this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2025
645 points (98.6% liked)
memes
16588 readers
2462 users here now
Community rules
1. Be civil
No trolling, bigotry or other insulting / annoying behaviour
2. No politics
This is non-politics community. For political memes please go to !politicalmemes@lemmy.world
3. No recent reposts
Check for reposts when posting a meme, you can only repost after 1 month
4. No bots
No bots without the express approval of the mods or the admins
5. No Spam/Ads
No advertisements or spam. This is an instance rule and the only way to live.
A collection of some classic Lemmy memes for your enjoyment
Sister communities
- !tenforward@lemmy.world : Star Trek memes, chat and shitposts
- !lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world : Lemmy Shitposts, anything and everything goes.
- !linuxmemes@lemmy.world : Linux themed memes
- !comicstrips@lemmy.world : for those who love comic stories.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Potatoes, tomatoes, cocoa, coffee, pasta, peppers, tea, nearly every form of cooking spice; all this shit that Europeans and North Americans claim as culinary cultural heritage are actually ideas that were taken/repurposed from another country/culture/region.
But that's okay, just dont be a racist bigot about it, is all.
Sugar!
Before Europeans discovered the sugarcane they only had the natural sweetness of things to make sweet food, the sweetest of which is sugar beet, whose sugar is lot harder to purify than that of sugar cane.
How sweet can cake be without some reasonably pure form of sugar you can add. Did the concept of cake even exist in Europe before that?
Edit: nevermind - I forgot the sweetness of fruit (oops).
Most sugar is made from beets nowadays in Europe.
Most sugar consumed in Europe is from sugarcane.
Most sugar produced in Europe is from sugarbeets, but that production is still less than the imported sugar from sugarcane (because sugarcane is just vastly more productive).
They didn't extract sugar from sugar beet back in the 14th century. In fact only in 1747 was it discovered that beets had sucrose and sugar beets themselves were only created after that, via selective breeding, so I don't think they had sugar as we know it back then. However as somebody else pointed out, they had honey which has a very high concentration of sugar.
I suspected sugar wasn't extracted from sugar beet in the Middle Ages or earlier but I wasn't sure and prompted by your question I went searching for it and indeed that is the case since sugar beets didn't even exist back then.