THE RIVAL SUGARS
The ancient Greeks, being an inquisitive and acquisitive people, were fond of collecting tales of strange lands. They did not care much whether the stories were true or not so long as they were interesting. Among the marvels that the Greeks heard from the Far East two of the strangest were that in India there were plants that bore wool without sheep and reeds that bore honey without bees. These incredible tales turned out to be true and in the course of time Europe began to get a little calico from Calicut and a kind of edible gravel that the Arabs who brought it called "sukkar." But of course only kings and queens could afford to dress in calico and have sugar prescribed for them when they were sick.
Fortunately, however, in the course of time the Arabs invaded Spain and forced upon the unwilling inhabitants of Europe such instrumentalities of higher civilization as arithmetic and algebra, soap and sugar. Later the Spaniards by an act of equally unwarranted and beneficent aggression carried the sugar cane to the Caribbean, where it thrived amazingly. The West Indies then became a rival of the East Indies as a treasure-house of tropical wealth and for several centuries the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, English, Danes and French fought like wildcats to gain possession of this little nest of islands and the routes leading thereunto.
The English finally overcame all these enemies, whether they fought her singly or combined. Great Britain became mistress of the seas and took such Caribbean lands as she wanted. But in the end her continental foes came out ahead, for they rendered her victory valueless. They were defeated in geography but they won in chemistry. Canning boasted that "the New World had been called into existence to redress the balance of the Old." Napoleon might have boasted that he had called in the sugar beet to balance the sugar cane. France was then, as Germany was a century later, threatening to dominate the world. England, then as in the Great War, shut off from the seas the shipping of the aggressive power. France then, like Germany later, felt most keenly the lack of tropical products, chief among which, then but not in the recent crisis, was sugar. The cause of this vital change is that in 1747 Marggraf, a Berlin chemist, discovered that it was possible to extract sugar from beets. There was only a little sugar in the beet root then, some six per cent., and what he got out was dirty and bitter. One of his pupils in 1801 set up a beet sugar factory near Breslau under the patronage of the King of Prussia, but the industry was not a success until Napoleon took it up and in 1810 offered a prize of a million francs for a practical process. How the French did make fun of him for this crazy notion! In a comic paper of that day you will find a cartoon of Napoleon in the nursery beside the cradle of his son and heir, the King of Rome—known to the readers of Rostand as l'Aiglon. The Emperor is squeezing the juice of a beet into his coffee and the nurse has put a beet into the mouth of the infant King, saying: "Suck, dear, suck. Your father says it's sugar."
In like manner did the wits ridicule Franklin for fooling with electricity, Rumford for trying to improve chimneys, Parmentier for thinking potatoes were fit to eat, and Jefferson for believing that something might be made of the country west of the Mississippi. In all ages ridicule has been the chief weapon of conservatism. If you want to know what line human progress will take in the future read the funny papers of today and see what they are fighting. The satire of every century from Aristophanes to the latest vaudeville has been directed against those who are trying to make the world wiser or better, against the teacher and the preacher, the scientist and the reformer.
