My Science School

Plums, cherries, apricots and peaches are among the commonest fruits with stones. The bit that interests us is the soft juicy flesh. So we tend to overlook how the fruit is put together. Look carefully at, say, a sliced peach and you’ll notice that it has three distinct layers. On the outside is the skin. Inside is the thick fleshy part that makes our mouths water. And inside that, right in the middle of the peach, is the stone. The stone is hard and we tend to chuck it in the rubbish bin without a second thought. For the peach, though, it is the most important part of the fruit because the stone consists of a hard protective shell to keep safe the seed which is inside from which another peach tree could grow.

 

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Pharmaceutical companies specializing in the manufacture of baby foods import large quantities of a light but nutritious flour known as arrowroot. This flour is obtained from the Maranta arundinacea, a beautiful herbaceous plant originally from the tropical regions of America. Today the arrowroot plant is also grown in India and parts of Africa.

The nutritive parts of the Maranta are found in the large underground roots or rhizomes. These have a high starch content, as well as some protein and salts, and are prepared in different ways as food by the natives of the region.

The Maranta also has another fine feature; a magnificent clump of shiny leaves that makes the plant very ornamental. This clump of leaves is a common feature in all the plants of this family which includes some species.

 

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In China and especially in India the production of cane-sugar is ancient. The Arabs turned this into sucar. The Greeks called it saccaron and today we have sucre in French. Zucchero in Italian, azucar in Spanish and sakhar in Russian.

The Egyptians during the Middle Ages had already developed a sugar industry. But the real story of this product begins with the introduction of the sugar-cane to America after the discovery of that continent in 1942. Christopher Columbus took the first specimen plants over from the Canary Islands to the Antilles in the West Indies where the plant found perfect conditions for growth.

To extract the sugar the cane had to be crushed between iron rollers. The juice was heated several times and refined by adding lime to it. It was then passed from   pan to pan and boiled until it turned into a sort of paste. This paste was then cooled in coneshaped vats.

 

Picture Credit : Google