Gingerbread Men

Nature Talk
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My Christmas Eve project was making gingerbread men. And that got me thinking about the far-flung biodiversity it takes to do this.

Starting with the ginger – becuse they wouldn’t be gingerbread without ginger – I find that Zingiber officinale, after which the Ginger Family Zingiberaceae is named, is a true cultigen that does not exist in a wild state, and originated in what is termed “Maritime Southeast Asia,” that is the Sunda and Philippine archipelagoes. Yet it has been traded for so long that it was known to the ancient Greeks and Romans.

Then the cinnamon. The true cinnamon, Cinnamomum verum in the Laurel Family Lauraceae originated in Sri Lanka; but I believe that my supply is the cassia cinnamon, Cinnamomum cassia, native to southern China. Both of these were also known to the ancient Greeks and Romans.

And let’s not forget the cloves, Syzygium aromaticum, in the Myrtle Family Myrtaceae. This is endemic to a single archipelago, the Malukus – once known as the Spice Islands because of their three endemic spices. These are especially evocative for me because they could be seen on the horizon during my crossing-the-equator initiation.

The spice needs to be set off with sweetness. The brown sugar and molasses are extracted from sugarcane, Saccharum officinale, in the Grass Family Poaceae. This one is fascinating in that it originated in New Guinea and was carried in prehistoric times as far as Polynesia and Madagascar, but crystalline sugar as we know it was invented in India, as described in Sanskrit and Pali texts.

All this is very well, but the structure of the cookie comes from plain old wheat flour. Plain? Triticum aestivum – also in the Grass Family – is a Middle Eastern species, although it reached Britain and Northern Europe in ancient times.

Five species in four botanical families, all produced by different ecosystems. What ecological interactions must they have had in evolutionary time? The Wikipedia articles about the spices emphasized how expensive they were historically. How things have changed; now, when I am in the Dominican Republic, I can go to a produce stand and purchase fresh ginger root that someone local probably grew in their garden.

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Huh, I thought most sugar came from a sugar beet cultivar of Beta vulgaris, or is this only true for white sugar?

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Sugar beets are grown in climates that are too cold for sugar cane.

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Google says only around 20-35% (from different sources) is from beets, here though it’s all 100.

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Yeah, I think it depends on where you are. I grew up in an area where sugar beets were grown and processed, so beet sugar was our “local” sugar. I can get cane sugar without problems here in the US at the big store chains. I just checked the generic package of sugar I have in my kitchen cabinet and it says it’s pure cane sugar. However, I suspect in Germany you may have to search for pure cane sugar in places like whole/organic food stores.

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I always wonder with that one: when does a human-made hybrid cultivar become its own species? “Common” wheat is an allohexaploid, made by crossing a tetraploid wheat cultivar (durum wheat, Triticum turgidum) with a diploid wild species at some point during its domestication in the Fertile Crescent about 8500 years ago.

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Back in Germany, I would only buy the brown (cane) sugar for special occasions as it would be harder to find it (I think that changed a bit now) and also more expensive. The white sugar from the beet is most certainly the “normal” one there.
Here in Colombia I am buying the brown cane sugar produced in Colombia, which is available everywhere and more common then the white sugar.

It really depends on where you are :-)

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And then there’s the butter :cow2: and eggs :rooster:

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I don’t think I’ve ever had beet sugar, unless I’ve eaten it unknowingly as an ingredient in something else. When I buy white sugar it says cane.

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Cape Town owes its existence (as a modern city) to the Dutch East India company and ships carrying spices. Place of sweet water - Camissa. With Table Mountain - Hoerikwagga.

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What a wonderful perspective! Thank you for the information!

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Sugar is sugar whether the source is sugar beets or cane. It is a pure crystalline compound, a disaccharide composed of one half glucose and one half fructose. Brown sugar is made by adding molasses back to the white stuff. This goes for the white sugar sold in paper bags in most grocery stores here in the US. I cannot speak to brown or partially refined sugars from other parts of the world.

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Which is ironic because molasses comes from processing it into the white stuff in the first place. Before industrial refining, brown sugar was a stage on the way to white sugar.

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Which molasses gets added back though, just cane sugar for brown sugar? At least on the wiki for molasses, both sugar cane and beet sugar processing creates molasses.

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White skin, white bread, white sugar. Such a strange world with broken logic.
And then they sell back to us the good stuff they took out.

Bran and wheat germ from the flour. Instead of whole grain, and the wheat before Must Have More Gluten. The say a loaf of bread is the same size and shape as after WWII - so people don’t notice that the weight and food value is minimal by comparison, and the difference is made up by a long list of additives instead.
Molasses with the vitimultimins from nature’s sugar. (And fibre from cane for sustainable paper pulp)

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This seems to have become a sugar source discussion. My favorite sugar is maple sugar, boiled down from sap.

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Agave is picking up market share as an alternative

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Yeah, well, not all alternatives are what they’re cracked up to be. A saying I invented:

Stevia is like sin: its devotees like to talk it up, say things like ‘a hundred times sweeter than sugar,’ but somehow they always forget to mention the lingering bitter aftertaste after the momentary sweetness is gone.

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