Herbert Welch, Age 8, Of Visalia, Calif., for his question:

How do they make brown sugar from white sugar?

The sweet taste of sugar is certairily the most wonderful taste in the world. You know about it because of tiny taste buds on the very tip of your tongue. Other taste buds in your mouth may tell you whether the happy flavor is plain white sugar, tangy brown sugar or perhaps the sweetest of sweet tasting honey.

Brown sugar and white sugar may carne from the leafy sugar cane of from the big, bulky root of the sugar beet. Sugar is a chemical, arid we get the same sweet chemical from the sugar cane and the sugar beet. But the sugar in the sugar cane is mixed with sticky, dark molasses. And this molasses makes the d7.ffererice between brown sugar and white sugar.

At harvest time, the tall stalks of the sugar cane are cut close to the ground. The long lebves are then lopped off and canes are chopped into small sections. The short stalks then go to the sugar mill. First they go through a machine that twists and shreds them. This separates the woody fibers, but it does not squ.eeze out the sweet, rich 3uice in the sugar cane stalks.

The next ,job is done by a set of heavy steel rollers. The ,juice is crushed out of the woody canes, and it runs dawn through the ro11ers w$ete it 1s collected in metal pans. The rich juice from the sugar cane is a mixture of plain sugar and sticky molasses. It must pass through sozne more treatments which remove fragments of woody cane and other impurities.

The liquid juice is then ready to be turned into raw sugar. It is boiled until it becomes a thick mixture of molasses and tiny crystals of clear sugar. The next treatment removes the sticky molasses, leaving behind only the crystals of white sugar. The two ingredierits are separated in a machine that whirls the mixture around and around.

The whirling machine cannot remove all of the molasses, and the crystals of white sugar are coated with a tacky brown film. This raw sugar is the soft, fluffy mixture we call. Brown sugar. If a lot of molasses is left in the raw sugar, we have dark brawn sugar; and if most of the molasses is whirled away, we get light brown sugar. The raw sugar then goes to the refinery where all the sticky molasses is ronoved. When the job is done, we have pure white crystals.

Crunchy brown sugar, then, comes from the sugar mill, which separates the sweet juice frcn stalks of the sugar cane. The juice becomes raw sugar, which is a mixture of sugar crystals and sticky molasses. And this raw sugar is the same as brown sugar. Snowy white crystals of pure sugar come later when the mixture is refined to remove all, absolutely all, of the rich, tangy molasses.