By Maple Valley Cooperative
Long before settlers arrived with the first European honey bee or began importing and growing sugar cane, Native Americans were already producing maple syrup. An Iroquois legend tells that one early spring, Chief Woksis threw his tomahawk into a maple tree, and his wife, finding the flowing sap tasted of sweetness, used the sap instead of stream water to cook their venison stew. Boiling the sap had removed most of its water and created a thick, delicious maple syrup! Further evaporating the syrup created hearty maple sugar, ideal for storage and traveling. Processing maple syrup was a very labor intensive task. To prepare for maple season, native families crafted wooden or birch bark buckets, carved wooden taps for the trees, gathered and cut firewood, and hollowed out large logs to serve as their cooking pots. When winter days warmed above 40 degrees and nights remained below freezing, the sap in maple trees began to flow, filling the many buckets. While some tended the fire day and night to heat the cook stones, others carefully added the stones to the sap, slowly evaporating the water in it. As it takes 40 gallons of sap to produce 1 gallon of maple syrup, and in turn, 1 gallon of syrup to produce 7-8 lbs of maple sugar, processing enough maple syrup for the year required many weeks of collaboration to make what Native Americans considered a very special energy food for their diet.
Today, science shows that maple syrup is one of our most sustainable superfoods available. Not only does maple syrup contain vital minerals and 54 antioxidants for our health, its effect on our body is neutral to alkaline producing, where most sweeteners are acid producing. With a low glycemic index, maple syrup doesn’t raise blood sugar as fast as white sugar does, making it an ideal addition to restorative sports drinks. Organic maple syrup is also the main ingredient for The Master Cleanse Lemonade Diet, one of the most used detox programs available.
Harvested from Sugar Maple trees that can produce sap for over 200 years, today’s syrup production benefits our environment when it follows certified organic practices. Produced without annual tilling or soil erosion and minimally processed in stainless steel evaporators, Maple Valley’s production leaves a carbon positive footprint. One hundred pounds of carbon dioxide are sequestered every time we produce a gallon of organic maple syrup! Where many conventional farmers use chemical cleaners in their bottling facilities, add chemical defoaming agents, and spray forests to clear paths, roadways, and other unwanted growth, certified organic practices ensure organic approved cleaning products, healthy forest soils, a diversity of tree species, and protection of wildlife habitat. As some organic farmers use butter as a defoaming agent or toss bacon into the evaporating sap for a homestead meal, Maple Valley asks our family farmers to sign a purity pledge to only add organic vegetable oil in the evaporation process. This requirement allows Maple Valley’s certified organic maple syrup to also be certified Kosher and vegan/vegetarian compliant.