In spite of the ridicule showered upon it the despised beet year by year gained in sweetness of heart. The percentage of sugar rose from six to eighteen and by improved methods of extraction became finally as pure and palatable as the sugar of the cane. An acre of German beets produces more sugar than an acre of Louisiana cane. Continental Europe waxed wealthy while the British West Indies sank into decay. As the beets of Europe became sweeter the population of the islands became blacker. Before the war England was paying out $125,000,000 for sugar, and more than two-thirds of this money was going to Germany and Austria-Hungary. Fostered by scientific study, protected by tariff duties, and stimulated by export bounties, the beet sugar industry became one of the financial forces of the world. The English at home, especially the marmalade-makers, at first rejoiced at the idea of getting sugar for less than cost at the expense of her continental rivals. But the suffering colonies took another view of the situation. In 1888 a conference of the powers called at London agreed to stop competing by the pernicious practice of export bounties, but France and the United States refused to enter, so the agreement fell through. Another conference ten years later likewise failed, but when the parvenu beet sugar ventured to invade the historic home of the cane the limit of toleration had been reached. The Council of India put on countervailing duties to protect their homegrown cane from the bounty-fed beet. This forced the calling of a convention at Brussels in 1903 "to equalize the conditions of competition between beet sugar and cane sugar of the various countries," at which the powers agreed to a mutual suppression of bounties. Beet sugar then divided the world's market equally with cane sugar and the two rivals stayed substantially neck and neck until the Great War came. This shut out from England the product of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Belgium, northern France and Russia and took the farmers from their fields. The battle lines of the Central Powers enclosed the land which used to grow a third of the world's supply of sugar. In 1913 the beet and the cane each supplied about nine million tons of sugar. In 1917 the output of cane sugar was 11,200,000 and of beet sugar 5,300,000 tons. Consequently the Old World had to draw upon the New. Cuba, on which the United States used to depend for half its sugar supply, sent over 700,000 tons of raw sugar to England in 1916. The United States sent as much more refined sugar. The lack of shipping interfered with our getting sugar from our tropical dependencies, Hawaii, Porto Rico and the Philippines. The homegrown beets give us only a fifth and the cane of Louisiana and Texas only a fifteenth of the sugar we need. As a result we were obliged to file a claim in advance to get a pound of sugar from the corner grocery and then we were apt to be put off with rock candy, muscovado or honey. Lemon drops proved useful for Russian tea and the "long sweetening" of our forefathers came again into vogue in the form of various syrups. The United States was accustomed to consume almost a fifth of all the sugar produced in the world—and then we could not get it.
MAP SHOWING LOCATION OF EUROPEAN BEET SUGAR FACTORIES—ALSO BATTLE LINES AT CLOSE OF 1918 ESTIMATED THAT ONE-THIRD OF WORLDS PRODUCTION BEFORE THE WAR WAS PRODUCED WITHIN BATTLE LINES Courtesy American Sugar Refining Co.
The shortage made us realize how dependent we have become upon sugar. Yet it was, as we have seen, practically unknown to the ancients and only within the present generation has it become an essential factor in our diet. As soon as the chemist made it possible to produce sugar at a reasonable price all nations began to buy it in proportion to their means. Americans, as the wealthiest people in the world, ate the most, ninety pounds a year on the average for every man, woman and child. In other words we ate our weight of sugar every year. The English consumed nearly as much as the Americans; the French and Germans about half as much; the Balkan peoples less than ten pounds per annum; and the African savages none.
How the sugar beet has gained enormously in sugar content under chemical control
Pure white sugar is the first and greatest contribution of chemistry to the world's dietary. It is unique in being a single definite chemical compound, sucrose, C12H22O11. All natural nutriments are more or less complex mixtures. Many of them, like wheat or milk or fruit, contain in various proportions all of the three factors of foods, the fats, the proteids and the carbohydrates, as well as water and the minerals and other ingredients necessary to life. But sugar is a simple substance, like water or salt, and like them is incapable of sustaining life alone, although unlike them it is nutritious. In fact, except the fats there is no more nutritious food than sugar, pound for pound, for it contains no water and no waste. It is therefore the quickest and usually the cheapest means of supplying bodily energy. But as may be seen from its formula as given above it contains only three elements, carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, and omits nitrogen and other elements necessary to the body. An engine requires not only coal but also lubricating oil, water and bits of steel and brass to keep it in repair. But as a source of the energy needed in our strenuous life sugar has no equal and only one rival, alcohol. Alcohol is the offspring of sugar, a degenerate descendant that retains but few of the good qualities of its sire and has acquired some evil traits of its own. Alcohol, like sugar, may serve to furnish the energy of a steam engine or a human body. Used as a fuel alcohol has certain advantages, but used as a food it has the disqualification of deranging the bodily mechanism. Even a little alcohol will impair the accuracy and speed of thought and action, while a large quantity, as we all know from observation if not experience, will produce temporary incapacitation.
When man feeds on sugar he splits it up by the aid of air into water and carbon dioxide in this fashion:
C12H22O11 + 12O2 → 11H2O + 12CO2
cane sugar oxygen water carbon dioxide
When sugar is burned the reaction is just the same.
