Advent Botany 2015 – Day 20: Sugar

By Jeanne Osnas and Katherine Preston (Botanists in the Kitchen) @BitKBlog

Sugar is an excellent preservative.

Sugar is an excellent preservative.

Editor’s note: Botany meets the chopping board today in the first of two stories by the Botanists in the Kitchen.  Looking back through their blog you can meet an extraordinary diversity of brassicas to supplement the traditional sprout as well as many other kitchen focused plant stories.  But today there is a distinctly sweet taste to their #AdventBotany Blog….

 

Sugar plums dance, sugar cookies disappear from Santa’s plate, and candied fruit cake gets passed around and around. Crystals of sugar twinkle in the Christmas lights, like scintillas of sunshine on the darkest day of the year. Katherine and Jeanne explore the many plant sources of sugar.

Even at a chemical level, there is something magical and awe-inspiring about sugar. Plants – those silent, gentle creatures – have the power to harness air and water and the fleeting light energy of a giant fireball 93 million miles away to forge sugar, among the most versatile compounds on earth, and a fuel used by essentially all living organisms.

Read the rest of this blog here.

Advent Botany 2015 Day 19, Day 21

Index to Advent Botany 2015

 

 

About Alastair Culham

A professional botanist and biologist with an interest in promoting biological knowledge and awareness to all.
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3 Responses to Advent Botany 2015 – Day 20: Sugar

  1. Pingback: Advent Botany 2015 – Day 20: Sugar « Herbology Manchester

  2. Pingback: Advent Botany 2015 – Day 21: Winter mint | Culham Research Group

  3. Pingback: Whewell’s Gazette: year 2, Vol. #23 | Whewell's Ghost

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