Savor Classics: Maple Syrup

Maple syrup has been sweetening dishes for centuries -- and it may contain the key to some futuristic medicines. In this classic episode, Anney and Lauren pour themselves into the history and science of maple syrup.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Hello, and welcome to save a protection of iHeart Radio.
I'm Annie Rees and I'm Lauren Vogelbaum, and today we
have a classic episode for you about maple syrup. Yes,
this is a fun one. This one has an easter
egg at the end. It's one of my very few
Oh yes, Lauren, I don't have to listen to find

(00:30):
out did I did I not listen to I didn't
listen all the way through the listener mail is it?
Is it? After? Okay? Fun? Okay, it might get cut.
Oh no, a lot of times we cut out the
very very ends. Oh well, you can listen to the original.
It's me talking to myself about being a clone and

(00:55):
never having maple syrup. Right, okay, I do remember that.
Now that's great. Well, hopefully we can find a way
to to to preserve that. But this was you'll have
to forgive my forgetting. This episode is from Mayen. Wow.

(01:16):
Always cracks me up when we designed to do certain things,
because to me, maple syrup is such a I know
for a lot of people it's like all year round thing,
but for me, it's kind of a warming winter fall flavor.
But we do that all the time. We're like oh
it's July. Let's talk about ginger bread, right right, yeah,
And that's kind of why I was thinking about this episode,

(01:38):
is because right like I associated with fall flavors, and
you get some of that good like a like it
goes so well with with dishes like like roast vegetables
or roast duck or something like that. But it's actually
really like a like a late winter food, not like
a fall food when you get right down to like freshness.
But it is. It is a year round thing now,
sure is. And people who love it love it. Oh goodness, absolutely.

(02:05):
Uh yeah, I guess a couple news updates before we
dive in. Uh So, during the pandemic, so many more
people picked up sugar ng is a hobby making maple
syrup from maple sap. Yeah, that supplies like at home
syrup evaporators sold out in the winter of Oh my gosh,

(02:32):
I love it. Wow listeners right in if this was
a hobby that you picked up, Yeah, yes, Oh fascinating.
Um Also NASA correlation Okay, so some researchers at Montana
State University are applying technology that they originally developed for

(02:54):
NASA two maple sap collection and that's because okay, okay,
microbes can create colonies called called biofilms. Yeah they can.
They can mump muck up the plumbing systems and spacecraft
um and similar biofilms can muck up the quality of

(03:14):
maple sap in the sap lines that's used to collect
the sap. So that's so cool. They just got a
whole grant. They're doing this cool stuff, really exciting. That
is exciting. I love it. You're so cool. Strange but
cool sometimes horrifying. Oh yes, well I think that this

(03:42):
means we should let pass Any and Lauren take it away. Yes, hello,
and welcome to food Stuff. I'm Are and I'm Lauren
voc Obam and today we're talking about maple syrup. Yes,

(04:05):
maple syrups. So many of you have suggested this, and
you've told us about amazing festivals. Oh yeah, there's so
many of them and we desperately want to go. But
thank you to thank you for writing in and suggesting
and also making us incredibly jealous. Yeah, we we just
missed all of them. I think. Yeah, they're they're all

(04:26):
in late March and early April. But so if you're
listening to this as it comes out. You have a
whole year to plan. You could plan Oh my gosh,
the whole maple syrup. Yes, a tour to syrup. Oh man,
let us in on that, please. Um. I have an

(04:47):
unattributed quote quote of the episode. They say blood is
thicker than water, but maple syrup is thicker than blood.
Therefore my loyalties lie with pancakes. I can appreciate that. Yeah,
I might be more of a waffles person than a
pancakes person, but I appreciate the sentiment. I I prefer
waffles as well, but I do like a good pancake.

