Sugar, in everyday speech, means refined sucrose — the pure white crystalline sweetener spooned into coffee and stirred into cake batter. Chemically it is sucrose, a disaccharide of one glucose joined to one fructose, extracted in vast quantities from just two crops: tropical sugarcane (Saccharum officinarum) and temperate sugar beet (Beta vulgaris). The two sources are processed quite differently but yield exactly the same molecule, so refined cane sugar and refined beet sugar are chemically indistinguishable. Table sugar is the purest food most people eat — better than 99.9 percent sucrose — with an intense, clean sweetness and essentially no aroma of its own until heat coaxes flavour out of it.