Celeb-Nerdy with Max Brooks

Like it or not, this country is obsessed with celebrities, and in Celeb-Nerdy we delve deeper than deep into what celebrities are secretly obsessed with. We exhume their secret D&D characters, Shakespeare-society club cards, and their "borrowed" Hummel figurines. Nothing is off-limits. This week, we got actor, former SNL writer, and zombie-enthused author Max Brooks to confess to a five-year-strong hobby of growing sugar in his backyard.

World War Z Comic Book Adaptation

When and how did you get started with this?

I got started when we moved back to LA. I liked to garden as a little kid, it was always fun for me. But I got back into it now actually as a way to exercise. My dad had a little patch of land behind his house and I used to spend time clearing out the brush -- which was more exercise than anything else. So I first started putting in some vegetables. Then I got exotic and added some cotton and tobacco, and then I thought, "I want to see if I can grow some sugar."

Growing Sugar in Hebrew

How did that thought pop into your head though? Most people probably don't even know you can grow your own sugar.

I think the interest started when I went to school in the Caribbean. I did your typical semester abroad, and most kids go to the bar or wherever somewhere in Europe. I wanted to go the Caribbean.

I've always wanted to do it since then. I learned the history of sugar and how it basically changed the world. It's one of the most historically important crops. It used to be a luxury item for the rich, and then it became a mass-consumption item. Therefore it became an explosion of wealth for Western Europe. Sugar was the Model T or the iPod of its day.

“Sugar was the Model T or the iPod of its day.”

Is this something anyone could do? Or is there a big investment up top on getting equipment and such?

Ironically I spent more money than I had to because of the seedlings. There are no seeds, though. You have to plant sections of them. It's like bamboo. You need warm weather. I guess you could plant 'em indoors, but you wouldn't get much.

Like an idiot, I got some sections on eBay. And I didn't realize moving back to California that lots of the Latino families here have it right in their backyards. So I literally saw one of my neighbors in Venice and asked if I could take a couple of clippings. She was going to get rid of it. It was a weed for her. The seed cane I got was a waste. I could've gotten everything I needed for free from my neighbor. So that was a waste of money.

All you need to invest is time. Like, fertilizer? I can't conceive of buying fertilizer. All you need is fish, dead fish. The best fertilizer in the world.

Every time I buy a filet for the family down at the local fish market I say, "Hey, what about all the guts and heads and bones you're gonna throw away?" They just give it to me in a bag. I take it, I freeze it, and when it's planting time I stick it in the ground and plant a piece of sugar cane on top of it. It's amazing.

“Every time I buy a filet for the family down at the local fish market I say, ‘Hey, what about all the guts and heads and bones you're gonna throw away?’”

How often do you make these trips out to get fish guts?

I used to do it every week. Sugar cane takes 18 months to two years to grow, so you gotta save up your frozen fish guts for planting season.

Do you store that at your house? How much fish guts do you have in your house right now?

Not as much as I would have liked. You can never have enough freezer space.

Do you need an entire freezer dedicated to it?

It depends on how much you want to grow. I had two green garbage bags full of it. You start hoarding dead fish. Whenever you go fishing, you save what you don't eat. I'm sure you can think of how many times you ordered sushi and didn’t eat one or two pieces. After a year, those one or two pieces add up, and it is not garbage.

And how does your family feel about you storing fish guts in your house?

My wife's attitude was to keep it in the garage freezer. As long as she doesn't see it or smell it, I can keep it. So I think that's a fair trade. That was the big thing with the fish.

Then there was my compost, I had to make a lot of it. And every year right before planting season I go down to the beach and get seaweed. I wash it off to get the salt out. The great thing about growing sugar, unlike vegetables, is you don't have to worry about bacteria because you're boiling it. I try to make sure the fish isn't tuna because I don't want too much mercury. But as long as it's organic solution in Santa Monica Bay, which it is, most of it's just sewage, that stuff doesn't translate. I boil all that out.

Fertilizing With Fish Heads

After you grow it for a couple years, you hack it down, and then you squeeze out the juice. I got a hand-cranked juicer I got off eBay. You squeeze out the juice and then you boil it for hours. You're boiling it down into syrup. While you're boiling it you're sifting. I use a Shabu Shabu strainer than I bought down at Little Tokyo. Boil and strain, boil and strain for hours on end. The great thing is you can do it while you're working. "Oop, three minutes! Time to strain!" And at the end of the day you've got syrup that I use like regular sugar.

Because it takes so long and you do it while you're writing, do you now equate the smell or taste of sugar with work or being creative?

