Time to turn in your hippie card, young man

[marydell]

The young hippie guy (ponytail, granola-ish clothes, a little body modding) who was bagging my stuff at the grocery noticed that the bottle for the 100% pure maple syrup was glass, not plastic.

guy: "huh, it's glass, I wonder why?"
me: "maybe that's to make it seem fancy, since it's the pure stuff."
guy: "is that better?"
me: "well, it is if your kid can't have the regular kind. I like the regular stuff better, but it's made of corn syrup and other stuff."
guy, looking puzzled: "then what is this made from?"
me: "trees."
guy: *looks incredulous*
me: "yeah, maple trees."
guy: "oh, wow. Wild!"

Comments

[vcmw]

My husband was deeply disturbed when I tried to explain where eggs come from. He asked me to stop, and then to never mention it again.

I grew up in Vermont, in the heart of sugaring country, so we had the folks who came in to school each year to tell us about it, and regular trips to the local sugar shacks.

I remember reading as a kid that maple sugar was cheaper than the regular (i.e. white) kind during colonial days. Given the relative costs of those two products now, that says a great deal about different economies and the cost of transport/mass production, doesn't it?

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

I remember reading as a kid that maple sugar was cheaper than the regular (i.e. white) kind during colonial days. Given the relative costs of those two products now, that says a great deal about different economies and the cost of transport/mass production, doesn't it?

It really does. I remember being gobsmacked by that same fact as a child.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

What really surprised me was reading (in an article on the politics of archaeology) the origin of the term "c-sugar" used in rural Jamaica of a cheap grade of brown sugar (along with the term "d-sugar"). I'd thought for years, that these terms referred to a grading system, in which D and C had somehow got inverted, since d-sugar was a better quality than c-sugar. Turns out that the C stood for "Cyprus" and that in the late middle ages the Cypriot economy had been based on selling cheap, low-grade sugar to Egypt. And the fall of Cyprus to the Turks came, in part, as a result, of the undermining of the Cypriot sugar-based feudal system (bearing in mind that Cyprus was the last of the Crusader kingdoms) by the rise of the plantation economy in Brazil. By that time, however, the term "Cyprus sugar", abbreviated to "c-sugar" had come to mean the cheapest grade of sugar.

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

!

Wow, thank you for telling me this.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

Everything is connected.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

What did the D stand for?

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

Demerara. That's both a river in South America and the region around it which is part of what is now Guyana. It still produces sugar and (more importantly from an adult perspective) rum. I recommend El Dorado.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

That is really fascinating.

[(Anonymous)]

Thanks!

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

That anonym is me, posting from a handheld. sorry.