"What a terrible smell" my father asked, "what could it be?"
"They're boiling sugar beets", I said, "there's a sugar factory here." We were passing through Cantley in Norfolk, England.
Sugar beets make syrup, and bread, and you can use them as a vegetable, almost anything. Having sugar beets, and little else, instilled in me a hatred of refined beet sugar that has never gone away. Not a hatred of sweet things, mind you; just of that one hideous product.
Hideous because refined sugar is, in the nutritional sense, the most unnecessary, even dangerous substance imaginable. The famous French slimming guru Michel Montignac put it, "sugar", he said in his book Eat Yourself Slim, "is a poison and should be treated as such."
Couldn't agree more. And of all sugars, it happens to be beet sugar that is by some distance the worst. Cane sugar, although just as unnecessary, is a bit better. Honey a bit better yet. But honestly, all of these are best avoided and replaced by artificial sweeteners, of which there is now a great variety.
A poison it is, but how addicted the world seems to be to it. People put it in absolutely everything, so that even the most fervent sugar hater can't avoid taking it in unless he gives all processed foods a wide berth. Open a tin of peas and you'll find there's sugar in it. A frozen TV dinner: ditto. A simple loaf of bread: the same. There's sugar everywhere. No surprise, really, for sugar is a huge business; the world annually produces in the region of 135 million tonnes of the stuff.
The EU fears 'the European sugar revolution'. The first shot in this bloody conflict was going to be fired by the European Commissioner for agriculture, Denmark's Mariann Fischer Boel who has drawn up a plan for the drastic reduction - a phasing out, rather - of all subsidies for sugar farmers. As things stand, European sugar beet growers are guaranteed a price for their product that is three times higher than the world market price.
A slap in the face for sugar farmers in the rest of the world, especially in developing countries like Brazil, India, Thailand and Mexico who find it all but impossible to compete. Even their own domestic markets are distorted by huge dumping of European sugar; a high guaranteed price is an open invitation to excess production. Thus, Europe produces not one but three types of sugar: A sugar (for EU consumption), B sugar (for reserve stocks) and C sugar (excess for dumping in poor countries and putting their cane farmers out of business).
High time that an end was put to this selfish dishonesty (or is it dishonest selfishness?) and Ms Fischer Boel has my full support. If she manages to convince the 25 European agriculture ministers of the rightness of her scheme then be prepared for a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth from among the European farming community. A sugar cube is a small price to pay for fairness.
The one problem with the Commissioner's plan is that it will also dversely affect many sugar farmers in poor countries such as Jamaica, Mozambique and Malawi, who have a special deal with the EU allowing them to sell quantities of cane sugar to Europe at the guaranteed EU price.
They, too, will see their income drop by about 40 percent over the next two years. A generous compensation scheme - to tide them over until they've switched to a less harmful and teeth-rotting type of crop - would be the least the EU could do for them.
But still. Sugar? There ought to be a law.
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