But when the yeast plant feeds on sugar it carries the process only part way and instead of water the product is alcohol, a very different thing, so they say who have tried both as beverages. The yeast or fermentation reaction is this:
C12H22O11 + H2O → 4C2H6O + 4CO2
cane sugar water alcohol carbon dioxide
Alcohol then is the first product of the decomposition of sugar, a dangerous half-way house. The twin product, carbon dioxide or carbonic acid, is a gas of slightly sour taste which gives an attractive tang and effervescence to the beer, wine, cider or champagne. That is to say, one of these twins is a pestilential fellow and the other is decidedly agreeable. Yet for several thousand years mankind took to the first and let the second for the most part escape into the air. But when the chemist appeared on the scene he discovered a way of separating the two and bottling the harmless one for those who prefer it. An increasing number of people were found to prefer it, so the American soda-water fountain is gradually driving Demon Rum out of the civilized world. The brewer nowadays caters to two classes of customers. He bottles up the beer with the alcohol and a little carbonic acid in it for the saloon and he catches the rest of the carbonic acid that he used to waste and sells it to the drug stores for soda-water or uses it to charge some non-alcoholic beer of his own.
This catering to rival trades is not an uncommon thing with the chemist. As we have seen, the synthetic perfumes are used to improve the natural perfumes. Cottonseed is separated into oil and meal; the oil going to make margarin and the meal going to feed the cows that produce butter. Some people have been drinking coffee, although they do not like the taste of it, because they want the stimulating effect of its alkaloid, caffein. Other people liked the warmth and flavor of coffee but find that caffein does not agree with them. Formerly one had to take the coffee whole or let it alone. Now one can have his choice, for the caffein is extracted for use in certain popular cold drinks and the rest of the bean sold as caffein-free coffee.
Most of the "soft drinks" that are now gradually displacing the hard ones consist of sugar, water and carbonic acid, with various flavors, chiefly the esters of the fatty and aromatic acids, such as I described in a previous chapter. These are still usually made from fruits and spices and in some cases the law or public opinion requires this, but eventually, I presume, the synthetic flavors will displace the natural and then we shall get rid of such extraneous and indigestible matter as seeds, skins and bark. Suppose the world had always been used to synthetic and hence seedless figs, strawberries and blackberries. Suppose then some manufacturer of fig paste or strawberry jam should put in ten per cent. of little round hard wooden nodules, just the sort to get stuck between the teeth or caught in the vermiform appendix. How long would it be before he was sent to jail for adulterating food? But neither jail nor boycott has any reformatory effect on Nature.
Nature is quite human in that respect. But you can reform Nature as you can human beings by looking out for heredity and culture. In this way Mother Nature has been quite cured of her bad habit of putting seeds in bananas and oranges. Figs she still persists in adulterating with particles of cellulose as nutritious as sawdust. But we can circumvent the old lady at this. I got on Christmas a package of figs from California without a seed in them. Somebody had taken out all the seeds—it must have been a big job—and then put the figs together again as natural looking as life and very much better tasting.
Sugar and alcohol are both found in Nature; sugar in the ripe fruit, alcohol when it begins to decay. But it was the chemist who discovered how to extract them. He first worked with alcohol and unfortunately succeeded.
Previous to the invention of the still by the Arabian chemists man could not get drunk as quickly as he wanted to because his liquors were limited to what the yeast plant could stand without intoxication. When the alcoholic content of wine or beer rose to seventeen per cent. at the most the process of fermentation stopped because the yeast plants got drunk and quit "working." That meant that a man confined to ordinary wine or beer had to drink ten or twenty quarts of water to get one quart of the stuff he was after, and he had no liking for water.
So the chemist helped him out of this difficulty and got him into worse trouble by distilling the wine. The more volatile part that came over first contained the flavor and most of the alcohol. In this way he could get liquors like brandy and whisky, rum and gin, containing from thirty to eighty per cent. of alcohol. This was the origin of the modern liquor problem. The wine of the ancients was strong enough to knock out Noah and put the companions of Socrates under the table, but it was not until distilled liquors came in that alcoholism became chronic, epidemic and ruinous to whole populations.
