Sugar Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Sugar is a term for sucrose that occurs naturally and is commercially produced from sugar cane or sugar beet. The origin of the word appears to have come from India where the Sanskrit was sarkara. This became the Arabic al sukkar, and then Portuguese acucar, the Spanish azu’ucar, and then the Italian zucchero. The old French word zuchre later became the modern word sucre.

The derivation of the word also illustrates the origin of sugar; the production of sugar from sugar cane took place in ancient India. Soldiers from the armies of Alexander the Great tasted it, and it became more common in the Middle East; the Moors introduced it to Spain and Sicily. The Crusaders also brought back sugar to Europe where it remained a delicacy in many parts of the continent, although it became somewhate more common in ports such as Venice and Genoa, as can be seen by the deterioration in the conditions of teeth during the Middle Ages. By the 15th century, the Spanish and the Portuguese had begun establishing plantations in the Canary Islands, Madeira, and the Azores.

In 1506 the Spanish started cultivating sugar cane in the Caribbean, with plantations on the island of Cuba in 1523. Nine years later the Portuguese began their sugar cane plantations in Brazil. Gradually as many European countries started to establish colonies in the tropics, the production of sugar increased. This was helped by slave labor, although production was higher after the abolition of slavery than before. The British grew sugar in Barbados and other parts of the Caribbean, especially British Guiana (Guyana), later growing large amounts of sugar cane in Queensland in northern Australia.

At its height, sugar production made up some 95 percent of the exports of Barbados. The French established plantations on the islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique, as well as on Mauritius and in the Pacific. They had also established plantations on Saint Dominique (modern-day Haiti). For the Dutch, the island of Java proved to be good for growing sugar cane. The Spanish industry on the island of Cuba led the world in production. Some places became so associated with the production of sugar that they gave their names to particular types of sugar. The port of Demerara in Guyana is one such example.

The production of sugar from beet began in 1747 when the German chemist Andreas Marggraf experimented with the idea. A colleague, Franz Achard, built a sugar-beet processing plant at Cunern, Silesia, a territory recently seized by Prussia from Austria. This continued with the support of King Frederick William III of Prussia (reigned 1797-1840). Demand increased considerably during the Napoleonic Wars with France because of the inability to access West Indian supplies. The Cunern factory was destroyed late in the war, but by this time other factories had been built.

Sugar was used to sweeten drinks, especially tea, and was also used for confectionary and for the production of molasses and rum. It was also used for jams, processed foods, beer, and other drinks. In 1813 British chemist Edward Charles Howard developed a method of refining sugar that was particularly successful and was further developed by David Weston in Hawaii in 1852. It used a centrifuge to separate molasses from sugar. It was used in making soft drinks, in particular Coca-Cola, first manufactured in 1886, and Pepsi-Cola, first produced in 1898.

Some of the famous sugar producers in the world include Tate and Lyle (a British company), and Colonial Sugar Refining (C.S.R.) in the Pacific and Australia. The latter company was involved in developing the sugar industry in Fiji, as well as in New Zealand.

Although sugar considerably improved the diet in terms of taste, one of the early side effects was tooth decay. Archaeologists sometimes use the state of teeth to give an early determinant of the age of a skeleton-dating it to before or after the widespread eating of food with sugar. Many dieticians also connect overconsumption of products with sugar to obesity. Sugar cane has also been used for many other by-products, notably ethanol, which is used as a substitute for petrol in some countries.

Bibliography:

Henry Hobhouse, Seeds of Change: Six Plants that Transformed Mankind (Papermac, 1999);
G. Lowndes, ed., South Pacific Enterprise: The Colonial Sugar Refining Company Limited (Angus & Robertson, 1956);
A. Quintus, The Cultivation of Sugar Cane in Java (Norman Rodger, 1923);
Wendy A. Woloson, Refined Tastes: Sugar, Confectionary and Consumers in Nineteenth Century America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).