Torrefaction

And doesn't that tell you something scary about the world we live in. That plus the guy is presumably not the brightest or most aware chap on the planet, but I bet you that fifty years ago no one would have doubted that maple syrup comes from maple trees.

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shemale.livejournal.com

http://www.newsweek.com/id/138536/page/1

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kouredios.livejournal.com

Huh. I just taught Cassie that maple syrup comes from trees. But, you know, she's 4.

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I've just realised that I wasn't particularly clear. I don't mean that today's youngsters are stupid, I mean that they've been brought up in such a highly industrialised society that they're relatively far more ignorant regarding anything to do with the natural world. Good article regarding the history thing.

Ach, my brain's going (I have severe ME/CFIDS, I'm allowed to be brainless!). So I think I am going to combine the old and the new by curling up with the audiobook of Clarissa while playing computer solitaire.

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llennhoff.livejournal.com

Oddly, I am more disturbed by your thinking of the industrial stuff as 'the regular stuff' than I am by his ignorance. But then, I remember when International House of Pancakes moved from real maple syrup to the artificial alternative.

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Well, this was a youngster in Chicago, so he probably didn't grow up going to Sorghum boiling and county fairs for fun, like the kids in my family do.

I don't generally look at a sample size of one as telling me anything about society; I just thought it was funny that someone who looks like he'd be into organic food obviously isn't.

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It was that plus the fact that real maple syrup is now in the minority and you're thinking of the "regular stuff" as being the fake maple syrup.

What is sorghum boiling?!

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We used to get the real stuff occasionally when I was a kid, but it was strictly rationed because it cost more than Log Cabin. Hence, and (I agree) unfortunately, Log Cabin is regular syrup.

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Even girls who don't learn this from seeing it done or being taught about it will learn it in the fullness of time, because they make syrup in Little House in the Big Woods. Boys, alas, will have to learn some other way.

Edited Date: 2009-05-05 03:10 pm (UTC)

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You know I'm 10 years older than you, right? ;) So I'm not one of today's youngsters, myself. "Regular stuff" just means "stuff that is most frequently available/cheap." I grew up watching people make maple syrup from time to time, since that's the sort of thing we do for fun in Indiana. Along those lines, sorghum is a sweet grass, that's not nearly as sweet as sugar, and that people spend a lot of time trying to make seem edible and fun, instead of just giving it to horses and cows as God clearly intended. There are sorghum festivals where people dress up in pioneer clothes and make things out of sorghum. Those are fun, except you end up having to eat things that are made out of sorghum...

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LOL, seriously!

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Yep, that's how I was interpreting "regular stuff" as well. Presumably there will have been a time in history when maple syrup was always real maple syrup: I wonder when it switched over to real maple syrup being in the minority?

I've been wondering what sorghum is for ages. It was one of those words that pops up in contexts where you don't have a dictionary or computer handy and can't be bothered to make the additional effort to look it up. (I'm still not entirely sure of the relationship between UK golden syrup and US corn syrup.) Is it cheaper or easier to grow than sugar? I've always lived in cities (I was going to say "big cities", but while London is quite large, Edinburgh might be the capital of Scotland but isn't really that huge), so I know practically nothing about agriculture.

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kouredios.livejournal.com

Actually, we do see pails hanging off of trees in the spring out here, so either way I think we'll end up having to explain what those things are. We're also hoping to have enough land and maple trees to do it ourselves someday. :)

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oursin.livejournal.com

Sssssh - let's not tell him where milk comes from...

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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?

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ckd

At Penguicon, I saw plastic packets of "Table Syrup". What, made by screwing spigots into tables?

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Thanks for that article. *makes a note*

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I'm still not entirely sure of the relationship between UK golden syrup and US corn syrup.

Not much: golden syrup is made from sugar cane (it's roughly equivalent to brown sugar in syrup form) while corn syrup is made by enzymatically treating the starch from maize to produce simple sugars in solution.

FWIW.

Also, that whole cities vs agriculture distinction doesn't hold consistently true everywhere. I spent my childhood summers in Jamaica's capital city of Kingston, where citizens grow fruit trees and keep goats, pigs, and chickens, at least as of 15 years ago.

