For information on the other sugars, see Monosaccharide and Disaccharide.
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In precise culinary terms, sugar is a type of Food associated with one of the primary taste sensations, that of sweetness.
The major cane sugar producing countries are countries with warm climates, such as Australia, Brazil, and Thailand. In 2001/2002 there was over twice as much sugar produced in developing countries as in developed countries. The greatest quantity of sugar is produced in Latin America,United States and the Caribbean nations, and in the Far East.
The sugar beet regions are in cooler climates; North West and Eastern Europe, Northern Japan, plus some areas in the United States including California. The beet growing season ends with the start of harvesting around September. Harvesting and processing continues until March in some cases. The duration of harvesting and processing is influenced by the availability of processing plant capacity, and weather - harvested beet can be laid up until processed but frost damaged beet becomes effectively unprocessable.
The world's second largest sugar exporter is the EU. The Common Agricultural Policy of the EU sets maximum quotas for members production to match supply and demand, and a price. Excess production quota is exported (approx 5 million tonnes in 2003). Part of this is "quota" sugar which is subsidised from industry levies, the remainder (approx half) is "C quota" sugar which is sold at market price without subsidy. These subsidies and a high import Tariff make it difficult for other countries to export to the EU states, or compete with it on world markets. The U.S. sets high sugar prices to support its producers with the effect that many sugar consumers have switched to Corn syrup (beverage manufacturers) or moved out of the country (candy makers).
The sugar market is also under attack from the cheap prices of glucose syrups produced from wheat and corn (maize). In combination with artificial sweeteners, drink manufacturers can produce very low cost products.
The white sugar produced is sieved into different grades for selling.
The residues of sugar production differ substantially and from place to place. While Cane molasses can be used as an ingredient, beet molasses is unpalatable and generally used for industrial fermentation or as animal feedstuff. Cane pulp can be burnt, beet pulp is dried, pelleted and used as an animal feedstuff.
Mill white sugar, also called plantation white, crystal sugar, or superior sugar, is raw sugar whose colored impurities have not been removed, but rather bleached white by exposure to Sulfur dioxide. This is the most common form of sugar in sugarcane growing areas, but does not store or ship well; after a few weeks, its impurities tend to promote discoloration and clumping.
Blanco directo is a white sugar common in India and other south Asian countries. In producing blanco directo, many impurities are precipitated out of the cane juice by using phosphatation a treatment with Phosphoric acid and Calcium hydroxide similar to the carbonatation technique used in beet sugar refining. In terms of sucrose purity, blanco directo is more pure than mill white, but less pure than white refined sugar.
White refined sugar is the most common form of sugar in North America and Europe. Refined sugar can be made by dissolving raw sugar and purifying it with a phosphoric acid method similar to that used for blanco directo, a Carbonatation process involving calcium hydroxide and Carbon dioxide, or by various filtration strategies. It is then further decolorized by filtration through a bed of Activated carbon or Bone char depending on where the processing takes place. Beet sugar refineries produce refined white sugar directly without an intermediate raw stage. White refined sugar is typically sold as granulated sugar, which has been dried to prevent clumping.
Granulated sugar is available in various crystal sizes, for home and industrial use depending on the application:
Also there are Cuboid sugar cubes for conveniently taking a standard amount.
Brown sugars are obtained in the late stages of sugar refining (stopping the refinement before sugar becomes white and free of molasses), or by coating white refined sugar with a cane molasses syrup. Their color and taste become stronger with increasing molasses content, as does their moisture retaining properties. They are also prone to hardening if exposed to the atmosphere although this is reversible.
Many pentoses and hexoses are capable of forming ring structures. In these closed-chain forms the aldehyde or ketone group is not free, so many of the reactions typical of these groups cannot occur. Glucose in solution exists mostly in the ring form at Equilibrium, with less than 0.1% of the molecules in the open-chain form.
Monosaccharides in a closed-chain form can form glycosidic bonds with other monosaccharides, creating disaccharides, such as sucrose, and polysaccharides such as starch. Glycosidic bonds must be hydrolysed or otherwise broken by enzymes before such compounds can be used in Metabolism. After digestion and absorption the pricipal monosaccharieds present in the blood and internal tissues are: glucose, fructose, and galactose.
