SUGAR

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Rock Candy

Ingredients:  Sugar, water, stick

 

Sugar, like salt, had been a such a rare treat for people through the vast majority of our history, but today we have so much of it we don’t even think twice about where it came from or the processes that had to occur to get it to such a refined state.  

 

It can be argued that the genocide of indigenous peoples of the Caribbean and the subsequent African slave trade was completely caused by our addiction to sugar.  The Caribbean islands have an ideal climate to grow sugar cane and the European nations that colonized the islands created so much of their countries wealth by enslaving individuals to work (often to death) in the sugar plantations.  

 

Thankfully, slavery has been abolished in most parts of the world, but sugar is still grown in the tropical Caribbean and is an incredibly important part of the economies of those countries. 

 

I personally don’t have a sweet tooth really, but I found making rock candy at home is pretty fun; it takes like a week for the little stick to attract sugar crystals to grow on it, but it was still a cool process.  I tasted it, didn’t like it, no surprise there.