12 November: Sugar

This week is Sugar awareness week 2020, so here are some things you might not know about sugar.

1. The word “sugar” comes from the Sanskrit word sharkara, which means “material in a granule form.” The first written mention of sugar may be in The Mahabhashya of Patanjali, a study of Sanskrit written around 400-350 BCE.
2. People have been eating it for a very ling time. People in India have been crystallizing cane sugar for over 2,000 years. The rest of the world back then mostly used honey to sweeten things, so when Alexander the Great and his companions got to India, they were mightily impressed that people there could produce Honey without Bees. Sugar was called ‘Khanda’ in the local language, which is where the word “candy” comes from.
3. When sugar finally arrived in Britain, it was a rare and expensive luxury. King Henry III once tried to order three pounds of sugar, but expressed doubts that so much sugar even existed in England. At that time, it tended to be lumped together (see what I did there?) with other expensive tropical spices such as ginger, cinnamon, and Saffron. Sugar was used by the very wealthy to season their savoury dishes.
4. In the ninth century, sugar was used as a medicine in Iraq. It was combined with fruits and spices to make medicinal syrups, powders, and infusions. An 18^th century doctor in Britain even recommended blowing sugar powder into people’s eyes as a cure for eye irritations. While that no doubt caused more eye irritations than it cured, sugar alcohol is used today to stop children from getting ear infections.
5. Sugar is everywhere. In fact, it’s what carbohydrates are made from, and carbohydrates are the building blocks of cells. It’s a by-product of photosynthesis so it is found in all plants. There’s even a type of sugar called glycolaldehyde which has been detected deep in the Milky Way – the galaxy, not the chocolate bars. Although it goes without saying that the chocolate bars contain a fair bit of sugar. As do most of the things we eat, even things you might not expect, like cream crackers. You may also be surprised to learn that Lemons contain more sugar than Strawberries.
6. Most articles about sugar will go on and on about how bad for you it is and how many nasty diseases you’re going to get from eating it. And that too much sugar can mess with the elasticity of the skin and give you wrinkles (I hadn’t heard that one). Sugar is bad and evil, they say, and you must give it up. However, scientists have discovered, using brain scans, that sugar is as addictive as cocaine and abruptly cutting all sugar out of the diet actually causes a cold turkey reaction with pain, nausea, and flu-like symptoms.
7. You could, of course, replace sugar with artificial sweeteners like saccharin, aspartame and sucralose, which were discovered thanks to what most people would see as serious breaches of lab safety. Lab workers doing experiments which had nothing to do with taste decided to taste the stuff they were working with. Not only did they not die, they found the stuff tasted nice. In the case of sucralose the scientists were actually working on insecticides. Not something anyone in their right mind would want to eat, but a lab assistant misheard an instruction to “test” a compound, thinking his boss had told him to “taste” it. Luckily, again, it wasn’t lethal to humans and tasted nice. Talking of artificial sweet things, there’s a compound called lugduname, which is more than 200,000 times as sweet as table sugar, the sweetest substance known to science.
8. Sugar is a major component in fuel for toy rockets, which has set scientists off on a quest to find a way to make fuel for cars from sugar.
9. Sugar can also be used as a preservative. That’s the thinking behind jams, jellies and preserves. You’d hardly want to use salt to preserve fruit, after all. Large amounts of sugar scupper Bacteria by making them lose Water by osmosis.
10. In the 13^th century, European royal families had a fashion for making sculptures from sugar to show off at their dinner parties. Called ‘subtleties’, they were impressive to look at but weren’t edible. Nuts, pastes, and gums in order to make it more malleable, a bit like clay.

Killing Me Softly

Sebastian Garrett is an assassin. It wasn’t his first choice of vocation, but nonetheless, he’s good at it, and can be relied upon to get the job done. He’s on top of his game.

Until he is contracted to kill Princess Helena of Galorvia. She is not just any princess. Sebastian doesn’t bargain on his intended victim being a super-heroine who gives as good as she gets. Only his own genetic variant power saves him from becoming the victim, instead of Helena. 

Fate has another surprise in store. Sebastian was not expecting to fall in love with her.

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