Sustainability experiments in the lush city of North Vancouver
July 10, 2008 at 6:58 pm
· Filed under Local Products, Observations and tagged: Local Products, organic, Rogers Sugar, sugar
(Preamble: I know I shouldn’t be eating sugar but I can’t help it. Lets say that baking is part of my therapy. That makes it okay.)
Rogers Sugar just merged with Lantic Canada. This now brings Canada’s three sugar refineries under one operating roof. There are cane sugar refineries in Vancouver and Montreal and a sugar beet refinery in Alberta. Rogers’ old webpage stated that Rogers brand sugar was minimum 70% sugar beet at all times and usually hovered around 90%. This meant that the product was largely local. I stopped buying Rogers organic sugar because that product is 100% sugar cane and therefore totally imported. Easy choice I thought as I always value local over organic.
The new webpage for the merged companies is less specific about what portion of packaged product is from sugar beet and much more specific about the use of animal bone char. Sugar refining requires the removal of sugar-containing syrups using a purification method. The Vancouver cane refinery still uses animal bone char while the Alberta sugar beet refinery uses lime and carbon dioxide. Lovely. As a Vancouverite I am really curious to know which plant my granulated sugar comes from. If the serial number starts with an “A” the sugar is from Alberta. If the SN starts with the letter “B” (for bone char?) the sugar originated at the Vancouver cane refinery.
I am going to the store later today and if the Rogers sugar is from Vancouver I think I will be switching back to organic. If my sugar is coming from Central America anyways it might as well be free of pesticides and animal bones.
Permalink
Vanessa wrote @ July 10, 2008 at 8:55 pm
Local vs. Organic - a very interesting dilemna. I think of animal bone char every time I see white sugar - it was one of the ickier things I learned about food while vegan.
I wonder if the sugar company realizes that people do care about this stuff. You, me, and lots of other people would go out of our way to buy more local organic sugar - processed here in Vancouver without critter bones, and made from Alberta sugar beets.
I wonder what “brown” sugar made from beets would look like, vs. from sugar cane. Capers sells a “BC Brown” sugar, and it is dark, wet and molasses-y, but essentially just very dark brown sugar. I assume it’s made from beets.
Kat wrote @ July 10, 2008 at 10:22 pm
Vanessa I seriously doubt that any brown sugar is made with local sugar beets. The definition of molasses is the first impurity that is removed in the refining of cane sugar. There is no molasses generated from the refining of sugar beets. Obviously no sugar cane grows here so I don’t know how they can get away with calling brown sugar “BC”. I would ask someone about that althoug you aren’t likely to find anyone that knows where the raw sugar came from!
[...] bookmarks tagged sugar Local or Organic? The Rogers Sugar Test Case saved by 4 others whittneyD bookmarked on 07/12/08 | [...]
maus wrote @ July 12, 2008 at 9:34 pm
GAH. I did not know these things about sugar refining. I think I’m going to switch permanently to other sweeteners (local honey and stevia, and fruit juice/mash where appropriate).
Bone char. GAH. Thank you for bringing this to my attention.
HTML-Tags:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>
