Sugar and …
Sugar in history
The refining process: one account and another
… Spice and …
Everything you wanted to know about spices
…other things nice
Rayon (much modified from wood fibre)
Could it be an alternative to cotton, that oh-so-comfortable-but-most-polluting-and-worse fibre crop?
Grasim, an Aditya Birla enterprise, produces a large fraction (24%?) of the world’s production of rayon. The process of converting wood pulp into Viscose Staple Fibre (VSF) uses caustic soda in large quantities.