KIMBALL, Neb. – Who remembers the number one pop single of 1969? Believe it or not, the band that recorded the song was what we might today call a virtual band. Back then, we thought of it as a cartoon band.

Ring any bells?

The band was called “The Archies,” and made up of the main characters starring in The Archie Show, a Saturday morning kids cartoon. The cartoon of course came from the Archie comic book series, featuring the teenage characters Archie, Reggie, Jughead, Veronica, and Betty.

The song that topped the pop charts in 1969 was called “Sugar Sugar.”

Just a bit of trivia as a starting point for putting the sugarbeet in perspective.

So, sugar. Everyone knows it comes from Hawaiian pure cane, grown in the sun (you might recall that advertising jingle from back in the 1980’s).

You might also know, from the rantings of a lot of self-proclaimed food experts, that sugar is poisonous and will make you fat, then sick, and then finally, dead.

In the real world, however, things are a little bit different. Sugar doesn’t only come from Hawaii, nor is it poisonous. Sugar is the energy source that fuels all animal life. Whether the self-proclaimed experts like it or not, carbohydrate sugar in the form of monosaccharide  glucose or dextrose is the only fuel animals metabolize at the cellular level. Inside the body, sugar is the only fuel that makes things function. No sugar, no go.

Carbohydrates come, of course, from plants, where solar radiation powers the photosynthesis of carbon dioxide and water, yielding cellulose, sugars, and starches, all forms of complex carbohydrate. In consuming plants, herbivore animals cleverly metabolize glucose/dextrose from complex carbs. Carnivores run on sugar too, but their supply comes from the glycogen stored in the flesh and fats of their prey. In that sense, carnivores are one step removed from their energy source. Omnivores consume plants and animals, of course, metabolizing sugar from both meat and plant material.

When we talk about sugar, we usually mean white, crystallized table sugar. This is sucrose, a disaccharide made up of glucose and fructose. I could go on and on about metabolic chemistry but there’s no need. Our bodies (at times with the assistance of gut bacteria) metabolize carbohydrate into glucose, whether the original form is lettuce, rutabaga, grain, apples, high fructose corn syrup or a spoonful of table sugar.

Obviously, we don’t need table sugar to survive. We could derive perfectly good nutrition from roadkill and wild fruits and grains. We’d all be foragers then, with no time to waste on school or jobs or propaganda or reading newspapers. That’s always an option.

In practice, we have a rather more varied diet, where sucrose features mostly as a sweetener. We like sweet stuff, and that’s okay. Sweets and sucrose are nutritious. They should be consumed, and as with everything else we eat, consumed in reasonable moderation.

Sucrose is concentrated energy and extremely easy to metabolize. So concentrated and so easy, in fact, that our body usually can’t immediately use all the energy made available from gobbling down a candy bar or piece of carrot cake. Waste not, want not, so the body stores the extra energy in the form of glycogen and fat. This happens whenever we take in more nutrients than we use. Fat stores come in handy during those lean times when we require more energy than we consume. The stored fat is metabolized and fat energy keeps us going until we can refuel.

It’s a great system. However, if we have more fat times than lean times, if we constantly take in more fuel than we use, the fat builds up, and too much fat can cause a host of problems. Sugar is easy to blame, and rightly so in the case of the morbidly obese overeater, because it is so concentrated and easy to metabolize and easy to convert to fat for storage.

Sugar isn’t the culprit. This is where the nattering nannies get it wrong. The culprit, I’m afraid, turns out to be the person who over-consumes and fails to use up stored fat via physical exertion.

Sugar is good food. It’s not bad food. We’re fortunate to have it and even (perhaps especially) the nattering nannies would screech and howl and curse their fates should sugar disappear.

Which brings us, finally, to what I set out to write about.

Sugar. Sweetener. Sucrose. Crystallized table sugar. Where does it come from?

As referenced above, sugar comes from Hawaii and other tropical and subtropical climes. It’s pure cane sugar, grown in the sun. Well, 80 percent of it anyway.

But a fifth of the world’s production of white crystalline sucrose or table sugar comes from...

The sugarbeet.

That’s right. One-fifth of the table sugar you consume comes from sugarbeets.

Sugarbeets are produced in the Nebraska Panhandle and other regions of the globe which feature a temperate climate. Sugarbeets can’t really be grown in tropical areas, and sugarcane can’t be grown in temperate areas, which is rather a nice coincidence all in all.

Sugarbeets are a row crop, planted in the spring and harvested in the fall, often after the first hard freeze.

The history of sugarbeets in particular and sugar in general is fascinating. Imagine a world where the nannies and propagandists read the actual history instead of making it up. A few tidbits which I suspect would cause them to explode:

Scientists were busy genetically modifying sugarbeets way back in the sixteenth century, producing plants that yielded ever more sugar.

Those sixteenth century scientists did not work for Monsanto and the Koch brothers.

Sugarbeets were first cultivated in the U.S. by abolitionists as a method of producing sugar without the use of slave labor.

Sugarbeets were developed from fodder (livestock feed) beets.

Frederick William III provided the wherewithal to open and operate the first sugarbeet factory in Silesia in 1801.

Napoleon Bonaparte was perhaps the key driver in sugarbeet production. He willed it and France obeyed. From France, the cultivation of sugarbeet and production of beet sugar spread, eventually, to temperate climes around the globe.