Mankind can be defined by its diverse addictions. The sweet tooth is one of them. Alcoholic drinks are another. No wonder, accordingly, if sugarcane and grapevine were domesticated and cultivated in vast areas early on. The trail of the sugarcane has been well documented: originally domesticated around 8000 BC in New Guinea. From there, it slowly moved east across Southeast Asia until it reached India, where the first organized production of sugar began during middle of the 1st millennia BCE. Subsequently, it carried with it the scourge of slavery from Africa to the Americas.
A comparable story is that of the sugar palm — a tree bearing a number of other names, such as, primarily, the Palmyrah palm. It is a tall fan palm. Adult, it grows to 20 m (60 ft) tall and 8 m (25 ft) wide. The grey trunk can measure up to 1 m (3 ft) in diameter).It is ringed with leaf scars. It is topped by a half-spherical crown of rigid palmate leaves, each about 2-3 m (8-10 ft) long with spiny stalks — features I shall return to.
The sap consists of about 87 % water, 11 % sucrose, 0.20 % protein, 0.02% fat, and 0.24 % minerals. Collecting it simply involves tapping the top shoots and le[ing the juice drip in hanging earthen, bamboo or plastic pots.
But where did this provider of a sweet bounty originate? Botanists seem to agree that it came from Africa, where indeed a closely related species, B. aethiopium, is exploited and cultivated. Even though this conjecture of an African origin is highly likely, it remains to be proved.
To return to B. flabellifer, it ranged widely over Asia. From India, it spread all over Southeast Asia: to Malaysia, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Indonesia. It was brought also to China and Japan. Along trade routes.
What made it useful and therefore so desirable to people, that they planted it? Its conspicuous size, that makes it a[ractive and tempting. And the multiple uses people have accordingly put this economically important palm to. They have drawn upon it for timber and firewood, for thatching material and the crafting of utensils, for nutrition and folk medicine. Let me detail a few of those applications: the timber is both cheap and extremely durable, it serves as building material for shelters and roofs. Mature trunks are used as pillars and posts. The narrow planks split from the tough outer layers of the mature trunk are used as rafters to hold and bolster roofs. Smaller products from the Borassus wood are, for instance, chopsticks. The ligneous rachises of the leaves serve as firewood,
The leaf fibers are put to numerous uses: baskets woven from them, mats, hats, cordage, scrubbing brushes.
Food and drink? The edible, jelly-like, immature endosperm of the seed (which in modern times in some countries is canned, preserved in syrup); the sweet, mesocarp pulp enveloping the pyrenes of the mature fruits that can be sun dried or roasted; the tender apical bud known as the palm‘heart’; and of course the sap providing sucrose and, once fermented, wine and other alcoholi drinks.
In Tamil Nadu, the palm tree named there Nera has been praised for its 801 uses in a Tamil poem from the medieval period, the ‘Tala Vilasam’.
Buddhist monks would plant Palmyrah palm trees next to their monasteries. They used the very large palm leaves as supports for the copy of the Buddhist scriptures. And, needless to say, they were not indifferent to the drinks the sap could be turned into. Indeed, some authors have connected the two expansions, that of Buddhism near the start of the Christian era and that of Borassus flabellifer. As a negative confirmation, both Buddhism and Borassus failed indeed to reach as far as the Philippines.