Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by Borrible | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Borrible

And then I thought, we've known for some time that dead men make good fertilizer.

https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/200th-a...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterloo_Soldier

View on HN

In Belgium we (not me) used the corpses from the famous waterloo battle to refine sugar.

Yes indeed. Science.org recently published an interesting interview [0] on exactly that, that even made the HN front page.

[0] https://www.science.org/content/article/now-we-know-where-de...

The use of bone char to filter cane sugar is interesting -- but something that I'm finding puzzling is that the above linked article specifically says that the bone char was used for sugar beet processing, but many other online sources consistently state that bone char is never used for sugar beet processing, only sugar cane processing. Did it used to be used for sugar beet processing but techniques changed?

Based on some reading, beet sugar refining is easier because of less impurities than cane sugar. So the modern technique for producing white beet sugar is to use vacuum evaporation to crystalize out the sugar out of beet juice leaving the impurities behind. Maybe before vacuum evaporation was invented beet sugar had to be undergo chemical processing similar to cane sugar to remove the impurities?

The deeper you plough this field, the more fruitful the findings. No dead end in sight. This may even take the cake. Dark and heavy Belgian cake. Cake of the dead, so to speak.

This sounds suspiciously close to the Anglican Inquisition . . .

Well, for good reasons nobody expects the Anglican Inquisition ...

Can't tell if this is sarcastic or not but an entertaining example of everyone going straight to the comments (myself included). (for those who didn't see this is link is the same as the main post these comments are under).

Definitely sarcastic. And I only realized the loop after clicking on the comment’s link (I had visited the post before, but not read it)

The secret of Belgian chocolate, revealed

Those are African bodies.

The blood of the Martyrs shall water the meadows of...Belgium.

Close enough.

Honestly I rather my body be used for something useful than wasting space in a box underground.

> we (not me)

of course not you flemish, it must've been those perfidous walloons, hoor

Reply on news.ycombinator.com