The post What Bees Can Teach Us About Survival and Well-being appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>About 35 percent of the world’s food crops are dependent on pollinators, which means that we have them to thank for about one in every three bites of food that we eat. Whether or not you welcome the presence of bees at your picnic or party, there’s no denying our tables would be poorly set without them.
Michelle Cassandra Johnson and Amy Burtaine, co-authors of The Wisdom of the Hive, understand this about bees—and much, much more. Johnson began keeping bees at her home in North Carolina in 2019, prompted by a vivid dream about them at a time when her mother was gravely ill. Still half dreaming, she got online and ordered “everything that one needs to tend bees—the suit, the boxes, the bees, everything,” she says.
Soon afterward, she learned that in many cultures, bees are thought to help people through times of grief or uncertainty. “This is when I began to understand their mystical power,” she writes in the book. (Her mother eventually recovered.) “And when the shipment of bees arrived, I began to realize the very practical magic they embody.”
“What does it mean for us as humans to labor in a way that will support future generations, even if we won’t experience that ourselves? To me, that kind of laboring is a condition that needs to be in place for us to create justice.”
Burtaine started keeping bees a year later at her home off the coast of Washington state. Though she still does not feel like a master beekeeper, she’s had great teachers—millions of them. “I am always learning from the bees,” she says.
The two longtime friends, who both work as equity educators, experienced the joys and heartbreaks of beekeeping in their respective backyards—from the sweet taste of a hive’s first honey harvest to the silence of a colony lost to a bitter cold winter day.
Then, one day, Johnson called Burtaine and invited her to a shamanism workshop about the principles of the sacred feminine and bees. Burtaine recalls, “At the end of it, we turned to each other with so much excitement. It felt like everything that bees do is a metaphor for humans, which could be a lesson to us.”
That excitement sparked a creative collaboration that eventually took form as their new book, in which the authors invite us to reflect on the myriad complex relationships between humans, bees, and the planet we all share. They encourage us to reimagine the relationship between humans and bees as one defined not only by what the bees can provide us tangibly in the form of honey, but also by the life lessons they can offer if we really pay attention. And, as bee populations the world over have plummeted, resulting in resounding chants of “Save the bees!” Johnson and Burtaine ask instead: “What if the bees are here to save us?”
Civil Eats recently spoke with the authors about bees and what they can teach us about the attunement, caretaking, and interconnectedness that are vital to their survival—and, the authors believe, to ours.
What are some of the ways that we all live in relationship with bees, even if we don’t tend beehives?
Burtaine: Michelle and I did not write this book only for beekeepers. We wrote it as a love letter to bees and as a love letter to humanity. We see how bees treat one another and care for the hive as a superorganism in ways that we wish human beings modeled. Our mission with the book is to help people become students of bees, like we are. Even if you’re not a bee-tender, you’re a food eater—and there’s food injustice across the planet because of systems of oppression. We have things out of balance as humans because of our hierarchies, with us at the top, even though we couldn’t survive without pollinators.
There are also incredible statistics—something like two million flowers go into a pound of honey. It’s just one example of how bees work. Even if they won’t be able to benefit from or taste the fruits of their labor, bees are constantly laboring for future generations, and for us.
Johnson: I think we have forgotten who we are to each other and how to be in reciprocal relationship with the more-than-human world, which is making us suffer. Most of what we ingest is in some way touched by the honey bees, which should call us into a deeper relationship with them.
It makes me think about the life cycle of most bees, which is about six to eight weeks, with the exception of the queen. Throughout that cycle, they’re moving through different roles within the hive. Their final stage is being a forager, where they go out and gather resources, like pollen and nectar and water, for the hive. Often, they will not benefit from those resources directly, because they’re going to die soon.
So, a question we ask is: What does it mean for us as humans to labor in a way that will support future generations, even if we won’t experience that ourselves? To me, that kind of laboring is a condition that needs to be in place for us to create justice.
What are some of the surprising things you’ve learned about how bees interact with each other? What can they teach us about community?
Johnson: As a superorganism, bees do not think of themselves as individual bees—they think of themselves as an extension of the hive. Everything they do is for the hive. They also work with the ecosystem. They understand seasons and weather systems—they know if it’s going to storm well before we do. They work with the sun and light. They work with the things that are blossoming outside their hive. Bees have to understand all that to survive. What if we understood and were aligned in that way with the larger ecosystem?
Bees are also an indicator species—how well bees are doing is an indication of how well we are doing.
