Awhile back, we had a discussion on the list about salt in Qaiyore: where it's produced, how it's produced, who produces it, and how it's taxed. Today, I was making muffins, and I started thinking: what about sugar? Thanks to watching a Burt Wolf food documentary on PBS, I know that in our world, for most of human history, honey was the only readily available sweetener available. According to http://www.sucrose.com/lhist.html, when the Persian Emperor Darius I invaded India, he discovered sugar-cane being cultivated. The Persians monopolized sugar production until the Arab conquests of the seventh century spread it across the Middle East, North Africa, and Spain. Western Europe got introduced to sugar in the eleventh century, during the Crusades. Sugar was a luxury good--In 1815, Great Britain collected over 3 million pounds in sugar taxes, a tax not abolished until 1874. Almost all this sugar was cane sugar--sugar beets were discovered in 1747, but cheap cane sugar kept it from being commercially viable until the British blockade of European ports in the Napoleonic Wars cut the continent off from Caribbean supplies and forced them to seek alternatives. Today, 70% of the world's sugar comes from cane, the remainder from beets. Sugar cane today yields about 10 tons of sugar per hectare and sugar beets yield about 7 tons per hectare, or 4 tons per acre and 2.8 tons per acre, for those of us who don't use metric. However, because sugar beets must be farmed using crop rotation, sugar beet farms need about four times the area that a sugar cane plantation would need to produce an equivalent amount of sugar. Sugar beets also need access to fuel sources for the refining process, whereas a sugar cane plantation can use the waste material from the sugar extraction process to fuel the refining process. Sugar cane is a labor-intensive crop. When looking at pre-American Civil War cookbooks, it is possible to identify the region in which the book was written by whether it uses honey or sugar as a sweetener: southern recipes called for sugar (which, at the time, was produced by slave labor), while northern recipes used honey. So, what about Qaiyore? Sugar cane cultivation requires a tropical climate with abundant sunlight and rainfall, while sugar beets are a temperate zone crop. Looking at the map, if sugar cane exists on Qaiyore, it could be cultivated in Hria, the Tora tribelands, the Kelshiri and Razanian Coasts, and Celpalar and the surrounding islands. Razania might be too far south, however. Sugar beets might be grown along the southern MidSea or in southern Torphan. And, of course, honey is almost certainly ubiquitous. Andrew (On a totally unrelated note, today, April 24, is my 26th birthday.) ---------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, send mail to celandra-off@phoenyx.net.
