The Sugar Season: A Year in the Life of Maple Syrup, and One Family's Quest for the Sweetest Harvest Author: Douglas Whynott | Language: English | ISBN:
B00FD36G5C | Format: EPUB
The Sugar Season: A Year in the Life of Maple Syrup, and One Family's Quest for the Sweetest Harvest Description
A year in the life of one New England family as they work to preserve an ancient, lucrative, and threatened agricultural art--the sweetest harvest, maple syrup...
How has one of America's oldest agricultural crafts evolved from a quaint enterprise with "sugar parties" and the delicacy "sugar on snow" to a modern industry?
At a sugarhouse owned by maple syrup entrepreneur Bruce Bascom, 80,000 gallons of sap are processed daily during winter's end. In The Sugar Season, Douglas Whynott follows Bascom through one tumultuous season, taking us deep into the sugarbush, where sunlight and sap are intimately related and the sound of the taps gives the woods a rhythm and a ring. Along the way, he reveals the inner workings of the multimillion-dollar maple sugar industry. Make no mistake, it's big business--complete with a Maple Hall of Fame, a black market, a major syrup heist monitored by Homeland Security, a Canadian organization called The Federation, and a Global Strategic Reserve that's comparable to OPEC (fitting, since a barrel of maple syrup is worth more than a barrel of oil).
Whynott brings us to sugarhouses, were we learn the myriad subtle flavors of syrup and how it's assigned a grade. He examines the unusual biology of the maple tree that makes syrup possible and explores the maples'--and the industry's--chances for survival, highlighting a hot-button issue: how global warming is threatening our food supply. Experts predict that, by the end of this century, maple syrup production in the United States may suffer a drastic decline.
As buckets and wooden spouts give way to vacuum pumps and tubing, we see that even the best technology can't overcome warm nights in the middle of a season--and that only determined men like Bascom can continue to make a sweet like off of rugged land.
- File Size: 1707 KB
- Print Length: 305 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0306822040
- Publisher: Da Capo Press (March 4, 2014)
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00FD36G5C
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #69,779 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #7
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Science > Nature & Ecology > Natural Resources - #26
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Cookbooks, Food & Wine > Gastronomy > History - #68
in Books > Science & Math > Nature & Ecology > Natural Resources
- #7
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Science > Nature & Ecology > Natural Resources - #26
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Cookbooks, Food & Wine > Gastronomy > History - #68
in Books > Science & Math > Nature & Ecology > Natural Resources
During one of the warmest modern winters ever, the balance tipped from what over centuries has been perfected within many-dappled forests of New England and French Canada. The addled combinations of sap and syrup, air and gravity, evaporation and consolidation which combine to fill golden bottles many of us reach for many mornings now add up, as Douglas Whynott observes, to a humble harbinger of global warming. What began as a curious search to uncover the mechanics and marketing of maple syrup turns, in his calm telling, into a case study of how venerable family enterprises deal with an uncertain future, as a few American firms contend alongside a bustling, volatile, and surprisingly profitable if persistently cartel-controlled Canadian syrup federation.
Parts of this tale recall John McPhee's fact-laden reports about our earth and those who seek to comprehend its hidden components. Whynott begins by summarizing the natural system. "Maple trees process carbon during photosynthesis, making carbohydrates that they later convert to sugar when the warm weather comes and the sap begins to flow." (3) What pioneering botanist James Marvin defined pithily as "the extent of the shock is equivalent to the rate of the flow" (12) translates into the delicate conjuration of temperature by which solar thermodynamics, via wind, light, or weather, makes the sunlight "shock" into motion the release of the equivalent sap from within the tree. That sap gets tapped, once by buckets loaded onto oxen or horses, now often by strands of plastic tubing, which by reverse osmosis funnel the sap from what are called sugarbushes (stands of trees) into steamy sugarhouses for boiling and bottling.
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