BUCKET LIST UPDATE – No. 668: Eat raw sugarcane

Raw sugarcane cut into pieces.

I scratched another item off my bucket list last Thursday when I ate raw sugarcane.

I’m 36 years old and have lived practically my entire life in the American South, but somehow I’d managed to never eat raw sugarcane, that is, until last Thursday. For those of you unfamiliar with sugarcane, it’s the world’s largest cash crop. I was surprised to learn that it’s actually a tropical grass, and it grows into a segmented stalk that you can chew to extract the juice. The juice is sweet, containing the sugar sucrose.

All my life, I’ve heard of people chewing raw sugarcane. As I child, I heard other children talk about eating raw sugarcane at home, and it was also something that older adults talked about doing during their childhoods. As far as I can remember, my parents and grandparents never grew sugarcane, which is why I probably never ate any as a child.

My sugarcane experience began Wednesday of last week, when I found myself at the home of family friend Jenny Lint, who had half a dozen sugarcane stalks leaned up against her front porch. I asked her where she got them, and she said that someone had come around selling them for a dollar each. She was nice enough to give me a five-foot-long piece for free, and I took it home with the idea of scratching another item off of my bucket list.

It became readily apparent that you just don’t stick one end of the stalk into your mouth and start chewing. The stalk was too unwieldy, and the outer “bark” was too green and thick. A few sugarcane-eating YouTube videos later and I figured out how to do it.

First, you break off a segment of the sugarcane, a piece about six to eight inches long between the knotty segments, which are too hard to chew and probably contain little to no juice. Next you shave or whittle off the thick outer bark, leaving behind a stalk of yellowish white meat at the center of the stalk. From there, I used my pocketknife to cut the stalk into bite-sized chunks.

One important thing to note about eating raw sugarcane is that you don’t actually eat it. You put a bite-sized chunk into your mouth and then chew it like you would a piece of bubblegum. This is the best way to get the juice out of the piece and when you’re done you spit out the pulpy waste instead of swallowing it. In a way, it’s a lot like chewing a piece of wood that also happens to contain a small amount of sweet-tasting juice.

I enjoyed eating raw sugarcane, but my kids really didn’t know what to think about it. I was surprised by how sweet the cane juice actually was, but I was also surprised by how little juice each piece contained. I’d hate to know that I had to survive on a desert island on a strict diet of sugarcane. You’d work yourself to death trying to eek out enough calories to survive.

In the end, I enjoyed scratching another item off my bucket list and trying something new. How many of you have ever eaten raw sugar cane? What did you think about it? Did you like it or not? Let us know in the comments section below.