“We’re in a time of great uncertainty, and it’s scary. What if we were to—as the bees do—huddle together in the dark, instead of just figuring out ‘how do I survive?’ or ‘what do I need?’”
Burtaine: Bees attune to one another. Their vibration tells you how they are doing. When they are agitated, their vibration is higher. When they are calm, their vibration is lower. They work well together, whether under stress or not.
We as humans tend to fall apart under stress. We are not resonating with ourselves. We are not resonating with one another or doing what is best to help those right next to us. We are not tuning into the whole. We in the West are from a “save mine, get mine, hoard mine, figure out mine” culture that is antithetical to what the bees do. The bees could never do anything for individual gain.
How do you think bees should inform our response to the present moment, to what’s happening in politics and social systems?
Burtaine: So much of what bees do is in the dark [of their hive], but as human beings, we tend to fear the dark. It’s the land of our nightmares, myths, and legends; it’s full of monsters or the wild beasts that would eat us in the days before electricity.
There’s a beautiful writer, Francis Weller, who does a lot of grief work and talks about the period we’re in being “the long dark.” We’re in a time of great uncertainty, and it’s scary. What if we were to—as the bees do—huddle together in the dark, instead of just figuring out “how do I survive?” or “what do I need?” What if we embraced the unknown? What if we sit more kindly with ourselves and one another in the unknowing to create new visions, new ideas, new possibilities?
I think we’re at a time on the planet where we have to learn by doing. We cannot wait until we’re ready with things figured out. We’re not going to just get it right. We’re going to move messily through it together.
Johnson: One way we can learn to mirror the ways of the bee is to attune to our internal and external landscapes. People right now are dysregulated, distracted, and overwhelmed, so it’s very hard to show up moment after moment.
The bees tend to one another, and they tend to the hive. That laboring and care and attunement feel like skills and tools that people in our ancestral lineages understood, because they were more connected to natural rhythms and engaged in ceremony related to seasonal shifts. They were more closely aligned to agriculture in the sense of “what’s growing now?” not “what do I want to eat right now?”
It’s going to require us to understand that things are urgent, and also that a response to this urgency is us slowing down enough to understand what is happening. The bees model that all the time. They’re aware of everything that is happening within and outside the hive, and they’re communicating about it through their antennae, vibrations, and movements.
How can folks become more attuned to bees and begin to learn for themselves what bees have to teach us?
Johnson: A practical thing people can do is plant a pollinator garden or support a community garden. That practice of gardening with one another generates a sense of hive mind.
Burtaine: Honey tasting is a practice we suggest, as long as folks aren’t allergic. Sit with the incredible complexity that unfolds when you really taste it. There are stories in honey.
Johnson: There are hints of multiple plants and places [in honey]. It can be a beautiful meditative practice to both nourish your body and be really present to the complexity and sweetness of what the bees offer.
What are some things we can all do now to better care for the bees, ourselves, and those around us?
Burtaine: There are very practical things we can do. If you have the means, support local, organic farmers and beekeepers. Don’t use pesticides. Try humming—it’s a powerful nervous-system-settling practice that you can do by yourself. You can also put on a YouTube video to listen to the bees and hum along with them, or try a humming practice or attunement meditation.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The post What Bees Can Teach Us About Survival and Well-being appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>The post From Bees to Beer, Buckwheat Is a Climate-Solution Crop appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>From a distance, fields of buckwheat may seem serene, with petite, fluffy white flowers and heart-shaped green leaves. But if you’re standing in one, you’ll hear the distinct buzzing of bees as they pollinate millions of flowers per acre.
“Bees love buckwheat,” says Keith Kisler, a farmer who co-owns Chimacum Valley Grainery, a mill, bakery, and brewery on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. Kisler and his wife, Crystie, cultivate barley, quinoa, rye, spelt, and wheat on about 70 acres of organic farmland, but buckwheat has become one of his favorite crops.
Despite its name, buckwheat is not a type of wheat; it’s a gluten-free seed, rich in vitamins and minerals.
That’s because buckwheat—planted in late May and harvested in early October—is remarkably easy to grow. “In between, there’s really nothing done to that field,” Kisler says. “I don’t do any weed control, and we don’t water. It’s planted, it germinates, it grows, it flowers, it’s harvested.”
Buckwheat is also easy to mill into flour and adds a rich, earthy flavor to some of the Grainery’s products, like bread, beer, and pasta. By managing every step of the process, from cultivation to the finished product, Kisler has overcome buckwheat’s greatest challenge in the U.S.—a solid infrastructure that connects producers with consumers.
