To command is an uncertain means of being obeyed.
By M. Bjaanes
Ordinary sugar, cane sugar, is produced from two widely different kinds of plants. The first is the sugar cane, which is grown in tropical and subtropical regions. It has a very sugar-rich juice, and from this cane sugar is extracted. Large quantities of sugar are still produced from this plant species, about half of world production. Java and Cuba are the largest producers of sugar cane.
The sugar cane was the sole producer of sugar right up until the Napoleonic Wars. Then in France, forced by the blockade, people had to look around for other ways to obtain sugar. A French chemist then tried to make sugar from the juice of the sugar beet. This was the first beginning of the great sugar industry we now have in Europe and other temperate regions of the earth.
The sugar beet, Beta vulgaris, is a root crop belonging to the same family as the red beet and the fodder beet. It is distinguished by the fact that virtually its entire content of carbohydrates is pure cane sugar, which can be extracted from the juice by manufacture.
The sugar beet now grown in agriculture in most European countries is the result of over a hundred years of breeding work, and by this time the sugar content has been increased from about 8 % to nearly 20 % for the best strains of our day. At the same time the beet itself has changed from a small, uneven, branched root into the large, even root shown in the picture below. …