What is the sugar cube equivalent in some common foods and drinks? I’m assuming that this series of photos is accurate, and there were some surprises in there for me.
The amount of sugar in your food – in sugar cubes
What is the sugar cube equivalent in some common foods and drinks? I’m assuming that this series of photos is accurate, and there were some surprises in there for me.
In my coffee only sugar:)
I like sugar, but put a single granule in my coffee and I can tell…
We're using stevia in our green smoothies (when needed) – the only non-sugar sweetener that doesn't turn my face into Calvin (of the … and Hobbes strip) looking at broccoli casserole that his mother served him.
But it is always about moderation, right?
From a speech by Terence McKenna regarding the sugar-slavery connection:
"Another example that's interesting, that shows how blinded and unaware we are of how drugs have shaped our society…We all know that slavery ended in the United States in the Civil War. And most people, if you question them, think that slavery existed before the Civil War in many places back into ancient times. This is not true at all. Slavery died in Western civilization with the collapse of the Roman empire. During the Dark Ages and the medieval period, if you owned a slave, you owned *one* slave. It was the equivalent of owning a Ferrari or a Lamborghini. It was an index of immense wealth, and social status, and that slave would be a houseboy, or a cook or something like that, someone close in to you, taking care of you. It was inconceivable to use slave labor in the production of an agricultural product, until Europe acquired an insatiable desire for sugar.
Now, let's think about sugar for a moment. Nobody needs sugar. You can go from birth to the grave without ever having a teaspoon full of white sugar. You will never miss it. Throughout the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages, sugar was a drug, a medicine. It was used to pack wounds, to keep wounds septic. And it was very expensive and there was very little of it. Nobody even knew where it came from. It was called cane honey, because they knew it came from some kind of jointed grass, but nobody had a clear picture of what sugar was.
Well, when you extract sugar from sugar cane, it requires, in pre-modern technology, a temperature of about 130 degrees. You cannot — free men will not work sugar. It's too unpleasant. You faint, you die from heat prostration. You have to take prisoners and you have to chain them to the sugar vats. And so, before the discovery of America, in the fifty years before the discovery of America, they began growing sugar cane in the east Atlantic islands, Madeira and the Canary Islands. And they brought Africans, and sold them into slavery specifically for sugar production.
Now when we get American history, they tell you that slaves were used to produce cotton and tobacco. In fact, this is not quite the truth. They had to find things for slaves to do, because they brought so many slaves to the New World to work sugar, and they had so many children, that then they just expanded and said, 'Well, we've used slaves to work sugar, we might as well use them in cotton and tobacco production.' In 1800, every ounce of sugar entering England was being produced by slave labor of the most brutal and demeaning sort. And there was very little protest over this. It was just accepted. To this day, sugar cultivation in the third world is a kind of institutionalized slavery. Christian, you know, the Popes, the kings of Europe, all of Christian civilization acquiesced in the bringing back of a practice that had been discredited during the fall of Rome, in order to supply the insatiable need for sugar. It was an addiction. It had no cultural defense whatsoever."
Terence McKenna
Excerpted w/o permission from
'A Weekend With Terence McKenna' Feb. 1992