Sugarcane is a tall tropical grass that grows thick, bamboo-like stalks filled with sweet juice. When you cut open a sugarcane stalk, you can chew on the fibrous inside to taste its intense sweetness. For thousands of years, people have crushed these stalks to extract their juice and boil it down to make sugar and molasses.

Sugarcane transformed world history. Before sugarcane cultivation spread globally, sugar was rare and expensive, available only to the wealthy. By the 1700s, sugarcane plantations in the Caribbean and the Americas made sugar cheap and common, changing how people ate and cooked. Today, most of the white or brown sugar in your kitchen started as juice squeezed from sugarcane stalks.

The plant grows best in hot, humid climates with plenty of rain. Farmers plant pieces of stalk in the ground, where they sprout and grow for about a year before harvest. Each stalk can reach 10 to 20 feet tall. After cutting, the roots often grow new stalks for several more harvests.

Sugarcane has many modern uses beyond making sugar. Some countries burn dried sugarcane stalks for fuel, use them to make paper, or ferment the juice into ethanol fuel for cars. In places like Brazil, India, and Thailand, you might see sugarcane juice sold as a refreshing drink at street stands.