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.)
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