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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.

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ebony14.livejournal.com

Personally, I learned it from Ranger Rick magazine. But I've been a chronic reader since about age 2.

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Maybe the tables in those parts are made from fresh maple trees.

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Now, there's a real sap.

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Depends on whether you mean real sorghum ("guinea corn") or fake sorghum (which is made from the stalks of maize.

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Agree - I've always lived in cities, too, but a lot of people grow their own veggies around here, because we have really good soil and it rains a lot. And the farm country tends to be right next to the cities...US cities have a bad case of sprawl, so the cities end up putting tentacles into the country. Here in IN and IL, seeing corn fields next to the mall isn't uncommon, because new malls always go up on the outskirts of towns.

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And golden syrup is an invert sugar (a by-product of sugar processing). As opposed to whatever evil corn syrup is.

As a boy growing up in London, I used to think of Lyle's Golden Syrup as "honey" because that's what my mother called it. I was pleasantly surprised by real honey when I first encountered it (in the form of the pungent honey made from logwood blossoms by St Elizabeth bees).

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Here's an article (http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-sorghum.htm) that talks about 2 types of sorghum - the grain kind and the sweet kind. The sweet kind is what we grow in Indiana. Maize stalks?

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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.

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You can crush the stalks of maize to get a sweet syrup. Not as sweet or as thick as the juice you get from sugarcane. I've heard that referred to as "sorghum". Of course, I may be confused (not the first time).

This is the Wikipedia article (your link wouldn't come up for me):http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_sorghum

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ckd

With Formica bark!

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"Whatever evil corn syrup is" made me giggle quite excessively. :)

Heh, this is funny to me because, growing up in NYC, I had honey and liked it okay, but I really loved the caramel notes of golden syrup the first time I bought any from the European Foods Shop near my college dorm. But if I hadn't had honey all my childhood, I definetely would have found it a revelation as you did.

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!

Wow, thank you for telling me this.

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Everything is connected.

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pixelfish.livejournal.com

I'm a pure maple syrup girl actually. I will suffer with corn syrup extracts if I have to, but give me the tree liquid any day.

This conversation does remind me of some of the tidbits in Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma where he's discussing how divorced from their food making process most North American consumers are. (Also he has a full section devoted to corn, explaining how it turned into the subsidy crop of choice, and what that did to our food supply.)

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Sweet sorghum is a relative of maize, but not a variety of maize, as I understand it. So it sounds like maize stalks would be the poor man's sweet sorghum, which is itself the poor man's sugar cane.

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ashnistrike.livejournal.com

Do boys not read Little House in the Big Woods? Weird.

Around here, I suppose boys would learn by going to the North Park Village Nature Center maple sugar festival every Spring. We missed it this year, but it was actually the first time that I got to see the whole process. They have stations set up so that you can see the different steps.

I grew up with maple syrup and cannot imagine liking the fake stuff better, but to each their own. The best is if you can find Grade B, which is darker and sweeter than the Grade A that's easiest to find.

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icecreamempress.livejournal.com

When I was but a tiny Empress walking to school, I used to detour past all the tapped trees to steal a little droplet of sweet sap from the spout (hey, it's going to be boiled anyway, so my kid-germs weren't going to be an issue).

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Ah, that makes sense. Especially given where I heard that, which was in eastern Kentucky.

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Different revelations for different folks... I was discussing with a colleague today the ways that the Third World can impress themselves on people raised in the First World. One of them was the first time I rode in a mule cart. To me, at twelve, it was an exciting experience. My father, however, was astonished at my excitement and eager to suppress it. To him it was a lower-class, old-fashioned form of transportation, and he was hardly excited at staring at the rear end of a mule.

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readinggeek451

Heck, I'm weird enough to prefer the stuff my mother made (still makes, occasionally) from (fake, I think) maple flavoring and sugar. Much better than fake maple syrup from the store. Cheaper, too.

(I like the real kind, too, but it's not what I grew up on.)

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beamjockey.livejournal.com

What did the D stand for?

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