(05:10):
I can't wait to do an episode on pancakes because me,
for me and most of my friends, pancakes when they
were kids made it. They made us all nauseous. Really yeah,
like some kind of weird thing, and I'm interested too many?
Was it like? No, it was like two bites in
nauseated so well duly noted. Yeah, not not anymore. I

(05:35):
love me a good pancake, but it was. It was weird.
It was almost all of my close group of friends
in high school. We did not eat pancakes because it
must feel straight. How are you pancaking? How did you
pancakes so wrong. Well, it could be because of the
syrup I was using, because I I hadn't tried real

(05:55):
maple syrup until I think last year Wow, when a
coworker Oars bought some back from Vermont Um and I
just had pretty much like ant Jemima, my whole life.
This is this is crazy to me because I grew up,
I was born in Ohio. I lived my early years
in Ohio, and I mean, like I I have watched

(06:19):
people tap maple trees and collect sap from them to
make syrup. Like one of my cousin's weddings, the favors
were bottles of maple syrup that they had bottled, that
they had made and bottled themselves. Oh that's so cool.
Like maple candy is a thing that I grew up
eating and still have huge nostalgia for. So I'm just like, like,

(06:41):
mind completely blown. Yeah. Um, I'm very sad about it,
and in like a I can't believe I wasted all
of this time. I'm gonna get used to maple candy.
We're gonna, We're gonna make this work. Also, this is
a throwback Benson to our Juicing and or Dtak episode right,
because it's one of the main ingredients of the Master Clans,

(07:04):
I believe. Yeah, yeah, it's like maple, lemon and cayene
pepper or something. Yeah. While I was doing research for
this episode, I ran across a a cocktail recipe for
the for the retox cocktail, which was those things plus bourbon.
Basically could go for that sounds good to me, but okay,

(07:27):
maple syrup, what is it? Great question? Great question. Maple
syrup is the concentrated sugary sap of maple trees, usually
specifically sugar maples or Acer saccarum, although other species of
maples can be used to and in fact are. You
can harvest the sap from trees by literally tapping them,

(07:49):
I mean like putting in a spout like tap, not
by like poking them lightly with a fingertip, over and over.
I'm glad you clarified, but that wouldn't that wouldn't work
as well. Uh. Then you you cook the resulting sap
down into syrup, and the resulting flavor is quite sweet,
with notes that can be woody, floral like vanillas or

(08:09):
caramel e and or herbal. A whole bunch of stuff
going on there. The trees are native to the northeastern
north central parts of North America, like like United States
and Canada kind of area. And they can live for
hundreds of years and reach heights of over one feet
or thirty meters. Wow. Their leaves turn this really brilliant

(08:31):
yellow than orange than red in the fall before falling
off for the winter. And they're they're lovely. They sound lovely. Yeah.
And their sap is collected in the late winter and
then processed into syrup. A sap as soon as possible.
Need syrup in our faces, totally, yes, Well, otherwise it

(08:51):
goes bad because it's got high water context, you know. Yeah,
gotta keep it cold, gotta use it soon. Not the
maple syrup, I mean, maples are so once you open
a bottle, keep it in the fridge. Really, it's not
shelf stable. Oh my gosh, I'm learning so much, learning
so much. Canada has a grading system, yeah, for maple syrup,
based on the color extra light A light A medium B,

(09:17):
number two amber cy and number three dark D. The
US has a simple light which is denoted by A
versus dark B distinction, but Vermont has a whole grading
thing of their own. The descriptors are great. There's golden
color with delicate taste, amber color with rich taste, dark

(09:39):
with robust taste, and very dark with strong taste, strong taste.
Thanks to mental flaws for that breakdown. Um and you
actually might guess by the flag and our basic conversation
so far, it's kind of a big deal in Canada,
maple is sort of a whole thing. Yeah. I believe

(10:00):
probably half of the listeners who suggested maple syrup from
Canada and the other half were from rut Uh and
like wine, salt, mushrooms, oysters, so many things we've talked about.
The flavor of maple syrup is impacted by the soil,
the tree, the weather, meaning you should sample different syrups
like wines if the opportunity presents itself, and I certainly

