A very New England Week

Self sufficiency only works when you believe in the idea of self.

That said, making maple syrup is fun and good exercise and relatively inexpensive and produces some of the greatest stuff on earth.

Just like most things in life, technology has made the collection and dehydrating of sap easier and cheaper than it ever was in the past, and thereby fucked the whole model.

Good things are supposed to come in small doses, after hard effort.  Making chocolate cheap only makes cheap chocolate and devalues the real.

I bet that is the way religious feeling works - saying "sorry" on your deathbed only devalues real piety and a lifetime of work.

With Maple Syrup, having suction hoses and 200 gallon collection buckets and commercial electric evaporators certainly results in a greater volume of syrup out the door with a minimum of labor, but what the fuck else are we meant to be doing out in the woods this time of year?

So we work less hard, get moldy, plasticky, ugly intubated forests catheterized like cancer patients wandering the halls of the forests that all used to be farms and are studded with rock walls and abandoned apple trees.

The syrup comes cheap(er) and tastes worse and people say - Pancake syrup is just as good and it's pennies on the dollar and who cares if it used to be beets or corn and never was a red leaf a hematoma on the woods slowly healing into explosions of color only to fall dead and become food for the next generation of trees.

We are using galvanized steel buckets, spiles, and lids.  We are using giant metal pots and scrap wood from the yard for heat, we are collecting daily by hand. It is hard work and cold and rewarding in a way that is hard to understand to someone that has never manufactured their own raw ingredients.

We start with stained old empties, young bucks, and denuded standing firewood and after a drill and a hang and a boil, we get dessert.

There was an episode of Perfect Strangers that I recall from probably 1989 where cousin Larry tried to turn a recipe from Balky into a product and everything falls apart when you try to make more than 1 batch at a time.

I try and I try and I try to remember this important life lesson.

Doing something easy devalues the end result, and devalues the person doing the easy work. Doing work yourself always tastes better than letting someone else do it for you, and when you are working for yourself you take a lot more care than working for an unseen face, for the stranger you'll never meet. See ALDO LEOPOLD for a better explanation.

Tomorrow I will go to Taunton, then to Mattapoisett and harvest shellfish. This will be pretty easy because someone planted those seeds in the bay and we are only doing the harvesting.  I will appreciate the freshness and the connection to the ocean as I eat them, but not as much as the guy who seeded the inlet or the person selecting the scallop from the wild sea that they will feed their family.

But I'll like it better for sure than any sushi I could buy at any price, I promise that.