Meanings of Maple: An Ethnography of Sugaring

alone.

INTRODUCTION

Backyard Sugaring

My brother tried making maple syrup for the first time in the spring of 2015. Well, winter really, as the maple sap typically runs when the temperature is below freezing overnight and above 40° F during the day. Those conditions generally occur at the end of winter, but before spring has really sprung. We have both always loved to cook, and for several years now my brother has been increasingly interested in food sourcing, local produce, and a general sense of awareness of where the items he’s cooking come from. Knowing an ingredient’s origin and all the steps that go into its making are meaningful bits of knowledge for him. It matters to him to understand where the items in his kitchen come from. Making maple syrup—sugaring—offered him a good chance to know intimately an ingredient in the kitchen from its very beginning. He is a software engineer by day, which means that he thinks in digitized systems and is also a bit of a gadget head. Making maple syrup affords many opportunities for acquiring gadgets, as well as for organizing and optimizing numerical systems, so it seemed like a perfect outlet for his hobby impulses as well. Again, making maple syrup would be a meaningful activity for him because playing with the gadgets and balancing all the numbers is something that resonates with him. He enjoys it; it’s meaningful. I was excited for him in his first year of sugaring, but also a bit jealous, as I have been doing research on maple sugaring in Vermont, where I live, for seven or so years now. I have helped Vermonters sugar, and I’ve taken part in pretty much all steps in the process, but I don’t have any trees of my own. I have never made my own syrup on my own trees, and he was getting a chance to do so. By definition, he is a backyard sugarmaker, as the first tree he tapped was a maple in his own backyard in Ohio, but by the standards of Vermont, he is a backyarder because he is making syrup in very small quantities and for his own amusement and consumption.

Eventually, my brother added to that first tree and tapped a couple more trees in his yard and one on a neighbor’s property, and he ended up with a decent yield of sap to work with his first winter. I would get periodic updates via text message about how much sap he’d gotten that day, and we would swap more messages about techniques and tools he could use on his first attempt at making syrup. In these conversations typed out with our thumbs, he also asked me questions about timing, temperatures, the vagaries and variations of sap flow, and many other topics, and he would report proudly his results. I was taking part in these conversations with two lines of thought. First and most important, I simply wanted to help my brother do something he was excited about trying to do. Second, I was listening in with my cultural analyst ears (as I always am . . . the curse of being an academic with no off switch), to hear what he was thinking about as he tried sugaring. He talked about the intensity of the flavors he was getting in his first couple batches, or where the best equipment came from, and I felt myself quietly filing those conversations away under culinary meanings or geographic meanings. It is profoundly annoying to be related to an anthropologist, so I didn’t tell him about the parallel course of analysis that was running through my head while we chatted, but he’s been my brother long enough that he doubtless figured it was happening anyway. I was particularly struck during one chat when he said that he wanted to do right by the trees he was tapping. I knew what he meant without having to ask him to explain, as I’ve been his brother just about as long as he’s been mine. He knew he was engaging in a process that was new to him, but by no means new, and he wanted to make sure he was doing it well. He wanted to sugar in a way that was respectful of the trees as biological organisms and mindful of the many others who have made maple syrup before him. Ecological meanings, yes; heritage meanings, check. All of these things mattered to my brother. He wasn’t just playing around at cutting holes in his trees; he was doing something important and he wanted to do it well. Even from his first attempt, making maple syrup was an intensely and multiply meaningful process for him.

That sense of meaning is why I wrote this book. Maple syrup is poorly understood by most of the people who consume it. It’s even less well understood by those who don’t, who prefer artificially flavored corn syrup derivatives on their waffles in the morning, or for those who don’t consume syrup at all. For the last group, my book probably won’t mean much. For the first two groups, though—people who eat real maple syrup and people who eat artificial things pretending to be maple—this book will give greater understandings of what real maple is, how it is made, and most importantly, what roles it plays culturally for the people who make it. For anyone who has stood in a grocery aisle and wondered why a pint of real maple syrup costs five or six times as much as Aunt Jemima and Log Cabin, Meanings of Maple explores the process of getting maple from the tree and onto that store shelf. At every step of the way, and in many different forms, maple syrup is laden with meaning. By exploring those meanings, this book attempts to create a better understanding of a very misunderstood product.

