Why I Stopped Buying the Sugar: A Traveler’s Realization in Oaxaca

🌍 The moment I stopped buying the sugar

I stood barefoot on sun-warmed adobe in a Zapotec village near San Juan Guelavía, holding a hand-blown glass jar filled with amber panela—unrefined cane sugar, still faintly smelling of woodsmoke and rain-damp earth. My fingers traced the rough label inked in charcoal: Hecho por Doña Licha, 2023. That jar cost 42 pesos—less than $2.30 USD—and it wasn’t for me. It was for my host’s daughter, who’d walked three kilometers uphill to sell it at the market that morning. In that quiet exchange, I realized why I’d stopped buying ‘the sugar’: not because it lacked sweetness, but because most versions sold to tourists weren’t sugar at all—they were transactional props masking extraction. ‘Why I stopped buying the sugar’ isn’t about ethics as abstraction—it’s about recognizing when your purchase replaces relationship with receipt. This realization didn’t arrive on a glossy tour bus or in a curated artisan bazaar. It came after six weeks of missteps, misread signs, and one stubborn refusal to accept a bag of vacuum-sealed ‘Oaxacan sugar’ at a hotel gift shop.

✈️ The setup: Why Oaxaca, why then, why sugar?

I arrived in Oaxaca City in late October 2022—not during Guelaguetza season, not for Day of the Dead crowds, but precisely because the city exhaled between festivals. My budget was tight: $32/day average, covering lodging in a shared casa particular, local transport, meals, and incidentals. I’d spent months researching regional agroecology, reading anthropological work on milpa systems and indigenous land stewardship¹, and compiling a list of community-run cooperatives. But my real motive was simpler: I wanted to understand how something as ordinary as sugar functioned in daily life—not as a commodity, but as currency, ritual object, and quiet act of resistance.

Oaxaca produces over 70% of Mexico’s artisanal panela and piloncillo, both made from freshly pressed sugarcane juice boiled in open kettles over wood fires. Unlike industrial white sugar, these retain molasses, minerals, and microbial complexity—tasting faintly of grass, burnt caramel, and wet stone. I’d read that families in the Mixteca region process cane on small plots using century-old methods, selling surplus at municipal markets or bartering for beans, cloth, or labor. So I brought a reusable cotton sack, a notebook, and zero assumptions about what ‘authentic’ looked like.

🗺️ The turning point: When the sugar tasted wrong

My first ‘sugar purchase’ happened on Day 3—inside the Mercado 20 de Noviembre. A vendor in a crisp apron handed me a sealed plastic tub labeled “Premium Oaxacan Panela – 100% Natural”, priced at 128 pesos ($7.10). It was smooth, uniform, and smelled only of caramel—not smoke, not soil, not fermentation. I paid, smiled, and walked away. Later, back at my guesthouse, I crumbled a piece into hot water. It dissolved instantly, leaving no grit, no aroma beyond sweetness. Then I noticed the fine print: Empaque y distribución: Grupo Azucarero Nacional, S.A. de C.V. A corporate processor—not a family operation. I hadn’t bought sugar. I’d bought branding.

The dissonance deepened two days later at a roadside stall near Tlacolula. An elder woman sat beside a rusted kettle, stirring thick syrup with a wooden paddle. Her hands were cracked, knuckles swollen, but her rhythm never faltered. She offered me a spoonful straight from the ladle—warm, viscous, tasting of scorched cane and damp clay. I asked how much. She named 25 pesos. I reached for my wallet. She shook her head, pointed to the small ceramic cup beside her, then to my water bottle. “Prueba primero,” she said. Try first. No sale until trust was tasted.

That was the pivot. Not anger, not guilt—but the sudden, physical awareness that every time I’d bought packaged sugar before, I’d skipped the step where value is co-created: where price emerges from shared context, not shelf placement.

📸 The discovery: Who makes sugar, and what does it cost?

I began asking—not “Where can I buy sugar?” but “¿Quién lo hace?” Who makes it? And slowly, doors opened.

In San Juan Guelavía, I met Doña Licha through a schoolteacher who translated our halting Spanish. Her family had milled cane for five generations on land held in communal ejido tenure. They harvested cane by hand in early November, crushed it in a small animal-powered mill, then boiled the juice in iron kettles over mesquite fires for 12 hours. Each batch yielded roughly 15 kg of panela, molded into round cakes wrapped in banana leaves. “The fire must breathe,” she told me, tapping the kettle’s side with a spoon. “If you rush, the sugar cries.” She meant crystallization—too-fast cooling caused grain separation, making cakes brittle and flavor flat. “Crying sugar sells cheap. Happy sugar lasts.”

Her pricing reflected labor, not markup: 32 pesos per cake (≈$1.75), plus 10 pesos if wrapped in leaf instead of paper—a choice that added 20 minutes of hand-folding. No discounts. No bulk rates. “We don’t make more just because you want more,” she said plainly. “The cane grows once a year. The fire burns only when we need it.”

I also visited a cooperative in Santiago Atitlán, where eight families pooled harvests and rotated kettle shifts. Their ledger—handwritten in a spiral notebook—showed income split equally after deducting fuel, transport, and a 10% reserve fund for school supplies and roof repairs. No external investors. No export contracts. Just direct sales at three nearby markets, tracked in pencil.