I think for me the taste of pure sugar that I've made myself will always be associated with Diary Of The Dead and George Romero. I ordered it from Amazon and it arrived on DVD the day I was harvesting. I was like, "Well, I gotta wait for at least an hour or two before it starts boiling enough so I can start skimming and straining it." So I watched Diary Of The Dead. I'll always have that image of late afternoon in LA, watching Diary Of The Dead, and making my own sugar cane.

Diary of the Dead Trailer

Have you ever been surprised by learning you have sugar-growing in common with someone else who just never really talked about it?

I have this in common with nobody. Believe me, I did as much Internet research as I could because I'm crazy. All I could find were a few families in the South who do this as a tradition. Sorta like how people in the North do maple. But it ain't common. Sugar-cane production tends to be a very big industrialized labor-intensive crop. There are no mom-and-pop sugar-cane fields.

“I have this in common with nobody. ”

There ain't nobody I can talk to. I've tried. I've had to buy sugar-growing manuals from Pakistani companies. Literally. This ain't a hobby for anybody else I know.

Why hasn't it gotten more popular?

It takes a lot of work. It's some hard stuff. The planting has to be patient. It takes two years. It's not like tomatoes that come up in a couple months. Squeezing the juice out is some serious, serious labor. You wanna get a workout? Try squeezing out a couple gallons of sugar-cane juice manually. That kills you.

Sugar cane is a hard-grass structure. Basically you're pressing out the juice from it. It has a hard, fibrous shell. It's not like squeezing grapes. It doesn't go easily. Sugar cane gives you a real fight.

Given how physically demanding it is and how patient you need to be, did you ever consider turning your back on it entirely?

No, I love it. It's a great hobby. The great thing too is in those two years I can focus on my other crops. Right now I like to plant enough vegetables so my family doesn't have to go to the store. You can do it really intensively. I've only got a few square feet at my house in Venice and I can squeeze out potatoes, lettuce, artichokes, kale, peas, carrots. Potatoes are good because you stick 'em in the ground and they're safe from bugs.

Do you fantasize about retiring and just living off the land?

I'd love to. That's a fantasy that'll probably never happen. I always have my fantasies of getting out in the country somewhere and taking along my musket and shooting my dinner but that's probably never gonna happen. I've never gone hunting but I think if I'm going to continue to eat meat I'm gonna have to do it. I'm not looking forward to it. If I'm going to continue to partake in these fruits of murder I'm gonna have to.

Well, if your stomach is tough enough to handle two garbage bags of fish guts on a weekly basis, maybe you can stomach a murder or two.

That's the thing. I live in a really leftie, hypocritical area of California. People are like, "Oh my God, I can never hurt an animal, that'd be like hurting my dog." Then they go and eat sushi every night and go home to their goldfish. If you wanna be humane? Personally, if I'm gonna go I'd rather be shot in the head than thrown in a bucket and eventually asphyxiate. If you're an animal, that's not the way to go.

“Personally, if I'm gonna go I'd rather be shot in the head than thrown in a bucket and eventually asphyxiate.”

What is the best way for animals to go?

Other than amyl nitrate during sex, which I don't know if animals do that? I think theoretically is to get shot in the face.

So getting back to sugar: Have you ever downplayed your interest in this when asked about it?

Oh no. I've never had the curse of popularity. I've never been cool. I've never been widely accepted. I've never had to worry about losing my popularity, because I've never had it. I've always been free to just be me. If you have a social life, don't try this. You're gonna miss a lot of golf games. I'm married with a kid, I don't bar-hop. Those days are behind me.

But what it is, is there's nothing sweeter than the harvest of your labor. For me emotionally it's all about seeing the results of my work. We live in such a disjointed society that it's so difficult to see you actually made a difference in anything. There's something so primal and satisfying about sitting down and having food that you actually grew -- not just with your own sweat but your own brainpower. All these tasks, which I think, are so vital and there's something so satisfying about saying, "I worked so hard and I actually get to eat it at the end." Maybe the next step is to start leeching out the molasses from the sugar and if I'm very ambitious, I'll take that molasses and try to make some rum.

Making Rum in Spanish

I'm a huge rum snob, I have hundreds of bottles from all over the world. I've made it myself on occasion and it's fine if you want to take the paint off something. I'm not what you'd call a master distiller, but I've never managed to make rum with sugar that I grew. I think, "Wow, if I can do that, that would really be something." That'd be old-school artistry. That's the core of World War Z: What do you do when all the systems break down.

“Two generations ago, everyone worked in a factory. And even though it sucked balls, you could at least see what you've done at the end of the day.”

I think we've lost that. Two generations ago, everyone worked in a factory. And even though it sucked balls, you could at least see what you've done at the end of the day. There was a movie called Swing Shift with Goldie Hawn, about women working in a factory in World War II. At the end of the movie, the girls step out of the plant and they see this flight of bombers up above fly over them and they look up and go, "We built those." How many Americans can claim that kinda pride in what they do?