This book is not just an extended commercial for Vermont maple syrup, though. On a larger scale, I want to explore meaning, or more properly, meanings. Using maple in Vermont as an example, I want to delve into the many and varied ways that humans make meaning with the objects and processes in their lives. The sheer variety of meanings that can be made with something as simple as a jar of syrup is obvious, but only if one looks. This book looks.

Meanings of Maple is situated in Vermont. I have been living there and talking with sugarmakers for several years, learning from them about all aspects of sugaring. The mechanics of it, the economics of it, its importance to who they are—all the different meanings that maple has for Vermont. Maple syrup is only made in a small corner of the world, and Vermont has claimed a spot right at the center of the maple-making world. When trying to understand the meanings of maple, it’s the place to be. Some of the analysis in here is specific to Vermont, but most of it is applicable to any place where maple syrup is made. Indeed, much of the discussion can be used to inform analyses of any food item anywhere, but that’s the nature of cultural analysis. We try to find the generalizable in the particular. In the case of Meanings of Maple, the particulars are Vermont and maple syrup, the general are meanings and the making thereof.

Setting the Scene

It’s not hard to find maple in Vermont, to be immersed in it, to feel maple all around you. A drive out from Burlington north to one of my many interviews takes me from urban to rural in less than fifteen minutes. The trip up to Fairfield will take about forty-five minutes, but I’m out of the city and into the hills in no time. As I cover the miles along the road north, sugaring becomes more and more immediate, more present. It’s all around us in Vermont, but it makes itself more obvious on the drive. I leave the city’s hidden maples, the planted, landscaped maple trees that appear in yards and parks, and enter the hills where maples form stands and, with birch, beech, and ash, make up whole stretches of forest. Vermont is not a big place. We’ve got only two interstates, and there are still plenty of unpaved roads that get you from here to there. I’m not talking about the little unmarked tracks that lead from a road to someone’s house—even being a genuine, named-on-the-map road in Vermont is no guarantee of paving. One of the effects of having more small roads is that, even when driving, it is very common to feel more of the presence of the landscape beside the road. Whatever is off the shoulder of the road here is generally closer to you when you’re in a car, and that closeness is more than just spatial. You see the fields and woods, you feel them; they are part of your present situation, not just background that is whizzing by, merely a setting for the reality of driving that is taking place in the foreground. The fields and woods are part of the foreground here. You don’t drive past the fields and woods here. You drive through them.

Fields and woods are the hallmarks of Vermont. Yes, the postcards show covered bridges, rustic barns, and pointy little churches, but those are images Vermont shows to outsiders. They are real enough, and we live here among them, but they are put on the postcards and shown to others because a visitor expects to see bridges and barns. The structures are always tucked into the fields and woods. As I’m driving through them on my way to Fairfield, maple gets closer. Even from the highway, I can see stands of maples, clustering together and asserting their presence among other species. I don’t know that I could have done that ten years ago, but several years of studying sugaring and talking with sugarmakers has given me a greater familiarity with the woods and trees. Here and there, the tell-tale blue or green networks of plastic weave among the trees, ready to gather sap from all the maples hooked into a sophisticated web of tubing that now gathers the vast majority of maple sap and funnels it to a sugarhouse, where it is made into syrup.

Some people and some tourist brochures will tell you that driving out into the hills of Vermont is like driving back in time. That is, at best, overly simplistic, and at worst, patently false. The webs of plastic tubing are very obviously modern, and knowing all the technological systems those webs of tubing connect to just confirms that I am not driving into the past out here. Such a statement assumes there is only one way to be human in the present day, but the people who live and work in the small towns and hills of Vermont are members of today, just as much as anyone else. Driving to my interview in Fairfield is not a trip to the past, but it is a trip to a farm, which is a different way of life from mine. I live and work in the city now. I grew up among farms, but not on a farm, so there is a wonderful familiarity about the sights and smells for me as I pull into the driveway of Jon Branon’s century-old farmhouse for my interview. Dairy is the main occupation on this farm, as it is for the majority of farms in Vermont. Jon greets me warmly when I arrive, and even before I am in the door, the conversation quickly turns to the most recent sugaring season—how well the area did, what prices are like, and so on. We sit down at the kitchen table, a familiar setting for my interviews with sugarmakers, especially in summer. A talk during sugaring season is going to take place in the sugarhouse or walking among the trees. I have been in Jon’s woods with him during winter as well, but summer is as close to down time as sugaring has, so today we sit around the kitchen table, and I start asking questions. More importantly, I listen to Jon’s answers:

ML: Tell me about your family’s history in sugaring.