Buckwheat flour can be used in a range of recipes, including noodles, pictured here, as well as crêpes, blinis, and cookies. (Photo credit: Crystie Kisler, Chimacum Valley Grainery)
Buckwheat has a long bloom period, can build healthy soil, and is nutrient-dense, making it good not only for bees and farmers, but also planet and people. These multiple benefits are why Kisler and a team of scientists are working together to test new varieties of buckwheat and to build a local market for it.
Led by researchers at Washington State University (WSU) and supported by funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), they hope to increase organic production of this underutilized, low-input crop—one with the potential to address larger challenges like nutrition access and climate change.
A Versatile Seed
Despite its name, buckwheat is not a type of wheat. It is a seed rich in vitamins and minerals, including vitamins A, B, C, and E, as well as potassium and magnesium, which play an important role in a healthy human diet—and it is gluten free. The tough outer hulls are typically removed, and the hulled seeds, called groats, have a nutty taste and the al dente texture of farro. Buckwheat groats can also be milled into a flour for use in sweet and savory recipes, from brownies and cookies to breads and crackers.
Buckwheat originated in southwestern China, featuring in Asian cuisines for thousands of years before spreading to Eastern Europe, likely in the 15th century. Today, China is the world’s second largest producer of buckwheat after Russia. The grain arrived in North America during European colonization and was a favorite of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, due to its capacity to suppress weeds.
Its culinary uses, however, have yet to be fully explored in the U.S., where it is still typically treated as an export item or cover crop. About 27,000 acres of buckwheat were grown here in 2017, the most recent year that data on buckwheat plantings were available.
Washington is the nation’s second top producer of buckwheat after North Dakota, with approximately 6,000 to 8,000 acres, according to Kevin Murphy, a WSU professor of international seed and cropping systems and the director of Breadlab, WSU’s grain research center. Almost all of the seed grown in the Northwest state is exported to Japan for making soba noodles.
Kisler’s buckwheat, grown on 12 acres that produce 16,000 to 18,000 pounds of seed annually, remains in his regional food system. His brother, on the other hand, grows between 200 and 300 acres of buckwheat in eastern Washington, entirely for export to Japan.
“There’s a need for different scales of operations,” Kisler says. “For somebody like my brother to grow several hundred acres of buckwheat and for small production at a local level.”
Buckwheat flowers develop abundantly about 30 days after seeding. At right, an aerial view of a buckwheat field trial. (Photo courtesy of WSU)
Kisler has worked with Breadlab since 2008, and the buckwheat in his fields are varieties they developed together. For years before this collaboration, Kisler used buckwheat as a cover crop, and he saw how it enhanced his soil.
“It helps break disease cycles,” Kisler says. “It grows really quickly, so it out-competes the weeds in a field. It sends down a fairly deep tap root, which loosens compacted soils. It does well even in marginal soils. I don’t ever need to water it, even in a dry season. And it’s planted later, so from a production perspective, it spreads out planting and harvesting so all that work doesn’t need to happen all at once.”
Buckwheat’s agricultural benefits extend beyond the lifespan of the plant. “When I follow it with a grain crop, that grain crop does better in that section of the field where there was buckwheat the previous year than next door where there was no buckwheat planted,” Kisler says.
The Pancake Project
In 2021, WSU researchers began collaborating with local producers to assess the regional market for buckwheat and millet and build consumer demand for these crops, supported by a $350,000 Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Project (SARE) grant, funded by the USDA.
“I don’t do any weed control with buckwheat, and we don’t water. It’s planted, it germinates, it grows, it flowers, it’s harvested.”
They used the most promising buckwheat varieties from nearby farms to develop a pancake mix for Washington’s school lunch programs. Stephen Bramwell, Thurston County Extension director and WSU agriculture specialist, coordinated with nearly 300 school districts for their feedback. A critical factor, they found, was the ratio of buckwheat flour to whole wheat flour.
“After many rounds of taste tests at the Breadlab and schools, we’ve dialed it in to 50 percent buckwheat,” Bramwell says. “We tried to get it close to what people know, what wouldn’t be too different from other pancakes—fairly light, not too grainy, a little bit sweet.”
The pancakes’ appearance was particularly crucial. “The color—that’s a huge one for kids,” says Bramwell, noting that students prefer the lighter hue of pancakes made with refined wheat flour. “Buckwheat pancakes brown faster and can become really dark, so we’ve done trials to moderate the color.”
