Driving up my valley last night I could see plumes of smoke rising from the sugar houses. April is sugaring season, a time when the sap runs fast across the thawing land and Vermonters continue the ancient Native American tradition of gathering the sap and boiling it down to make maple syrup and maple sugar.
It’s not a hard or elaborate process: Alesia Depot, EatingWell's Assistant Managing Editor, tapped a few trees at her house this weekend and boiled it down with her kids on a little fire. It takes 40 gallons of sap to make a gallon of syrup so it’s a time consuming process and one reason the final product sells for upwards of $35 a gallon, in Vermont, the largest maple producer in the country.
Compare that with the cheap sugars and sweeteners that have flooded our food supply: high fructose corn syrup and white table sugar are practically chemistry experiments compared with my neighbor’s maple sugar that sits in jars in my cabinets. Genetically modified sugar beets now account for nearly half our US sugar supply and about 40 percent world-wide. And the cane sugar industry has had a checkered environmental history. According to a 2004 report by the World Wildlife Fund, Sugar and the Environment, “The production of sugar cane has probably caused a greater loss of biodiversity on the planet than any other single crop.”
By the time I got to the end of my dirt road, passed the last buckets nailed to trees, I realized what I love about maple. It is the unadulterated taste of the land – the woods, the streams, the ferns – with nothing added: no chemicals, pesticides, herbicides. No habitat destroyed (tapping does not harm the trees). Nothing but rain, sun and soil; wood, cut and burned a hot fire, sap heated to boiling point, then collected.
And as I sat at my kitchen counter, looking at the melting snow outside, I thought: What if we were to consider sugars the way our ancestors in Vermont did, not a staple that we consume every day, but a sweet luxury, the product of a long spring’s work, that must last us a season? What if I were to only rely on one $35 gallon of syrup and two small $8 jars of maple sugar to sweeten my food all year? Would that be such a bad thing?
It could be a sweet solution.
Green Tip of the Day: Think about the sweeteners you use and consider swapping processed sugars (table sugar, corn syrups, etc.) for natural sweeteners such as maple, honey, agave or fruit. Try these recipes for Mustard Maple Pork Tenderloin or Spinach Salad with Warm Maple Dressing or Maple-Maple Walnut Cake.
But don’t forget: All sugars act the same way in your body so limit your consumption of any added sweeteners and try to stick to consuming fewer than 2000 calories a day.
Speak Up: How do you cut back on processed sugars? What sweeteners do you prefer?
No comments:
Post a Comment