(10:21):
hope it presents itself to us. Yes, we need to
work on this, we absolutely do. We're looking at the health. Um. So,
the sap by itself is relatively low in sugar. A
good maple syrup is about sixty six sugar or higher.
That's mostly sucross. If you were wondering with a little

(10:41):
bit of glucose and fruit toast mixed in there. It's
about fifty calories per table spoon, with a decent amount
of calcium and potassium, no cholesterol, no fat um. A
fake maple syrup is made of high fructose corn syrup,
cellulo scum, coloring um. If you look at the labels,
they almost certainly don't have maple and the product name
and instead a pancake syrup or breakfast syrup, which is

(11:01):
one of those things that when I read that, it's
a light in oh yeah, oh yeah, So I really
wasn't having maple syrup. It was right in front of
me all along um. And if you haven't surmised already,
Vermont takes their syrup seriously. And in two thousand and eleven,
McDonald's found itself in a legal battle after selling a
product called fruit and Maple oatmeal, except it wasn't with maple,

(11:26):
it was with the fake stuff. Gasp. In Vermont, it
is illegal to use the word maple if the sweetener
is not involved, if the sweetener involved is not pure maple.
So McDonald's found itself in a bit of a pickle
that tasted like maple syrup, fatally maplely pickle. I would

(11:49):
eat that, I would try that. Yeah, we we try.
We'll try just about anything. Yeah, you didn't see our
our social post recently. We try the peanut butter and pickles.
So maple and pickle. We already gut some pickles leftovers,
and the maple and the peanut butter and pickle was

(12:09):
pretty okay. Yeah, yeah, all right, we'll table that for later. Yes, yes,
let's talk about how we get maple syrup. Yeah. Yeah,
to get one gallon of syrup, you're going to need
about forty gallons of sap because the sap is water,
and per season, the average tree will yield somewhere between

(12:30):
five and fifteen gallons of sap, So you're gonna kneel
a lot of trees. Um Generally, this is all generally,
there are allliners that produce way more or with less, right,
And the reason that these sugar maples or rock maples
are used so frequently is that they produce more sugar
than a lot of other maple trees. You can also
do this with birch trees. I guess you could do
it with other kinds of trees too, but I'm not

(12:51):
sure your results may vary. Yeah, more about that possibly
in another episode Okay, so trees, yeah, they makes app
they do. They do some more than others and all
with different properties. But SAP is the sugary energy source
the trees create from photosynthesis, and then they use that

(13:12):
SAP to power their cells and their growth. SAP is
uh that that sugar stuff rather is mixed with water
drawn up from the tree's roots, and the SAP also
contains a number of minerals and other compounds. Due to
all of this process, some trees have a specific growing
season In maples, that's the warm spring in summer when
light is plentiful. In the fall and winter, the trees

(13:34):
stop growing and kind of battened down the proverbial hatches
for the for the cold weather and shorter days, so
they store any excess sugars for use the next growing season.
One of the storage units for all this sugary sap
is raise in the trunk. Raise Raise. Not like the
Star Wars character just hanging out. No, there's not a

(13:58):
bunch of tiny Star Wars ladies with lightsabers. Okay, just
checking in trees that I'm personally aware of. Oh man,
that's true, all right. Have you have you ever seen
a cross section of a of a tree trunk. Yeah
all right, so so it's got rings. It's got rings,
concentric rings that represent growth seasons, like like Dante's Inferno, um,

(14:21):
and running perpendicular to those rings from the center of
the tree out to the bark. You'll also see rays
in a living tree. These are chains of cells that
store sugars for growth and repairs. And normally the trees
cell structure and you know, stiff outer bark will keep
the sap just cozily insulated until spring. But it's pretty

(14:42):
easy to disrupt that insulation and get the sap to
flow right out to you during certain temperature conditions because
of physics. Physics, Okay, for first, disrupting the the insulation,
that part's easy. You you drill a hole into the
trees trunk and gently hammer in a spout or tap
or spile, and a wee bit of sap is going

