You could mechanically remove them with blades or you could burn them, which is what they do in Florida. Now, there are a couple of ways of doing that. The only part of it that you actually need for producing the sugar, for taking to the mill and producing into cane sugar is the stalk and you want to get rid of its leaves. If you've ever seen a sugarcane crop, it's this really dense plant. Lulu Ramadan: It very quickly rids the plant of its leafy outer stalk. Melissa Harris-Perry: Maybe for folks who aren't from Louisiana or from parts of Texas or Mississippi where this is done, or particularly in Florida, help us understand why they're burning sugarcane. Then it is hauled to the mills and turned into the sugar that you see on your supermarket shelves all across the country. Like you mentioned before, there's a six-month harvest period where in order to prepare the cane for harvest, the cheapest and most effective method is to rid it of its leaves by burning it. This is an area where they started to grow sugar back in the 1930s, and the muck from the soil from when they dammed the lake at the turn of the century, it's this nutrient-rich muck that really allows sugarcane to thrive. It's the largest field crop in South Florida and they have about 400,000 acres centered around Lake Okeechobee. Lulu Ramadan: The sugar industry is really a defining feature of South Florida.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Help me understand how important the sugar industry is to Southern Florida. In collaboration with ProPublica, she recently published an investigation of Florida's sugar industry. With me now to discuss is Lulu Ramadan, investigative reporter at the Palm Beach Post. The sugar industry is the largest employer in Western Palm Beach County and the confection comes with plenty of political connection, but residents are now challenging sugar companies with a lawsuit in federal court, claiming that pollution from cane burning is damaging their health. Florida harvest more than half of America's sugarcane, which means that nearly every day of the six-month harvest season sugar companies burn dozens of cane fields and the fires create storms of ash that fall for months on the predominantly Black and Latino residents who live nearby. A tension that persists in the way sugar is grown and gathered today. Sugar is sweet, but its history is bitter. It's also a map of the world, drawing Greek scholars to India in 327 AD, fueling the crusades 700 years later, shackling millions in the 18th-century transatlantic slave trade, and earning millions for 20th-century food industry titans.

Sugar is much more than the yummy goodness invading everything from brownies to salad dressing. If you want to understand the history of Western civilization, there's one great place to start. Melissa Harris-Perry: Back with you now in The Takeaway.

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