Perhaps I am not the best person to go to for advice about white or brown sugar. After all, I didn’t know it existed until I was about six. As a kid, I was always the first one to leave the birthday party with my mom. We left, you see, so I wouldn’t discover the cake. Weaving through the front gardens of my kindergarten friends’ oversize Berkeley homes, my mother would pick the candy from the goodie bag and, with righteous conviction, toss it into the potted plants.
You can imagine my surprise when, around the time my friends found out about Santa, I discovered I’d been suckered into celebrating my own birthdays with “birthday soup” and had lost a few pounds of perfectly good candy to somebody’s flowerpot. The good news is that while my friends were totally decompensating as their entire theological framework went up the chimney, I was eating cake.