GMO Sugar Beets: Lighting a candle

I'm really really good at cursing the darkness of industrial food and GMOs and stuff, as you may have noticed. I haven't been so good about lighting candles. Sorry about that. But here's a candle that burns pretty brightly, I think.

Julie just warned us about GM sugar beets, and advised us to buy sugar from cane. Unfortunately, sugar cane won't grow around here, which means refined sugar need to come from places like Louisiana. Now, we can argue about whether long-distance, non GM cane is better than local GM beets, and I don't know what the right answer is. If you absolutely need to have refined sugar in your recipe or coffee or wherever, I think non-GM cane sugar the way to go. But if refined white sugar isn't all that important to you, and you want to keep eating locally, consider the following:

I've just been reading the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, because Melissa is re-reading them, and I never read them as a kid. The Ingalls family used a lot of maple sugar in their cooking. Michigan produces quite a lot of maple syrup. Making sugar from syrup isn't hard. Here's one set of instructions. You can also just use the syrup to sweeten your morning brew. I put maple syrup in my coffee yesterday and in my tea today. Delicious! I figure if it's good enough for Pa Ingalls, it's good enough for me.

Plus, you can get maple syrup from LVL!