But the chemist later tried to undo the ruin he had quite inadvertently wrought by introducing alcohol into the world. One of his most successful measures was the production of cheap and pure sugar which, as we have seen, has become a large factor in the dietary of civilized countries. As a country sobers up it takes to sugar as a "self-starter" to provide the energy needed for the strenuous life. A five o'clock candy is a better restorative than a five o'clock highball or even a five o'clock tea, for it is a true nutrient instead of a mere stimulant. It is a matter of common observation that those who like sweets usually do not like alcohol. Women, for instance, are apt to eat candy but do not commonly take to alcoholic beverages. Look around you at a banquet table and you will generally find that those who turn down their wine glasses generally take two lumps in their demi-tasses. We often hear it said that whenever a candy store opens up a saloon in the same block closes up. Our grandmothers used to warn their daughters: "Don't marry a man who does not want sugar in his tea. He is likely to take to drink." So, young man, when next you give a box of candy to your best girl and she offers you some, don't decline it. Eat it and pretend to like it, at least, for it is quite possible that she looked into a physiology and is trying you out. You never can tell what girls are up to.
In the army and navy ration the same change has taken place as in the popular dietary. The ration of rum has been mostly replaced by an equivalent amount of candy or marmalade. Instead of the tippling trooper of former days we have "the chocolate soldier." No previous war in history has been fought so largely on sugar and so little on alcohol as the last one. When the war reduced the supply and increased the demand we all felt the sugar famine and it became a mark of patriotism to refuse candy and to drink coffee unsweetened. This, however, is not, as some think, the mere curtailment of a superfluous or harmful luxury, the sacrifice of a pleasant sensation. It is a real deprivation and a serious loss to national nutrition. For there is no reason to think the constantly rising curve of sugar consumption has yet reached its maximum or optimum. Individuals overeat, but not the population as a whole. According to experiments of the Department of Agriculture men doing heavy labor may add three-quarters of a pound of sugar to their daily diet without any deleterious effects. This is at the rate of 275 pounds a year, which is three times the average consumption of England and America. But the Department does not state how much a girl doing nothing ought to eat between meals.
Of the 2500 to 3500 calories of energy required to keep a man going for a day the best source of supply is the carbohydrates, that is, the sugars and starches. The fats are more concentrated but are more expensive and less easily assimilable. The proteins are also more expensive and their decomposition products are more apt to clog up the system. Common sugar is almost an ideal food. Cheap, clean, white, portable, imperishable, unadulterated, pleasant-tasting, germ-free, highly nutritious, completely soluble, altogether digestible, easily assimilable, requires no cooking and leaves no residue. Its only fault is its perfection. It is so pure that a man cannot live on it. Four square lumps give one hundred calories of energy. But twenty-five or thirty-five times that amount would not constitute a day's ration, in fact one would ultimately starve on such fare. It would be like supplying an army with an abundance of powder but neglecting to provide any bullets, clothing or food. To make sugar the sole food is impossible. To make it the main food is unwise. It is quite proper for man to separate out the distinct ingredients of natural products—to extract the butter from the milk, the casein from the cheese, the sugar from the cane—but he must not forget to combine them again at each meal with the other essential foodstuffs in their proper proportion.
THE RIVAL SUGARS The sugar beet of the north has become a close rival of the sugar cane of the south
INTERIOR OF A SUGAR MILL SHOWING THE MACHINERY FOR CRUSHING CANE TO EXTRACT THE JUICE
Courtesy of American Sugar Refinery Co.
VACUUM PANS OF THE AMERICAN SUGAR REFINERY COMPANY
In these air-tight vats the water is boiled off from the cane juice under diminished atmospheric pressure until the sugar crystallizes out
Sugar is not a synthetic product and the business of the chemist has been merely to extract and purify it. But this is not so simple as it seems and every sugar factory has had to have its chemist. He has analyzed every mother beet for a hundred years. He has watched every step of the process from the cane to the crystal lest the sucrose should invert to the less sweet and non-crystallizable glucose. He has tested with polarized light every shipment of sugar that has passed through the custom house, much to the mystification of congressmen who have often wondered at the money and argumentation expended in a tariff discussion over the question of the precise angle of rotation of the plane of vibration of infinitesimal waves in a hypothetical ether.