Buckwheat pancake-mix packets at the Thurston County Fair, created by WSU Extension. At the booth, kids could grind their own buckwheat flour for the packets using a hand-crank mill. The booth was extremely popular, with some kids returning two or three times to grind more buckwheat groats. (Photo credit: Stephen Bramwell)
To familiarize students with buckwheat, the team also organized hands-on lessons, including growing it in school gardens, harvesting and threshing it, using hand-crank mills to pulverize the seeds into flour, making pancakes, and taste testing batches made with different flour ratios.
“The best way to reach kids is not just when it shows up on the plate,” Bramwell says, “but when they’ve had a chance to get exposure to a new product by learning about it, as a plant, as a seed, and then as a food.”
‘More Bang for Your Buckwheat’
After the SARE grant ended in 2024, the WSU team received another USDA grant for a project they call More Bang for Your Buckwheat (MBYB). Their goal is to develop new buckwheat varieties based on traits that both farmers and consumers like and want. With these new varieties, the team plans to develop a diverse selection of “flavorful, affordable, and nutritious” buckwheat products and continue collaborations with 50 school districts in the region.
“The name is sort of tongue-in-cheek,” explains Micaela Colley, WSU professor of participatory plant breeding. “Many farmers grow buckwheat knowing they won’t make any money off it, and they just till it in. We’re interested in all the values of buckwheat as a cover crop, but the idea is that you’re getting a food crop out of it, too.”
An array of foods made with buckwheat, including cookies and crackers, at the Buckwheat Festival. (Photo courtesy of WSU Breadlab)
Recent federal funding cuts devastated some WSU research programs, such as the Soil to Society grant, which included buckwheat as a key crop to consider for increasing food security. The four-year, $3.3 million MBYB grant is still being funded through USDA, but may be indirectly impacted by a $1 billion federal funding cut to the Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement Program, which affects 850,000 students in Washington and may limit the ability of some school districts to buy nutritious, locally produced foods—like WSU’s buckwheat pancake mix.
The MBYB team also includes experts from across the country, with several in New York—another top U.S. producer of buckwheat and buckwheat products. Cornell University and the Glynwood Center for Regional Food are key for research and forming relationships with both farmers and food producers to develop products such as BAM, a buckwheat-based milk alternative.
The MBYB grant will also help fund the third annual Buckwheat Festival on August 8 at the Breadlab, in Burlington, Washington. The small event, which attracted about 50 visitors last year, will offer an evening tasting of buckwheat foods and drinks for $25 or a full day of activities for $125, including a field tour with plant breeders and cooking demonstrations with chefs.
Since 2018, the Breadlab has collaborated with chef Bonnie Morales of the Eastern European restaurant Kachka, in Portland, Oregon, to develop recipes for the restaurant and pop-up events, including the Buckwheat Festival.
“She makes my favorite comfort food,” Colley says, referring to Morales’ golubtsi, a Ukrainian dish of cabbage rolls stuffed with buckwheat. The seed is used throughout Kachka’s menu, including for custard and blini.
The Buckwheat Festival offers tastings of buckwheat foods and drinks, field tours with plant breeders, and cooking demonstrations with chefs. (Photo courtesy of WSU Breadlab)
California chef Sonoko Sakai has also participated in the festival and will be there again this year. “She did a demo and made soba noodles by hand,” Colley recalls. “One thing that stuck in my mind that she shared is that in Japan, master soba chefs will include on the menu the date that buckwheat was harvested and what farm it came from.”
Ultimately, the goal is for buckwheat to be enjoyed year-round, not only on the day of the festival. For this to happen, there’s still much work to be done, especially in local and regional infrastructure.
“We’re really good at growing large amounts of grain and putting them in silos and then shipping them off somewhere far away,” Murphy says. “But if we want to eat locally and grow these grains at a smaller scale, there are a lot of gaps between the farmers and food companies and schools. How do we work together to bridge these gaps and make regional grain economies and value chains more efficient?”
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]]>The post Oregonians Can Now Taste Local Maple Syrup–and Learn to Make It appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>From late November to early March, Ella Smoot can usually be found in one of two places: the forest or the sugar shack. Like all maple syrup producers, her winter is a rush of running sap—cold mornings tapping trees and warm afternoons boiling the clear, watery liquid down to a golden, viscous substance. Though sugaring equipment has evolved over time, the basic process remains unchanged, as it has been practiced for centuries by Indigenous peoples in northeastern North America, from New England up through New Brunswick in Canada.
