Raising Cane

November 24, 2020 11:25 PM

Sugar candy tasted better than bitter truth: A long and beautiful read by Shane Mitchell on sugar cane. SL The Bitter Southerner
posted by frumiousb (9 comments total)

Wonderful article.

The bit about burning was interesting, though. Cane burning produces more Particulate into the air than the oil refineries in this month, it's horrid. If you drive st John parish in the daytime, you see the putrescent yellow clouds, like a vomit color. It's much worse in Acadiana.

I really wish that practice would stop, not for nothing is this place called cancer alley, and now, with the COVID? we need our lung health. really wish they wouldn't burn.
posted by eustatic at 5:00 AM on November 25, 2020 [1 favorite]

I live in Wellington, FL, just a couple miles east from where the Florida cane fields start. You can definitely smell it when they burn, and every so often when the wind's blowing in our direction the air is just full of it, enough to sting the eyes, and it leaves a layer of ash on everything outside. The highway that goes through the cane fields has signs all along it with flashing lights to warn of low visibility when they're burning.
posted by Daily Alice at 5:56 AM on November 25, 2020

This is a great article, thank you for posting. There's a parallel story about the ecological impacts of sugar cane farming that is important also, but this was already a long article and I can understand why that was not the focus.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:48 AM on November 25, 2020

There's another way this article could have been written, focusing on the small-scale, old-fashioned hobby distilling of Charles Poirier, extolling his operation's custom-made credentials, with the bespoke boiling pots and the supply to the fancy New Orleans restaurant, and then touching lightly upon the mechanized harvesting and refining in 3 paragraphs, with a quick quote from Frischhertz as "the way things are now."

This is much better.
posted by pykrete jungle at 7:17 AM on November 25, 2020 [2 favorites]

oh man not the point but now every time I clean my kitchen I'll be thinking about how the sugar I put in my food has been trod upon by tiny besneakered feet

Re: cane burning, a couple of months ago I was constantly checking air quality due to CA wildfires. Air quality varied between 150 (at the low end of terrible) and 300 AQI (the day the smoke literally blacked out the noonday sun). One day I zoomed out and noticed a bit of dark purple in Louisiana -- the reading was 500+AQI.
posted by grandiloquiet at 9:00 AM on November 25, 2020

The story kind of wandered around then went nowhere, but I enjoyed the journey and learned a lot!
posted by Patapsco Mike at 10:17 AM on November 25, 2020 [1 favorite]

From Thibodaux to Raceland there's fire in the fields
All the way up the bayou from Lafourche to Iberville
Dirty air, dirty laundry, dirty money, dirty rain
A dirty dark at daybreak burning the sugar cane
- Mary Gauthier
posted by TheCoug at 6:33 PM on November 25, 2020

Yeah, sorry for the derail, it s just topical for november
posted by eustatic at 10:11 PM on November 25, 2020

for anyone interested in more on the history of sugar, i highly recommend Sidney Mintz’s Sweetness and Power.
also recently watched Tasting History’s two episodes on the history of sugar, which i also recommend!
posted by LeviQayin at 1:33 AM on November 26, 2020