(15:04):
to start flowing out from the from the cells immediately
surrounding the tap. But the way that you get it
to really flow is so cool. Literally uh yeah, um. Okay.
The reason that maple sap is harvested in the late winter,
like I said, is that that's when the ambient temperature
starts going significantly above freezing during the day up until

(15:28):
like the forties or fifties, but then dipping back down
below freezing at night. In celsius, that's going up to
about five or ten degrees during the day, and this
means that at night the sap cools and will even
freeze inside the trunk. As you may remember from our
episode on soft drinks, colder temperatures mean that gases can

(15:49):
more easily dissolve into liquids, So overnight gases get dissolved
and compressed and frozen into the sap, and the next day,
when warmer temperatures melt the ice and those gases are released,
they expand, pushing the sap right out of the tree.
All you've got to do is like hang a bucket

(16:10):
and you've got sap. Pretty cool. Yeah, don't worry about
the trees, by the way, they're they're fine. You can
certainly over tap a tree if you were trying, but
it would take a lot more than a single hole,
or even two or three. A properly made tap hole
will prepare itself within a couple of years to allowing
for a a long and uh productive life. An illustrious career. Yes,

(16:36):
and you can keep this this uh, this sapping process
up as long as the night's freeze in the day's
warm up, until the tree begins butting new leaves, at
which point, at which point the tree starts producing other
compounds that will make the sap taste off. I've heard
it referred to as like old shoe flavor. Oh no,
not what you want, and delicious maple syrup. No, not

(17:00):
generally shoe flavor. I've never seen that on a label. Now,
an old shoe flavor, I guess. I see things described
as a leather sometimes. Sure, I don't think that's what
they're talking about. I mean, old shoe is very very

(17:20):
specific and devocative. Yeah, no, no, thanks, No, okay, So
you've got you've got your sap um And it's most simple.
You get maple syrup from sap by tapping a sugar maple,
collecting sap, and taking water out of the sap via
boiling and or other science until it's gone from like
two sugar to about sixty six sugar. As we're saying

(17:44):
these days, though farms might have a couple of thousand
trees or a couple of hundred thousand trees and they
might pipe the SAP through hundreds of miles of tubing
to a sugar house where the SAP is processed. And
at that point it gets a little bit more complicated
because in these large productions and even in some home productions,
the SAP is run through a reverse osmosis unit before

(18:07):
it's cooked down. And all right, Reverse osmosis is a
type of filtration system that's more than just like big
molecules get stuck on one side and smaller molecules go
through to the other side. That's your basic filtration. This
is a little bit more um. Basically, you apply pressure
to a solution of water plus stuff that's on one

(18:29):
side of a semipermeable membrane, and on the other side
you've got purer water. Normally, the way osmosis works is
the purer water would want to come through to dilute
the solution, but because you're applying pressure to it, and
in a in a couple other conditions caused by the pressure,
you're reversing the normal flow of osmosis, forcing the purer

(18:53):
water to all collect on one side, and then the
increasingly dense solution of are in stuff to collect on
the other and this gets a whole bunch of water
out before you start cooking the SAP, which means you
can save a whole lot on energy. Yeah yeah, because
yeah yeah. The cooking process, you essentially set it out

(19:14):
in big trays and heat the trays. That's it until
it's until it's syrup. Well there you go, and then yeah,
either way you you you filter it and then it's
essentially that's what you got. That's what you got. I
every time you're saying SAP, I kept thinking of a
drastic park that DNA video mr and it get caught

(19:40):
and they'll stay. I watched that last night, so it's
like different things. Yes, no dinosaurs involved in this episode
that we know. Again, there's a lot of mysteries to
be solved, listeners, a lot of mysteries out here, all right,

(20:03):
So let's talk some maple syrup numbers. Um As you
may have heard in the news lately, maple syrup makes
some big books, such big books that had inspired theft
and criminals absconded with six million pounds of maple syrup
from the warehouse of the Federation of Quebec maple syrup producers,