The term "glyco-" indicates the presence of a sugar in an otherwise non-carbohydrate substance: for example, a Glycoprotein is a protein to which one or more sugars are connected.
Simple sugars include sucrose, Fructose, Glucose, Galactose, Maltose, Lactose and Mannose. As far as disaccharides are concerned, the most common are sucrose (cane or beet sugar - made from one glucose and one fructose), lactose (milk sugar - made from one glucose and one galactose) and maltose (made of two glucoses). The formula of these disaccharides is C12H22O11.
Sucrose can be converted by Hydrolysis into a syrup of fructose and glucose, producing what is called invert sugar. This resulting syrup is sweeter than the original sucrose, and is useful for making confections sweeter and softer in texture.
Originally, the cane was chewed raw to extract its sweetness. Sugar refining was developed in the Middle East, India and China, where it became a staple of cooking and desserts. In early refining methods, the cane was ground or pounded to extract the juice, and the juice then boiled down or dried in the sun to yield sugary solids that resembled gravel. The Sanskrit word for sugar (sharkara), also means gravel. Similarly, the Chinese term for table sugar is "gravel sugar" (Traditional Chinese:砂糖)。
Later sugar spread to other areas of the world through trade. It arrived in Europe with the arrival of the Moors. Crusaders also brought sugar home with them after their campaigns in the Holy Land, as there they encountered caravans carrying this "sweet salt" as it was called. While sugar cane could not be grown in northern Europe, sugar could be extracted from certain beets and these began to be widely cultivated around 1801, after the British control of the seas during the Napoleonic Wars isolated mainland Europe from the Caribbean.
In 1493, Christopher Columbus stopped, intending to stay only four days, at Gomera in the Canary Islands, for wine and water. Columbus became romantically involved with the Governor of the Island, Beatrice. He stayed a month. When he finally sailed she gave him cuttings of sugarcane, the first to reach the New World.
The Portuguese took sugar to Brazil. Hans Staden, published in 1555, writes that by 1540 there were 800 sugar mills on Santa Catalina Island and another 2000 up the north coast of Brazil, Demarara and Surinam. Approximately 3000 small mills built before 1550 in the New World created an unprecedented demand for Cast iron gears, levers, axles and other implements. Specialist trades in mold making and iron casting were inevitably created in Europe by the expansion of sugar. Sugar mill construction is the missing link of the technological skills needed for the Industrial Revolution that is recognized as beginning in the first part of the 1600s.
After 1625, the Dutch carried sugarcane from South America to the Caribbean islands from Barbados to the Virgin Islands. In the years 1625 to 1750, sugar was worth its weight in gold. Price declined slowly as production became multi-sourced especially through British colonial policy. Sugar production also increased in the American Colonies, Cuba, and Brazil. African slaves became the dominant plantation worker as they were resistant to the diseases of Malaria and Yellow fever. European indentured servants were in shorter supply, succeptible to disease and a less economic investment. Local Native Americans had been reduced by European diseases like Smallpox.
With the European colonization of the Americas, the Caribbean became the world's largest source of sugar. Sugar cane could be grown on these islands using Slave labour at vastly lower prices than cane sugar imported from the East. Thus the economies of entire islands such as Guadaloupe and Barbados were based on sugar production. The largest sugar producer in the world, by 1750, was the French colony known as Saint-Domingue, which is today the independent country of Haiti. Jamaica was another major producer in the 1700s.
During the eighteenth century, sugar became enormously popular and went through a series of booms. The main reason for the heightened demand and production of sugar was a great change in the eating habits of many Europeans. For example, they began consuming jams, candy, tea, coffee, cocoa, processed foods, and other sweet victuals in much greater numbers. Reacting to this increasing craze, the islands took advantage of the situation and began harvesting sugar in extreme amounts. In fact, they produced up to ninety percent of the sugar that the western Europeans consumed. Of course some islands were more successful than others when it came to producing the product. For instance, Barbados and the British Leewards can be said to have been the most successful in the production of sugar because it counted for ninety-three and ninety-seven percent of the island’s exports, respectively.
Planters later began developing ways to boost production even more. For example, they began using more animal Manure when growing their crops. They also developed more advanced mills and began using better types of sugar cane. Despite these and other improvements, the prices of sugar reached soaring heights, especially during events such as the revolt against the Dutch and the Napoleonic wars. Sugar was a highly desired product, and the islands knew exactly how to take advantage of the situation.