The reason for this painstaking is that there are dozens of different sugars, so much alike that they are difficult to separate. They are all composed of the same three elements, C, H and O, and often in the same proportion. Sometimes two sugars differ only in that one has a right-handed and the other a left-handed twist to its molecule. They bear the same resemblance to one another as the two gloves of a pair. Cane sugar and beet sugar are when completely purified the same substance, that is, sucrose, C12H22O11. The brown and straw-colored sugars, which our forefathers used and which we took to using during the war, are essentially the same but have not been so completely freed from moisture and the coloring and flavoring matter of the cane juice. Maple sugar is mostly sucrose. So partly is honey. Candies are made chiefly of sucrose with the addition of glucose, gums or starch, to give them the necessary consistency and of such colors and flavors, natural or synthetic, as may be desired. Practically all candy, even the cheapest, is nowadays free from deleterious ingredients in the manufacture, though it is liable to become contaminated in the handling. In fact sugar is about the only food that is never adulterated. It would be hard to find anything cheaper to add to it that would not be easily detected. "Sanding the sugar," the crime of which grocers are generally accused, is the one they are least likely to be guilty of.
Besides the big family of sugars which are all more or less sweet, similar in structure and about equally nutritious, there are, very curiously, other chemical compounds of altogether different composition which taste like sugar but are not nutritious at all. One of these is a coal-tar derivative, discovered accidentally by an American student of chemistry, Ira Remsen, afterward president of Johns Hopkins University, and named by him "saccharin." This has the composition C6H4COSO2NH, and as you may observe from the symbol it contains sulfur (S) and nitrogen (N) and the benzene ring (C6H4) that are not found in any of the sugars. It is several hundred times sweeter than sugar, though it has also a slightly bitter aftertaste. A minute quantity of it can therefore take the place of a large amount of sugar in syrups, candies and preserves, so because it lends itself readily to deception its use in food has been prohibited in the United States and other countries. But during the war, on account of the shortage of sugar, it came again into use. The European governments encouraged what they formerly tried to prevent, and it became customary in Germany or Italy to carry about a package of saccharin tablets in the pocket and drop one or two into the tea or coffee. Such reversals of administrative attitude are not uncommon. When the use of hops in beer was new it was prohibited by British law. But hops became customary nevertheless and now the law requires hops to be used in beer. When workingmen first wanted to form unions, laws were passed to prevent them. But now, in Australia for instance, the laws require workingmen to form unions. Governments naturally tend to a conservative reaction against anything new.
It is amusing to turn back to the pure food agitation of ten years ago and read the sensational articles in the newspapers about the poisonous nature of this dangerous drug, saccharin, in view of the fact that it is being used by millions of people in Europe in amounts greater than once seemed to upset the tender stomachs of the Washington "poison squads." But saccharin does not appear to be responsible for any fatalities yet, though people are said to be heartily sick of it. And well they may be, for it is not a substitute for sugar except to the sense of taste. Glucose may correctly be called a substitute for sucrose as margarin for butter, since they not only taste much the same but have about the same food value. But to serve saccharin in the place of sugar is like giving a rubber bone to a dog. It is reported from Europe that the constant use of saccharin gives one eventually a distaste for all sweets. This is quite likely, although it means the reversal within a few years of prehistoric food habits. Mankind has always associated sweetness with food value, for there are few sweet things found in nature except the sugars. We think we eat sugar because it is sweet. But we do not. We eat it because it is good for us. The reason it tastes sweet to us is because it is good for us. So man makes a virtue out of necessity, a pleasure out of duty, which is the essence of ethics.
In the ancient days of Ind the great Raja Trishanku possessed an earthly paradise that had been constructed for his delectation by a magician. Therein grew all manner of beautiful flowers, savory herbs and delicious fruits such as had never been known before outside heaven. Of them all the Raja and his harems liked none better than the reed from which they could suck honey. But Indra, being a jealous god, was wroth when he looked down and beheld mere mortals enjoying such delights. So he willed the destruction of the enchanted garden. With drought and tempest it was devastated, with fire and hail, until not a leaf was left of its luxuriant vegetation and the ground was bare as a threshing floor. But the roots of the sugar cane are not destroyed though the stalk be cut down; so when men ventured to enter the desert where once had been this garden of Eden, they found the cane had grown up again and they carried away cuttings of it and cultivated it in their gardens. Thus it happened that the nectar of the gods descended first to monarchs and their favorites, then was spread among the people and carried abroad to other lands until now any child with a penny in his hand may buy of the best of it. So it has been with many things. So may it be with all things.