Pancakes and Global Warming
Filed in archive Food for Thought by karen on March 21, 2006

The sun is finally shining, the birds chirping on the trees, the first buds of spring are about to break. A nice, hearty breakfast is in order! Aren't pancakes marvelous on a perfect spring morning? Easy to whip up, tasty and filling.
However pancakes only taste like proper pancakes with Maple
syrup. When I was a little girl, I loved it so much I wanted to make my own. But then I was nowhere near a maple tree. That hasn't stopped me from wondering how maple syrup was made, though.Here's a bit of history from SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry:
Native Americans taught the European settlers how to make maple syrup. They would cut a gash in the tree and collect the sap in containers made of tree bark. All the sap collected was poured into a trough, where they would drop hot stones into it to boil off the excess water. The thick fluid that was left in the trough was the syrup.
Did you know that this is the time of year when maple trees are tapped to produce maple syrup? Maple trees thrive under certain temperature conditions and produce the sap for maple syrup because of specific temperature cycles. In the early spring, the trees generate sap when the nights are very cold and the days fairly mild. The temperature cycling causes the starch in the sap to turn into sugar and rise in the trunk. It's one of nature's delicate miracles - which will disappear if we don't do something to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that are making New England winters milder with each passing year.
I wholeheartedly agree.
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