Tales of Typhoid and Sugar

Who’s ready for an update?

This week I finished one of my prophylactic medications! No one can call me Mary – typhoid Mary, that is. For those of you who have never been lucky enough to go through the typhoid vaccination process, let me explain. It’s a pill you have to take every 48 hours for 4 doses. And it has be refrigerated. AND it has to be taken on an empty stomach (1 hour prior to eating or 2-3 hours after eating). Plus you can’t be on any antibiotics. Oh, and wait, insurance doesn’t cover it either and it’s nearly $100. In fact, prior to purchasing my vaccine, I had purchased a cello; my credit card company texted me to make sure fraud wasn’t happening due to the cost of both purchases so close within 1 hour at two different locations.  But I digress; that’s another story for a different blog.

So what is typhoid anyway? Typhoid fever is caused by a bacterium called Salmonella typhi. Symptoms include fever, chills, stomach pain, and “rose spots” – faint, salmon-colored spots on the stomach and trunk. It’s not common in the US/Europe, but can be found in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Philippines, Africa, Mexico, El Salvador, and, yep, you guessed it, Haiti. It’s spread through food and water (cooking, cleaning) contaminated with fecal bacteria. It’s recommended to drink bottled (or boiled x 1 minute) water, avoid ice, consume only fully cooked, hot food, avoid vegetables, eat only fruits with peels that you remove yourself, wash your hands before cooking or eating, and avoid street vendors.

And that's the story with typhoid. On to sugar...

To prepare for the trip, I’ve started listening to this podcast about Haiti’s history. Haiti was largely economically fueled by the sugar cane industry, which was the main reason for its large slave population. This brought up the fact that I have no idea how sugar is created. So I did some research. Sugar cane is a type of perennial grass that grows to anywhere from 6 to 20 feet tall and is only found is tropical/subtropical areas. The stalk is harvested, leaving the root to continue several cycles of growth.

After harvest, the stalks are taken to a factory for processing, which consists of several steps.

1. The stalks are crushed to extract the juice. The leftover fibers serve as fuel for the fire for other parts of the process.
2. The juice is quite dirty with, well, dirt as well as leftover pieces of green plant. It is separated from the "impurities" by using a cousin of chalk called slaked lime that settles out the dirt, which is then sent back to the fields. 
3. The sugary juice is then evaporated using steam created by the fire fueled by the crushed stalk fibers. Through this evaporation process, the juice turns into a syrup. 
4. The syrup is then boiled to burn off excess moisture and make conditions right for crystal formation. Occasionally, it needs a little help and "sugar dust" is added to the mixture. Once the crystals form, the mixture is centrifuged to spin off the excess liquid (called molasses at this point), much like a final spin on the washing machine.
5. The sugar crystals get one good last blast of heat to dry it out every more before it goes to storage. It is usually shipped to its final county in raw form and processed once there into refined sugar. 

Photo of "sugar cane and refined sugar" courtesy of these peeps

So, next time you have something sweet, think about the journey it took from being in the field to being in your food :)