On Food and Cooking

countries that are the major consumers. Sugar
beets, on the other hand, are a temperate crop,
grown mainly in Europe and North America,
so they are processed all the way to refined
sugar in a single factory. Harvested sugarcane
is very perishable and must be processed
immediately; sugar beets may be stored for
weeks to months before they are processed
into sugar.
Sugar production requires two basic kinds
of work: crushing the cane to collect the juice,
and then boiling off the juice’s water. The
crushing is hard physical labor, and the
boiling requires large amounts of heat. In the
Caribbean, these needs were filled by slave
labor and deforestation. Three 19th-century
innovations helped make sugar a less costly
pleasure: the application of steam power to
the crushing; the vacuum pan, which boils the
syrup at reduced pressure and so at a lower,
gentler temperature; and the multiple
evaporator, which recycles the heat of one