What surprised me wasn’t their self-sufficiency—it was their precision. They measured Brix levels with handheld refractometers (donated by a university extension program), logged pH shifts during boiling, and adjusted fire intensity based on humidity readings taken at dawn. This wasn’t nostalgia. It was rigorous, adaptive knowledge—passed down, yes, but constantly tested against drought, market fluctuation, and shifting regulations.

🚂 The journey continues: From buyer to witness

I stopped carrying cash for sugar after Week 2. Instead, I carried questions:

• “¿Cuánto tiempo dura el proceso?” How long does it take?
• “¿Qué usan para endulzar el atole en casa?” What do you use to sweeten atole at home?
• “¿Quién aprendió esto de quién?” Who taught this to whom?

Answers varied. Some used honey from native stingless bees. Others mixed panela with roasted cacao for ceremonial chocolate. One teenager showed me how to press cane juice directly into warm corn tortillas—a snack called chicharrón de caña that tasted like green grass and sunshine.

I learned to recognize the signs of non-commercial sugar: irregular shapes, surface bloom (a harmless yeast film indicating natural fermentation), slight variation in color between batches, and the faint, sour tang of lactic acid beneath the sweetness—proof it hadn’t been over-heated or filtered sterile. Industrial versions were uniform, inert, and shelf-stable for years. Real sugar aged visibly: darkening at the edges, softening in humid air, developing subtle umami notes after three weeks.

One rainy afternoon in Teotitlán del Valle, I watched a young man re-boil a batch deemed “too light” by his abuela. He didn’t discard it. He added ash from last night’s cooking fire—alkaline, traditional—to deepen the color and stabilize the crystals. “It’s not waste,” he explained, wiping steam from his glasses. “It’s correction. Like grammar.”

🌅 Reflection: What sugar taught me about travel itself

This wasn’t about sugar alone. It was about the quiet violence of convenience—the way mass-market souvenirs flatten labor into packaging, erase seasonality, and convert cultural continuity into aesthetic décor. Every time I’d bought branded sugar before, I’d participated in a system where origin was reduced to a logo, process to a photo caption, and people to ‘craftspeople’—a term that sounds respectful but often functions as a polite euphemism for unpaid or underpaid labor.

Stopping wasn’t austerity. It was recalibration. I redirected my spending: paying extra for a lunch cooked over an open hearth instead of a gas stove; hiring a local teen to guide me to remote weaving workshops (his fee covered bus fare and notebooks); contributing to a community fund for solar panels at a rural school—not as ‘donation’, but as advance payment for services rendered next season.

I also stopped photographing sugar-making unless invited. Early on, I’d raised my camera instinctively at the sight of a boiling kettle. A woman turned, wiped her brow, and said quietly, “No es espectáculo.” It’s not a show. I lowered the lens. Later, she handed me a cup of fresh cane juice—not for sale, but because I’d waited while she finished stirring. That gesture mattered more than any image.

📝 Practical takeaways: What travelers can observe, ask, and choose

You don’t need to renounce souvenirs—or sugar—to travel more thoughtfully. You need sharper observation and clearer questions. Here’s what changed for me, and what you might adapt:

🔍 Look beyond labeling

“Artisanal”, “traditional”, or “Oaxacan” on packaging means nothing without context. Real indicators include:

💬 Ask questions that reveal process—not product

Instead of “How much?��, try:

• “¿Cuántas personas trabajaron en esto hoy?” How many people worked on this today?
• “¿Esta caña se cosechó esta semana?” Was this cane harvested this week?
• “¿Puedo ver cómo se hace?” May I watch how it’s made? (Ask respectfully—never assume access.)

If the answer is vague, rushed, or deflects to a brochure—step back. Authenticity isn’t performative. It’s embedded in time, repetition, and consequence.

🚌 Choose transport that connects, not isolates

I took second-class camionetas instead of private tours—even when routes required transfers and 90-minute waits. Those waits became conversations: with a teacher carrying textbooks, a grandmother sorting dried chiles, a farmer checking soil moisture with his thumb. These weren’t ‘cultural experiences’. They were ordinary human rhythms I’d previously bypassed in pursuit of efficiency.

⭐ Conclusion: Sweetness measured differently

I left Oaxaca with no jars of sugar in my suitcase. Instead, I carried three things: a folded banana leaf stained with cane residue, a page of Doña Licha’s handwritten recipe (with notes in Zapotec orthography), and the certainty that the sweetest thing I’d tasted wasn’t sucrose—it was reciprocity.

Stopping buying ‘the sugar’ didn’t mean rejecting commerce. It meant refusing transactions that erased the maker’s name, timeline, and terrain. It meant learning that value isn’t fixed—it’s negotiated daily in firewood counts, rainfall forecasts, and the weight of a child’s schoolbag.

Now, when I see sugar on a menu or shelf elsewhere—in Bali, in Portugal, in Tennessee—I don’t reach for my wallet first. I pause. I ask: Who heated the kettle? Whose hands shaped this? What would it cost—not in pesos, but in breath and bone—to make it again tomorrow?

❓ FAQs: Practical questions from the road