Sugars

The sweetness we taste in sugarcane stems, sugar-beet roots, apple fruit and palmyra sap all comes from varying proportions of the same broad family of sweet, soluble carbohydrates called sugars, used across foods and beverages; sugarcane and palmyra sap are particularly well suited to efficient commercial extraction. Sugarcane (Saccharum officinarum, family Poaceae) is the result of repeated back-crossing between Saccharum officinarum from New Guinea and the wild Saccharum spontaneum of India to improve quality, and it is cultivated in every district of Tamil Nadu except Kanyakumari and the Nilgiris; it feeds a whole ecosystem of industries — sugar mills producing refined sugar, distilleries turning molasses into ethyl alcohol, and countless small units making jaggery — besides being sold as fresh, refreshing cane juice. Stevia or Sweet leaf (Stevia rebaudiana, family Asteraceae), native to Brazil and Paraguay and grown in Himachal Pradesh, Gujarat and Tamil Nadu, is a calorie-free sugar substitute some 200 times sweeter than sugar; the compound responsible for that sweetness, steveocide, makes it a popular natural alternative to white sugar for diabetic and health-conscious consumers. Palmyra (Borassus flabellifer, family Arecaceae), the state tree of Tamil Nadu and native to tropical Africa, Asia and New Guinea, grows across the state, especially in coastal districts; its inflorescence …