"The ever-curious Greeks were glad to learn of sugar cane, but it was just one more interesting fact about the natural world, the way a postcard from a summer vacation might list the sights a family has recently seen."
Part I, p. 10

"Maybe after many, many offerings a priest noticed that if the juice of the cane was boiled in the right way, it crystallized into sweet, dark brown clumps."
Part 1, p. 12

"The only way to make a lot of sugar is to engineer a system in which an army of workers swarms through the fields, cuts the cane, and hauls the pile to be crushed into a syrup that flows into the boiling room."
Part 1, p. 27

"Cane sugar was the first product in human history that perfectly satisfied that desire. And the bitter lives of the enslaved Africans produced so much sugar that sugar sweetness began to...