What is unusual about Smoot’s work is not how it happens, but where. In her role as the executive director of the Oregon Maple Project, she is among the first to make maple syrup in the Pacific Northwest.
“It’s one of the founding reasons of the Oregon Maple Project: to make maple syrup with people.”
The Oregon Maple Project is based in the sugarbush of Camp Colton, an outdoor environmental education center located 45 minutes southeast of Portland. Its 85 forested acres, composed largely of bigleaf maples, as well as fir and cedar, are the traditional lands of the Molalla and Kalapuya people. Though some tribes historically used parts of the bigleaf maple trees for medicinal purposes, it is only in the past few years that the area’s residents have begun tapping the trees for sap.
Eliza Nelson, founder of the Oregon Maple Project, was inspired by her childhood growing up amid sugar maples on the East Coast. She produced her first bigleaf maple syrup in 2018 and founded the Oregon Maple Project two years later, with Smoot joining a year after that. Though thousands of miles from most sugar shacks, they are part of a growing group of bigleaf syrup enthusiasts in the region, actively supporting its continued growth—especially through their Sugaring Collective, which consists of 22 members, drawn together by an interest in local, sustainable food practices.
As international tariffs implemented by the Trump administration affect the flow of foreign imports into the U.S., this interest has taken on a new urgency. Approximately 70 percent of the world’s maple syrup is produced in Canada. While the U.S. produces the remaining 30 percent, our cravings outpace our supply—in the past decade, we have imported more than half of Canada’s total production of maple goods. As imports from Canada are currently subject to a 25 percent tariff, this may change quickly.
The Oregon Maple Project—which produced just 2 gallons of syrup this past winter—can’t come close to meeting national demand, but what the collective offers to its members is more than just a precious, sweet taste of the season: It’s an opportunity to form a more meaningful relationship with their natural surroundings.
Following her fourth sugaring season, Smoot chatted with Civil Eats about her experience as one of the first maple syrup producers in the Pacific Northwest, the differences between bigleaf and sugar maple syrups, and how the traditional practice of sugaring is changing with the climate.
How would you describe the Oregon Maple Project?
Ella Smoot explains to the participants of a sugaring workshop how the boiler is used to transform bigleaf sap into maple syrup. (Photo credit: Elena Valeriote)
We’re an educational nonprofit with the mission of inspiring experiential learning, community partnership, and connection to nature through the local production of bigleaf maple syrup. We offer a range of programs for all ages, including workshops to teach about native plants and field trips to get kiddos outside more. The heart of our organization is the Sugaring Collective, which brings together individuals and families in Northwest Oregon who have access to bigleaf maples and an interest in learning how to produce syrup.
How does the maple collective work?
People pay a fee to participate during the sugaring season, and we provide training, equipment, and support throughout this time. We have a group email thread where people are able to ask any questions, any time, like, “What should I do here?” People collect sap from their own backyards and bring it to a community boil, where we then boil it down into syrup.
What do you love most about making your own maple syrup?
The gathering and the community aspect of it! It’s one of the founding reasons of the Oregon Maple Project: to make maple syrup with people. During the days of boiling, it gets drawn out. It’s a lot of work, but the first boil is always the best day. Through this process, people volunteer in different ways—helping make sure the sap doesn’t start foaming up, chopping wood, adding wood to the fire, thawing sap, checking the tank so that we don’t burn the sap. After all that, we bottle it.
What are the differences between sugar maple and bigleaf maple trees?
Sugar maples are native to the eastern United States and parts of Canada, while bigleaf maples are native to the Pacific Northwest. We usually tag bigleaf maples in the spring and summer, which is when you can identify them using the flowers and leaves (which are bigger than sugar maples’). We also look at the symmetry of their branching patterns.
Steam rises from the Oregon Maple Project’s sugar shack at Camp Colton as members of the sugaring collective oversee the boiling process, reducing the sap from local bigleaf maple trees down to a dense, flavorful syrup. (Photo courtesy of Oregon Maple Project)
Both are used for syrup, but there are some key differences. Sugar maples thrive in colder climates, where they have more consistent freeze-thaw cycles, and are known for producing sap with a higher sugar content, around 2 to 3 percent. This makes the sap easier to boil down into syrup. In the Pacific Northwest, we have less predictable freeze-thaw weather patterns, and the sap of bigleaf maples has a lower sugar content—about 1 to 2 percent—so we need more sap to produce the same amount of syrup.
What does bigleaf maple syrup taste like, compared to the sugar maple syrup most of us are familiar with?
