Oh sugar, another ethical question.

[growingthings]

I appreciate thatmy local factory only runs for the five month season. I guess that perhaps, being brought up, and living in a rural agricultural situation that perhaps I did not make myself clear, that my life and many other in this area are dictated by the seasonality of the crops that I am surrounded by and perhaps I have neglected to make things a bit clearer.

My DH himself has had to do his stint on the Beet lorrys and is on a regular basis to be found underneath one (repairing it - not throwing himself down in protest!)

[ina]

One of the worst memories of a trip with a tractor was delivering sugar beet to the factory, from the first farm I worked on... I was only the apprentice, so naturally I was given the smaller tractor. My boss was going ahead with the bigger (and much faster) tractor. I still had two trailers behind me, and we had to go through the centre of a large city to get to the factory - in the morning, so just hitting the rush hour! Tractors with two trailers need a lot of space, which normal car drivers generally don't appreciate... So I was constantly on edge, and absolutely exhausted by the time we reached the factory...

[Green Aura]

Sorry if I don't sound suitably sympathetic Ina but you're so lucky - I've always wanted to drive a tractor! Oh and a Mack truck too...

[ina]

Tractors nowadays are different beasts altogether! The few times I did drive one in recent years, I always had the feeling I needed a computer degree before I could even get it started... You used to be able to solve problems with a spanner, a hammer and a kick in the right place. Now, everything is electronic, and hydraulic... I don't really find it fun anymore. One small place I worked for (in 2000) had a little grey Fergie - now that was my kind of tractor!

[Graye]

Looking for something totally unrelated I found this about extracting your own sugar. I don't have a juice extractor so can't even think about trying it but it sounds like a challenge! Not much "product" at the end of the day though...

Sugar (sucrose) is extracted from sugar beet in factories. However, you don’t necessarily need an industrial refinery to get sugar out of a sugar beet. You can do it on your kitchen table, if the urge takes you. Richters Herbs in the USA have supplied details, based on home experiments. You will need an orange juicer, a percolator top, a large pan and a meat slicer, grinder or grater. Firstly, take two washed sugar beet, each weighing around 4-5 Kg (8-10 lbs), and put them through a slicing, grinding or grating machine. Then boil the processed beet in ample water in a large pan until soft and mushy (around one hour). Strain off the juice and reserve the pulp (it can be fed to animals).

The next step is to purify the juice. For three quarts of liquid, add half a cup of milk of lime (a suspension of calcium hydroxide with a milky constituency) and a shot of seltzer water. Let the juice stand for about two hours, after which time the semi-solids should have settled to the bottom. The water is then carefully poured from the top.

The semi-solid sugar mass obtained after the liquid has been poured off is cooked carefully and slowly. It takes around an hour and a half to reduce it to a molasses-like thickness, stirring frequently. When boiling is complete, around a cup and a half of a viscous black liquid should remain. This reduced sugar mass is poured through a percolator top into an orange juicer. The fast-spinning juicer separates the molasses from the refined sugar. The juicer should be covered as the spinning throws the white sugar onto the bowl of the juicer, while the molasses drips through the spout into a waiting container. This should produce around a cup of sugar, and half a cup of black-strap molasses (treacle). The damp white sugar can be air-dried before use.

[ina]

Interesting - but it sounds like an awfully expensive way of getting your sugar...

[Annpan]

There was a plant named here a few months back it had something like 15x the strength of sweetner.... surley that is the best sugar substitute? though, I wonder how it would do in baking

[Clara]

Stevia, I think. There has been some suggestion that there could be other problems related to it (poss carcinogen?), though the stevia-heads say this is a sugar industry conspiracy. I don't know either way, probably needs some investigation.