Not-So Pure-Cane Sugar

I’ve always wanted a reason to not eat sugar. I mean a really good reason, not because it’s not good for me, because that reason just hasn’t worked very well, I’ll gladly harm my own body for a moment of heaven. No, I needed a good animal- or earth-friendly reason

So this falls under my commitment to “let no animal suffer” in my name, which by the way, is getting more and more difficult as I read more and more.
But back to sugar –

The white refined sugar Americans love so much is white because it is run through a bone char filter during the processing. What is a bone char filter? Well, it’s created from the most dense bones of a cow. Of the 82 pounds of bone from a cow, only about 20 pounds are load-bearing bones, mostly the pelvis, which are used for the bone char.
The bones, almost exclusively from non-USA sources, are baked for 12 hours at temperatures over 700 degrees to remove bacteria etc and thus create a char. You then have 9 pounds of char from one cow source.

An average sugar processing plant runs a filter processing 30 gallons of sugar per minute for 120 hours, each requiring 70,000 pounds of bone char. So doing the math, that’s almost 7800 cow bones being used for just one filter. Of course some plants run multiple filters at a time. That’s a lot of dead cow. Mind you hey only have to change the char every 5 years or so, but it’s still a lot of dead cow.

Cane sugar is the only kind of sugar run through these filters. Beet sugar is not, however it is common for cane and beet sugar to share the same post-filter vats, so you really can’t say for sure that it’s char-free. There is one plant in New York that is using an ion filter, but until now it’s been more expensive than bone char. But even the sugar from that plant is indistinguishable to you and I at the grocery store because it’s not packaged any different than the other plants as they’re all sold under the same names.

Organic sugar, however, is always char free. I’ve been eating almost exclusively organic and vegan for the last few weeks anyway but there have been occasional bits of candy and cake finding their way to my mouth. Again wondering to myself, why do I need a reason other than personal good health to not eat sugar?? Now I have the cow gross-out reason.

Enough of that, now a quick tip about genetically modified and organic produce. If your produce item code starts with a “9”, it’s organic. If your produce item code starts with an “8”, it’s genetically modified. Now, just run out to your supermarket and try and find an “8”, chances are you won’t. You see, they thought we’d PREFER genetically modified food, but the opposite proved true, we avoided it. So shortly after this was instituted the “authorities” decided we really didn’t need to know if it was genetically modified, so they took the “8” off. That’s how much they care for us, the big corporations and government, they care enough to mislead us into buying what we otherwise wouldn’t. .Baaa

Now where'd I put those organic cookies?