My first exposure to ‘beet’ sugar was during my year of specializing in pastry at cooking school. We always used ‘cane’ sugar, and a number of my instructors warned us that ‘beet’ sugar didn’t react the same as ‘cane’ sugar in the context of breads, cakes, pastries and candy and did yield the same results in terms of texture and taste. Having always achieved great results with cane sugar, I never thought twice about experimenting, and at the time I didn’t even know where to get beet sugar.
My next exposure to beet sugar was literally just in passing about a half dozen years later. I was in France on a buying trip and I scheduled a visit to one of our preserves producers at the time Tea Together. Judith and Nick Gifford had moved from London to a farm in the Pas de Calais region of northwest France near the Belgian border to make preserves and marmalades with organic fruit and organic cane sugar. Nick picked me up at the train station, and we drove the winding country roads past acre after acre of sugar beet fields. The region had once had a diversified agricultural landscape slowly shifted into mono-crop mode in the decades after WWII, and it saddened me - large scale mono-cropping always disturbs me, but ‘sugar beets’ seemed to me to be an ‘alien’ way of producing sugar. Of course, I didn’t even need to ask why they were buying imported cane sugar when they lived in a sea of sugar beets.
I’m just not waxing nostalgic here because of the impending holiday season. If you happened to hear the report a week or so ago on NPR, you know that over half the ‘sugar’ sold in this country is now ‘beet’ sugar - something I didn’t know - and that the ‘beet’ sugar industry has been transformed over the last three years by Monsanto’s genetically modified Roundup-ready beet sugar seeds. The NPR report indicated that “virtually the entire the sugar beet crop in the United States is genetically engineered…” so if you’re using beet sugar, odds are it is made from GMO sugar beets! The focus of the NPR story was the legal fight by organic farmers to prevent any more plantings of Monsanto sugar beet seeds for fear of contamination of their organic sugar beet, table beet and chard seeds with the GMO pollen. A judge has granted a permanent injunction against planting until the USDA can study the effect of cross-pollination.
Back on the sugar front, a little online research brought me to the 1999 San Francisco Chronicle article, Sugar Sugar, which examined the differences in ‘beet’ and ‘cane’ sugar. In many respects it just confirmed what I had been taught in culinary school, but more importantly, the article outlined the distribution and sourcing of ‘beet’ sugar in this country. Basically, if the label doesn’t indicate the source of the sugar, odds are it’s made from sugar beets - unfortunately according to the article, some private label brands switch back and forth based on cost, so they don’t label the source. When in doubt buy only sugar labeled “cane sugar” - for better baking and dessert results and to protect the 'real' seeds from contamination.
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