As Europeans established sugar plantations on these larger Caribbean islands, prices fell, especially in Britain. What had previously been a luxury good began, by the eighteenth century, to be commonly consumed by all levels of society. At first most sugar in Britain was used in tea, but later candies and chocolates became extremely popular. Sugar was commonly sold in solid cones and required a sugar nip, a pliers-like tool, to break off pieces.
Sugar cane quickly exhausts the Soil and larger islands with fresher soil were pressed into production in the nineteenth century. For example, it was in this century that Cuba rose as the richest land in the Caribbean (with sugar being its dominant crop) because it was the only major island that was free of mountainous terrain. Instead, nearly three-quarters of its land formed a rolling plain which was ideal for planting crops. Cuba also prospered above other islands because they used better methods when harvesting the sugar crops. They had been introduced to modern milling methods such as water mills, enclosed furnaces, steam engines, and vacuum pans. All these things increased their production and production rate.
After the world's only successful slave revolution established the independent nation of Haiti, sugar production in that country declined and Cuba replaced Saint-Domingue as the world's largest producer. Production spread to South America as well as to new European colonies in Africa and the Pacific.
Napoleon, cut off from Caribbean imports by a British blockade and at any rate not wanting to fund British merchants, banned sugar imports in 1813. The beet sugar industry that emerged in its place grew, and today, cane and beet sugar enjoy approximately equal world production.
While it is no longer grown by slaves, sugar growing in developing countries continues to this day to be associated with workers earning minimal wages and living in extreme poverty. Cuba was a large producer of sugar in the 20th century until the collapse of the Soviet Union took away their export market and the industry collapsed.
In the developed countries, the sugar industry is machine reliant, with a low requirement for manpower. A large beet refinery producing around 1,500 tonnes of sugar a day needs a permanent workforce of about 150 for 24 hour production.
In 1813, the British chemist Edward Charles Howard invented a sugar refining method in which the cane juice was boiled not in an open kettle, but in a closed vessel heated by steam and held under partial vacuum. At reduced pressure, water boils at a lower temperature, and this development both saved fuel and reduced the amount of sugar lost through carmelization. Further gains in fuel efficiency were achieved through the Multiple-effect evaporator, designed by the African-American engineer Norbert Rillieux perhaps as early as the 1820s, although the first working model was not built until 1845. This system consisted of a series of vacuum pans, each held at a lower pressure than the previous. The vapors from each pan were used to heat the next, and little heat wasted. Today, multiple-effect evaporators are employed widely in many industries for evaporating water.
The process of separating the crystallized sugar from the molasses also received mechanical attention: the Centrifuge was first applied to this task by David Weston in Hawaii in 1852.
There is an on-going argument as to the value of extrinsic sugar (sugar added to food) compared to that of intrinsic (sugar, seldom sucrose, naturally present in food).
In the United States sugar has also been attributed as a leading cause of diabetes and obesity. As stated in the Diabetes in America, 2nd Edition more and more children at younger ages are becoming victims of this deadly disease.
In international trade bodies, especially the World Trade Organization, the "G20" countries led by Brazil have argued that because their cane sugar exports are essentially excluded from these sugar markets, they receive lower prices than they would under Free trade. While both the European Union and United States maintain trade agreements whereby certain developing and least-developed countries (LDCs) can sell certain quantities of sugar into their markets, free of the usual import tariffs, countries outside these preferred trade regimes have complained that these arrangements violate the "most favored nation" principle of international trade.
In 2004, the WTO sided with a group of cane sugar exporting nations led by Brazil, and ruled that the EU sugar regime and the accompanying ACP-EU Sugar Protocol, whereby a group of African, Caribbean, and Pacific countries are given preferential access to the European sugar market, are illegal. In response, the European Commission proposed on 22 June 2005 to radically reform the EU sugar regime, cutting prices by 39% and eliminating all EU sugar exports. The African, Caribbean, Pacific and Least developed country sugar exporters have reacted with dismay to the EU sugar proposals, arguing for a fairer reform of the EU regime which would be pro-development and meaningful towards the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals.
Small quantities of sugar, especially speciality grades of sugar, are sold as 'fair trade' commodities; these products are produced and sold with the understanding that a larger-than-usual fraction of the revenue supports small farmers in the developing world.