D.A. Cooke and R.K. Scott Sugar beet is one of just two crops (the other
being sugar cane) which constitute the only important sources of
sucrose - a product with sweeten- ing and preserving properties that
make it a major component of, or additive to, a vast range of foods,
beverages and pharmaceuticals. Sugar, as sucrose is almost invariably
called, has been a valued compo- nent of the human diet for thousands of
years. For the great majority of that time the only source of pure
sucrose was the sugar-cane plant, varieties of which are all species or
hybrids within the genus Saccharum. The sugar-cane crop was, and is,
restricted to tropical and subtropical regions, and until the eighteenth
century the sugar produced from it was available in Europe only to the
privileged few. However, the expansion of cane production, particularly
in the Caribbean area, in the late seventeenth and the eighteenth
centuries, and the new sugar-beet crop in Europe in the nineteenth
century, meant that sugar became available to an increasing proportion
of the world's population.