Sugar-producing Plants

2024 Author: Gavin MacAdam | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:38

Rarely does a person not like to eat something sweet, replenishing the loss of vitality and mental strength, or trying to overcome a nervous breakdown. The city man is so accustomed to shop sweets in the form of sugar, sweets, cakes … that he does not even think that plants "produce" sugar for him. Moreover, there are such plants, the leaves and berries of which are hundreds, or even thousands, times sweeter than sugar

If you conduct a survey on the street on the topic: “What plants does a person produce sugar from?”, Then the leaders among the answers are likely to be “sugar beet” and “sugar cane”. After all, the educated person knows from school that 60 percent of the world's sugar production is due to the merit of Sugarcane. Sugar cane is followed by sugar beet, which, unlike the thermophilic cane, is not afraid of cold weather, and is also very drought-resistant, and therefore a couple of centuries ago allowed Europeans to replace cane sugar with beet sugar. In the main photo, cane sugar: white and brown. In the Egyptian city of Hurghada, brown cane sugar can be bought at the market. It is given a conical shape with a top similar to a mushroom cap, which lies on the saucer [they managed to gnaw off the cone-shaped base before the "photo session":)]. And the following photo shows the most popular plant-based sources of sugar: Sugar beet and Sugarcane:

But, the list of terrestrial plants containing sugar is much richer. In principle, all flowering plants, with rare exceptions, accumulate sweet nectar in their miniature flower pantries. But not everyone can get to the sweet treat. During its long life on Earth, each plant has “entered into a contract for mutual services” with certain species of other living inhabitants of the planet. In exchange for a flower pollination service, the plants share their sweet nectar with insects, small Hummingbirds and even bats.

There was such a curiosity in history: enterprising guys decided to expand the growing area of the Orchid with the name Vanilla flat-leaved (it is, fragrant Vanilla or simply Vanilla), since its fragrant pod fruits were popular and in demand as a spice all over the world. They brought the plant from America to Indonesia and the island of Madagascar, which had a climate that was perfect for growing Orchids. The plant took root in a new place and delighted entrepreneurs with exuberant flowering. However, the turn did not reach the fruits for which the business was started. It turned out that this type of Orchid admits only one species of bees to its sweet storerooms, which were not found in their new place of residence. The matter got off the ground only after a teenage servant who helped care for the Orchids tried to manually pollinate the flowers. Since then, hand pollination of Vanilla has continued on new lands, which inflates prices for natural spice.

Plants from which man learned to take away part of their labor for his "sweet life" is a deciduous tree from the Maple genus, which is called the Sugar Maple. The sap of the tree is collected in the same way as we collect birch sap, bring it to the state of syrup, and then to sugar. The taste of this sugar differs from the sugars we are used to, and is popular with the inhabitants of Canada.

Sweet juice also flows through the veins of one tree species of the Pine genus, which is distinguished by the presence in its ranks of the famous centenarians of the planet. While the "Bristlecone Pine" and "Bristlecone Pine Intermountain" break records for longevity, observing from the height of the mountains for earthly life for 2000 to 4500 years, "Lambert Pine", or, as it is popularly called, "Pine sugar”, shares with people sweet juice, the quality of which some sugar connoisseurs put above sweet maple juice. In addition, the Lambert Pine leads among the pines in tree height and in the length of cones with edible and large nuts.

The twenty-first century found Humanity in an alarming state. People are more and more successfully overgrown with fat folds, and the disease called "diabetes" begins at an earlier age. It is believed that one of the culprits of this situation is the excessive consumption of sugar and all kinds of sweets by people. And then scientists remembered a plant called "Stevia honey" (lat. Stevia rebaudiana), the leaves of which are three hundred times sweeter than sugar. Today Stevia is offered to patients as a sugar substitute.