Sugar cane

(I encourage you to use the power of the internet to find a picture of sugarcane, and what it is used for. I’m told that most of the pop sold in Africa is made with sugarcane sugar instead of corn sugar, which is cool.)

The ladies at the market sell sugarcane. There are poles of it spread out on the ground. It looks kind of like overgrown bamboo, about as tall as I am, and maybe 2 inches in diameter. It costs 30 MK (about $0.20) for a stalk, and the woman I’m buying from hacks it into two foot long sections using quick sharp blows from a dull knife.

I’m quite sure this has no redeeming nutritional qualities, but it’s entertaining to eat, and tastes like (surprise surprise) sugar. When I get home, I rinse off a section, and settle in the backyard.

First step: peel off the outer layer. This is more or less like peeling green bark off a small tree with your teeth. Using my side teeth, I catch a section of bark, bite, pull it away from the stalk until it breaks, and spit it out.

After peeling, the stalk is about 1.5 inches in diameter, and ready to “eat.” Quotation marks because people don’t really eat sugarcane – it’s about the same texture as balsa wood, splintery and soft (as far as wood goes), and isn’t that edible. Instead, I bite off a small chunk, chew it a couple times to get out the sugary juice, and then spit out the mashed wood.

Repeat.

I’m not sure if there is an elegant way to eat sugarcane, but I definitely dripped the sweet water all over myself, and it ran down my face and arm. Also, I’ve decided it is probably the exact opposite of sugar-free gum: it is sugar water, it gets stuck in your teeth, and there is no point to chewing it longer than a couple seconds.

ps- After I got tired of chewing at it, I took a leftover section, and decided to hack it into smaller pieces and boil it in the water I was going to make tea from, and see if the sugar came out to sweeten the tea. It didn’t, so now I’m off to figure out how they actually process sugar cane into sugar.