Preparing for Saint Zita’s bake sale last weekend, I added sugar to my shopping list. In a rush, I stopped at Kroger to get some, instead of buying from the bulk section of the Mountain People’s Co- Op as has been my habit of late. I skimmed the store’s sugar section for unbleached granulated sugar. Why unbleached? I didn’t even think about it, that choice was out of habit. Preferring natural and less-processed food, I grew up in a family who chose unbleached and unrefined options. It has to be better, right? I grabbed a bag off the shelf, and noted the non-GMO certification logo, and other typical language indicating I held a wholesome product. Then some verbiage on the corner of the bag caught my eye: “Bone char free.” “Oh good,” I thought, followed instantly with “Wait, what?!” Why would there by bone char in my sugar? Into the internet I delved. I quickly learned bone char filtration in refining sugar cane is standard practice in the United States. At an early stage in the process, sugar cane syrup is poured through filters made from cow pelvic bones which have been heated to between 400 and 500 degrees celsius, ground and used to make enormous filters which remove impurities. There are other ways to whiten and remove impurities from sugar, but they are more expensive, so most refineries here continue the bone char method. Australia, New Zealand and many European countries have banned the use of bone char in sugar processing and instead use reverse osmosis, ion exchange or synthetic carbons. While apparently bone char is cheaper than other methods, I do wonder about the global costs. USDA regulations prohibit using the bones of United States cattle, due to the possible presence of mad cow disease. Instead, we import cow bones from India, Afghanistan, Argentina and Pakistan. I read that these cows had to die of natural causes, although I couldn’t find out why. Let’s back up to the filters again — each one measures “10 to 40 feet high and five to 20 feet wide. Each column, which can filter 30 gallons of sugar per minute for 120 hours at a time, may hold 70,000 pounds of char,” according to the Vegetarian Resource Group website. This site determined the bones of 7,800 cows are needed to make each of these filters. Refineries have and use multiple filters. One source I found said refineries need to replace the filters about every five years. Using the byproducts of animals slaughtered for meat isn’t a new practice, and I can accept the logic of it, given that humans consume a lot of meat. However, importing tens of thousands of pounds of bone from cows which died naturally halfway around the world to simply make sugar whiter and homogenous doesn’t make sense to me. I wonder about the environmental impact of this business. While no actual bone remains in the sugar, as a vegetarian I’m gonna pass. Unfortunately, white granulated sugar is not the only product filtered through thousands of bones. Powdered sugar and brown sugar are also refined through “natural carbon” (i.e. bone char). Beet sugar and organic sugars are always bone char free though. Faced with the need to change my sweet-tooth-satisfying habits, I wonder if this constitutes a knowledge is power situation, or if it falls into the ignorance is bliss category.