Bigleaf maple syrup tends to be darker than the amber color of the sugar maple syrup most people are used to. Its flavor is usually described as richer, with a hint of butterscotch and a floral undertone.
We try to boil it to all the same properties of traditional syrup, which is sweet and dense because it has to be 66.7 percent sugar. We make sure ours is that percentage of sugar. It’s hard to get there because it’s really scary to be close to burning it when you’re getting to those higher density sugar levels. But what we found is that because there’s less sugar content in our sap, we need to boil it for longer, which gives it a darker color, plus a more molasses-y flavor.
Have Indigenous traditions connected to bigleaf maple trees or sugaring informed your practices at Oregon Maple Project?
Definitely, and moving forward, a big goal of ours is to figure out how to collaborate more with local Native people. Eric Jones (a professor at Oregon State University and a leader of the region’s bigleaf maple syrup movement) has been reaching out to Native communities trying to figure out more about the local history around bigleaf maples.
Buckets are affixed to bigleaf maple trees to capture the sap, which will then be turned into syrup at the nearby sugar shack. (Photo credit: Elena Valeriote)
For us, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book Braiding Sweetgrass is really inspiring, especially the chapter on tapping maple trees. In our workshops, we try to share what we know about Native practices, particularly those from the East Coast, where maple sugaring traditions have been passed down for generations.
We follow Honorable Harvest principles, which means taking only what is given, using everything we take, showing respect for the environment, and leaving something behind in return. For example, to make sure we are respecting the trees, we wait until their leaves are fully off at the beginning of the season before we tap. Then, we only tap them one spile per foot of diameter and we’re not tapping all the trees in the area.
We’re also taking a really small amount of sap compared to what the tree actually creates and we try to be super-duper clean so that bacteria doesn’t grow. We remove all the taps once the trees start budding so that they have all of their energy go towards flowering and making seeds.
In terms of giving back, I think it’s the way we’re educating people about how to practice tapping sustainably. Overall, research on the East Coast has shown that sugaring is really sustainable, and there is more research being done at Oregon State University to evaluate if it impacts the lifespan of a tree at all. They’ve done samples on trees that have been tapped thousands of times on the East Coast, and it hasn’t led to anything showing that it disrupts its ability to live a long, healthy life.
How is producing maple syrup different in the Pacific Northwest as compared to the Northeast? Has climate change impacted the possibility of producing maple syrup in these two regions?
The sugar maple industry in the Northeast has a shorter season. Theirs lasts about six weeks in the spring after the deep freeze. For us, it’s late November or early December—whenever the first freeze is—through early March. And while their temperature patterns are more reliable and they’re working nonstop, we’re on and off, paying attention to the weather, collecting whenever there’s a freeze-thaw, then freezing all of our sap, because we don’t usually have enough for a boil. We have to do a lot of cleaning of all of our materials, because when there’s nothing flowing and it gets really warm during the winter, that’s a perfect place for bacteria to grow.
The maple syrup industry in general is interesting because there are a lot of small farm owners and woodland owners, and we serve people with all different political identities. Unfortunately, climate change has become a political identity.
At the Oregon Maple Project, we are curious about how the warming climate will impact the bigleaf maple trees. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer talks about how sugar maples are going to start walking up to Canada and colder regions because they really like cold. My inkling is that bigleaf maples are really resilient and they’ll stay here, but as the climate gets warmer, we won’t be able to make as much syrup because we need the freeze-thaw cycle for the sap to run.
Can you describe your work at the start of the sugaring season, and then a typical day when everything is in full swing?
The beginning of the season in November is focused on getting all of our systems up and running, developing curriculum for our educational programs, setting up the equipment for the sugaring season, and waiting for that first freeze.
Then, throughout the sugaring season, from December through March, it’s really just chaos. I’m running programs—we do two field trips every week and workshops on the weekends—but also supporting the Sugar Collective, plus collecting sap and processing it through a reverse osmosis system. Sap is made out of water and sugar, so when you run it through reverse osmosis, it’s separating out the water molecules and the sugar molecules. This allows us to freeze a higher concentrate of sugar sap and that lessens the amount of boiling time that we need to get rid of the water and turn it into syrup.
What does the future hold for the Oregon Maple Project?
We’re hoping to connect with more local Native communities to learn more of the history of this area, to keep growing the educational piece of our programs, and continue sharing the joy of making maple syrup from bigleaf maple trees.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The post Oregonians Can Now Taste Local Maple Syrup–and Learn to Make It appeared first on Civil Eats.
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