Sugar is taken for granted even more than salt. When you spill salt, superstition dictates that you throw a bit over your shoulder for good luck. You spill sugar, you just whisk it into the trash. Sugary drinks and snacks are regarded today as demons that bring obesity and illness. But sugar is a metaphor for love (or something sweatier) in hundreds of songs, and it's what the waitress calls you when she sets your po' boy sandwich on the table.

Yet, in all the years that I've picked up bags of Dixie Crystals, I never thought about how sugar has affected life in the South. I sampled both sweet and bitter chapters of the tale of sugar during a recent three-day trip to New Orleans that focused on sugar.

The trip was organized by the Southern Foodways Alliance, a group dedicated to the study and preservation of food cultures in the South. As its Web site (www.southernfoodways.com) states: "The SFA sees food as vital in itself, and as a clear, accessible lens through which infinite aspects of Southern culture may be viewed and embraced."

The group, based at the University of Mississippi, sponsors events such as this trip plus conducting foodways history research. The 552 members (about 65 from North Carolina) include chefs, writers and just plain folks who are interested in food.

"The story of sugar is a lesson in politics and morality," cookbook author and historian Jessica B. Harris told the group.

Sugar cane, which is related to bamboo, has been cultivated for its sweet juice for more than 2,000 years, beginning in New Guinea and India. It spread through the Middle East, and Crusaders introduced the cane juice to Europe.

Columbus brought sugar cane plants on his second voyage to the New World, changing the economy of the Caribbean and the South for centuries to come.

Sugar cane required quick processing after harvest or it would go bad. It led to the destruction of forests for wood to heat the pots in which the syrup was boiled down.

And it required a lot of labor; slavery followed.

Being consigned to the cane fields was especially nasty and hazardous work, Harris said. The razor-sharp leaves had to be stripped away and the tall canes cut to the ground with a machetelike tool. A slip while feeding canes into machinery might lead to the loss of a hand or foot. The boiling syrup sloshed and burned skin.

For the planters, cane brought money of a kind they'd never seen. They recouped their main costs from the rum made from cane, then the sugar was pure profit. There was a time, I was told, that you could walk through New Orleans and easily tell the lavish cotton mansions from the even more lavish sugar mansions.

Production collapsed after the Civil War and, later, the Depression. Out of more than 300 U.S. cane sugar refineries that existed 50 years ago, about 10 percent are around today. Harvesting and production is automated now.

Politics still has a finger in the sugar bowl. James H. Simon, general manager of the American Sugar Cane League, a Louisiana industry group, said that he's lobbying against increased sugar imports and the predominance of high-fructose corn syrup as a commercial sweetener. The future of sugar, he said, isn't in food but as an ingredient in things such as plastics and fuels like ethanol.

When I'm around distinctively New Orleans uses of sugar, such as beignets, bread pudding and pralines, sugar's history doesn't leave a sour taste for long.

At Celebration Distillation -- they make rum in New Orleans, imagine that -- I tasted a bevy of sweet and rum-fueled dishes, and ran into a fellow Tar Heel. Chef Tenney Flynn, originally from Gibsonville, offered Zydeque Cajun Barbecue with a sauce made from cane syrup, cane vinegar and Louisiana peppers (too sweet and thick for my Eastern North Carolina preferences, though).

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