The other great member of the starch, or carbohydrate, group of foods is sugar.

This is a scarcer and more expensive food than starch because, instead of being found in solid masses in grains and roots like starch, it is scattered, very thinly, through the fruits, stems, and roots of a hundred different plants, seldom being present in greater amounts than two or three per cent.

It is, however, so valuable a food, with so high a fuel value, and is so rapidly digested and absorbed, that man has always had a very keen desire for it, or, as we say, a "sweet tooth," and has literally searched the whole vegetable kingdom the world over to discover plants from which it could be secured in larger amounts.

During the last two hundred years it has been obtained chiefly from two great sources: the juicy stem of a tall, coarse reed, or cane, the sugar-cane, growing in the tropics; and (within the last fifty years) the sweet juice of the large root of a turnip-like plant, the beet.

Another source of sugar, in the earlier days of this country, was the juice or sap of the sugar maple, which is still greatly relished as a luxury, chiefly in the form of syrup.
Honey is nearly pure sugar together with certain ferments and flavoring extracts, derived in part from the flowers from which it is gathered, and in part from the stomach, or crop, of the bee.
The Food Value of Sugar.