JB: I don’t know exactly when we started making maple syrup, I would assume it was very early on. I know we had dairy very early on, and so I’m not sure of the actual date on our first maple process, but I think it’s been a hundred years easily enough. And we’ve acquired a little bit of land over time, not a lot. The homestead is pretty much what it was then, I think. We’re a fairly small producer overall, we tap about 3,200, some of that is over the fence on the neighbor’s, kind of hedgerow-type tapping of significant woods. And as time has gone on in the maple world, 3,200 is a very small number. I’ve got some uncles that are doing tens of thousands, almost a hundred thousand actually. And so, economically, it’s fairly insignificant probably, compared to some others local, but it certainly is a heritage. It’s a way of life that we’ve fostered for years, passed on from one generation to the next, and we’re hopefully instilling that in our children. I’ve got three children on the farm, and my brother, who’s a big player in our maple, he has two children also, and so we’re trying to encourage it to them.

As we begin talking about his sugaring operation, it is evident that at least two sets of meanings are interweaving from the outset—the economic importance of maple in the area, and its importance to his family in particular. How these two layers of meaning intersect catches my ear, as Jon juxtaposes the small number of taps he has, which is fairly insignificant in comparison with some of the larger operations near him, and the importance of his sugaring to his family’s heritage. I want to know more about that heritage. . . .

ML: You used the phrase heritage and way of life; what do you mean by that?

JB: For us, maple means more than just producing a crop. On the dairy farm, we produce three cuttings of hay, so those would be three crops, sometimes corn would be a fourth crop, maple would be a fifth crop, actually our first crop of the crop season. And for us, it represents much more than that. For me personally, it’s evidence that winter is tail-ending, we do the sugaring in the spring of the year. Typically winter for a lot of Vermonters gets to be long, drawn out, and so when we start moving toward sugaring, that means we’re moving toward spring, new beginnings, new crop season, and so that plays a pretty big role in my personal feelings toward the spring of the year. I also am a science major in college, and I really enjoy being outside and in the spring of the year, that’s the new beginning of all kinds of plant life and animal activity, and so by being out sugaring you see that. Whether you want to be or not, you’re out there during the snowstorms, or rainstorms, or windy days, and so you see all the awakening, the new season. It puts you right there. And as far as the cultural heritage, as I said, we’ve been doing it in the family for generations. In fact, some of the equipment that we use was probably used by my great-grandfather and maybe even beyond. Some of the buckets, for example, got many, many miles on them. The manufacturing of maple syrup has certainly progressed. We used to be all buckets with horse-drawn tubs, that’s how we collected the sap, and I was very active in that when I was younger. And the technology and the economics have kind of pushed us toward modern maple, which is much more pipeline and pumps. In fact, we have a team of horses, but we use them very little. We do have a few buckets still of that 3,200 total taps, probably 200 are buckets. And now we kind of look at gathering the buckets as almost a Sunday picnic. My father, who’ll be sixty-seven this summer, he oftentimes will drive the tractor, and myself and my kids or some friends from town and their kids will come down, oftentimes on a Sunday, and we will do our little bucket run, which is on a nice, graveled road. The trees are pretty friendly, no side hills. When we used to gather buckets, when we had to gather buckets, you literally took a small army to get the sap collected. We were in some of the worst terrain, going over hillsides to gather trees on ledge, or ice-covered and that kind of thing, and asking the horses to take heavy loads down into swaley areas that were breaking up in the spring of the year the frost was going out, and the icepack and stuff. And so, now gathering buckets is kind of a fun chore, and years ago it was, if you had a big run of sap and then all the sudden the weather turned negatively cold, down around zero where it was going to freeze and split the buckets, there was a big hurry-scurry to get the buckets empty, to get that sap boiled before everything froze up. And so now the bucket component is handled much differently. And the pipeline isn’t nearly as susceptible to freezing and damage as the buckets would have