The Unexpected Ingredient You Had No Idea Was In White Sugar

We don't want to make any assumptions here, but we figure you have a pretty good idea of how many bones you consume in a given day. For most of us, it's none, or next to none. We can't really chew bones and digestion is difficult (if not impossible), so unless you're part owl it's safe to say bones aren't really part of your diet — except for white sugar, that is, as it usually includes bone char.

What is bone char? Well, it's pretty much exactly what it sounds like: Bones (usually cattle bones) which are subjected to extremely high heat and turned into a fine powder. (Most kinds of bone are fair game except for the skull and the spine; nobody wants to get Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease or mad cow disease.) As for what it's doing in your sugar, it's part of the sugar refinement process. You see, most people want that pure, blinding shade of white when they're buying a bag of sugar for a batch of sugar cookies (make sure the cut-outs maintain their shape), so it behooves the sugar companies to make sure every batch is uniform. Bone char does a great job of filtering out impurities and keeping things as white as the sands of Turks & Caicos.

Some of you may be alarmed to hear about this. Does this mean that sugar isn't vegan? Have you been unwittingly consuming animal products every time you sprinkled a packet of Domino into your creamer-enriched coffee? (You can thank Henry Ford for non-dairy creamer, by the way.) Well, you can take some heart in the fact that not every kind of sugar uses bone char; beet sugar, for instance, doesn't need that kind of refinement. But sugar companies don't usually list what the source of their sugar is, so that's not especially helpful.

Vegan sugar is always a good idea, of course — if you're vegan and you want sugar, it's kind of a no-brainer. But if you don't live within walking distance of a Whole Foods or you're just leery about the price, organic sugar is another good substitute since the United States Department of Agriculture doesn't allow bone char to be included in organic sugar. Just make sure you don't put sugar in wine if you're in California, because that's also against the law.