Thursday, March 22, 2012

The Maple Sugar Shack

| | 3 comments

This is Frank's Sugar Shack.

Literally.

As in, tapping, collecting and boiling down maple sap to make maple syrup.



As in, real maple syrup, not the fake stuff made of genetically modified corn and food coloring made to look like real maple syrup.

(Don't believe me? Check the labels people.  Only, you won't find "GMO" listed in front of corn.  Big Ag doesn't have to label its genetically modified ingredients. They figure you don't really need to know what you're eating.)

Me? I like eating real food, not GMO-derived.

There's no GMO in Frank's Maple Syrup. It's the real stuff.  The good stuff.

Some years Frank has had 600 taps in his sugar bush.  And if you didn't already know what I was talking about that sentence would sound a bit... strange.

(A sugar bush is a stand of maple trees being utilized for maple syrup production.)

At peak production they can turn out 120 GALLONS of maple syrup. And when you do the math, about 30 gallons of sap to 1 gallon of syrup, that means about 3600 gallons of sap were collected.

One bucket at a time, like this:


As if it weren't enough to spend all day long collecting and boiling down maple sap into syrup, Frank and his family were also running the rest of the farm and milking cows, too.

Farmers work harder than just about any other group of people I know.

The next time you visit the local farmer's market, shake a farmer's hand and say "thank you" for working so hard to produce your food.  Then buy everything you can directly from the hands of the farmers that produced it.

Because you know what happens when you bypass the farmer's market and decide to buy the cheapest food available from the big chain store instead?

You get GMO-corn fake maple syrup.

And really, who on earth needs that?

Who grew your food?


3 comments:

Holly from 300 Pounds Down said...

Wow. That was really interesting! I can honestly say I never had any clue how that was made. I just showed this to my daughter. It's like we went on a field trip. Thanks for the great info!

Holly from 300 Pounds Down said...

Wow. That was really interesting! I can honestly say I never had any clue how that was made. I just showed this to my daughter. It's like we went on a field trip. Thanks for the great info!

Victoria Strauser said...

Thank you Holly for visiting and commenting. I will definitely be out there again next spring to help tap some trees!

 
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