Sugar

Table sugar is sucrose, a double sugar in which one unit of glucose is bound to one of fructose. Plants make it and store it in their roots, fruits and nectar, and for food it is drawn chiefly from sugarcane, grown in the tropics, and sugar beet, grown in cooler climates. Raw cane sugar is washed, dissolved, passed over carbon to take out its colour, then boiled down under vacuum and crystallised; refined white sugar is more than 99.7 per cent sucrose, and cane and beet sugar are chemically the same. The English word goes back through Latin, Arabic and Persian to the Sanskrit śarkarā, and sugar was first made from cane in the Indian subcontinent. Arabs brought it to Sicily and Spain, Columbus took it to the Americas, and Prussia began making it from beet in 1801. By the nineteenth century it was a household staple, and its spread was closely tied to colonisation and to slavery. White was not always the ideal: in India, where sugar often has a place in religious observance, sugar used for ritual purity must not be white. In Hoodoo, sugar water is the traditional filling of the honey or sweetening jar, made to sweeten a person or a situation in the maker's favour.