Liquid Plants

How can eating maple syrup save the planet?

By Maintaining Forests

Maple trees preserve soil, filter water, cool and provide habitat and consume carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas contributing to global warming.

By Supporting Farmers

Farmers and foresters who produce maple syrup are the stewards of the land, with local businesses sustained and supported.

By Valuing Land

When we appreciate the sheer beauty of forest’s landscape or for simply being in the woods, we’ll see the need for preserving Maple trees.

Call to Action

Support small and large producers of maple syrup. More maple syrup in demand means less trees and forests are cut down.

Eat: Eat maple syrup in Granola and on pancakes.

Buy: Maple syrup from your local store or from Farmers directly.

Sustain: Check out more Earth saving solutions.

     Maple Syrup comes from Sugar Maple trees, sweetly and scientifically named Acer saccharum. Growing in the Northeast United States and Canada and famous for their iconic leaf color change in the fall, Maple trees also produce a liquid sap that’s boiled into sweet syrup used for pancakes, waffles, candy and many other foods. 

     A plant science look at your favorite pancake maple syrup topping traces back to water traveling from roots through xylem, one of plant’s vascular transportation tubes that are much like your veins and arteries. Xylem is lined with sugars, carbohydrates, and minerals which rush along with the water’s upward movement. The sap reaches the tree trunk and can be “tapped” and collected.

     Unique weather conditions are needed for the maple sap to flow – cold, below freezing temperatures 20° to 30° F and warm days of 40° to 50° degrees F. At this time the trees can be tapped and sap collected. Technologies and processes for tapping, collecting and concentrating maple syrup have changed and refined over centuries. To concentrate the slightly sweet sap into richly sweet maple syrup requires an insane proportion of 50 gallons of sap producing 1 gallon of syrup.

Maples are deciduous trees that lose their leaves to go dormant in the cold winter. If the leaves didn’t fall, branches will break from heavy snow landing on the leave’s flat surface. So, the falling leaves are an evolutionary adaptation to keep the maples alive.

          But our climate is warming, and Maple’s syrup production locations are shifting to colder northern latitudes. Annual maple syrup production is dropping. Maple sap used to contain 4% sugar; now it’s reduced to 2%. The drop in sap sweetness has followed the rise in global temperatures.

          Maple trees offset carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossils fuels – coal, oil, and gas – by taking in global warming carbon dioxide gas during photosynthesis, Earth’s life supporting process. Eating maple syrup can help to reduce incoming carbon dioxide.

Learn more about Maple syrup

From Canada Maple from Quebec 

From the United States State of Vermont Pure Maple Syrup