, healthy planet
dweller, etc.  Hard to do when you're salivating over a rain forest
decimating McBurger, killer Cola and minimum wage labor fries, right?
Sigh.  The hand-basket's full to overflowing...

>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