(20:26):
worth about eighteen million dollars. That's so much syrup. I know,
eighteen million dollars of syrup. It's six million pounds. That's wild.
I do not have the technology, No are the brain power.
Now twenty three people have been arrested so far. Yeah,

(20:46):
but authorities are still missing one third of what was taken,
so they have recovered two thirds. Um. And this is
one of the largest agricultural thefts of all time. There's
been some really big ones, so that's impressive. Uh. And
and the Quebec Maple Syrup Producers Organization, by the way,
has been keeping reserves of syrup to accommodate for fluctuations

(21:08):
in production back since the year two thousand. Yeah. I
never want to be out of that maple, sirup Oh No,
the price cannot fluctuate wildly depending on the season. Time
reported in two thousand nine that maple syrup would run
you about eighty dollars a gallon in some places. Yeah. Um,
about eight percent of our supply comes from Canada and

(21:29):
two thirds of that comes from Quebec. Korea, however, prefers
the sap. They gather from the Korean maple tree, and
they consume a lot of it sometimes as much as
five gallons in one got of the sap, not the syrup, Yes, important, important,
just guzzling calendar after calendar syrup. Yeah. The tree's name

(21:54):
translates to tree good for the bones. Birch sap is
a popular drink in Russia and are parts of northern Europe,
and here in the United States. There has been from
time to time a market for maple sap called maple water. Oh,
very fancy. I don't know it sounds it sounds lovely,
it does. Okay, So that's the overview of maple syrup.

(22:18):
What is it? Answered? But what about the history? What
about it? We'll get into it right after a quick
break for a word from our sponsor, and we're back,

(22:39):
Thank you, sponsor. The indigenous peoples of North America were
most likely the first to figure out the secret to
tapping maple trees, and we can find a few legends
about the discovery and the historical record. Um, there's a
legend that a chief through a tomahawk at a tree
and the syrup overflow with from the cut, and I

(23:01):
believe his wife she collected it, and then she accidentally
maybe not accidentally, she um was out of water, and
she used the sap to cook venison in or something,
and they were like, whoa, this the best taste, so good. Um.
There's another legend that some well it's not really a legend.

(23:23):
Maybe some just oozed out from a broken branch on
a maple tree. Um. Perhaps it froze and became a sapsicle.
I did not make that word up. Oh yeah, no,
that's real word, sapsicle. I love it. Um. Or perhaps um,
some folks got the idea by watching animal life always
a possibility. UM. Accounts from arriving settlers described Native Americans

(23:46):
slashing into trees with their tomahawks, then collecting the sap
with a reed or a concave piece of bark in
vessels of stone together birch bark that were made waterproof
by adding boiled pine cones for the seams. Um and
these vessels were later replaced with iron kettles. According to
the American Maple Museum, Jacques Cartier observed North American maple

(24:10):
trees and fifteen forty and French monk Andred Tibet wrote
about the North American maple sugar ng in fifty seven. Obviously,
hopefully you never know, you never know. Um. Collection and
distillation of maple sap by the Micmac tribe was detailed
by Mark Les Carbo and sixteen or six, and written

(24:34):
records show that by seventeen sixty and probably earlier um
with that distillation, the syrup was sometimes boiled down to
sugar and added to water or porridge made of ground
up corn on meat and fish in the place of salt.
I found a document listing the ways Native Americans utilized
maple sap syrup sugar, and it was quite long, ranging

(24:56):
from beer to bread to venison, all kinds of things.
When the Europeans arrived, the Native Americans stopped them how
to extract it, and it was their go to when
other sweeteners like molasses are a fine sugar, we're hard
to come by the authors of Eating in America History
describe at maple syrup as one of the quote most
important contributions of Northeastern Native Americans to American cooking, one

(25:20):
that impressed Europeans enormously. The beginning of the sixteenth century,
dairy farmers sometimes referred to maple trees as sugar bushes,
and with drill holes into these trees with a bucket
hung underneath. During the brief window they could get to
the sap as a way to make a little extra money,
or if they just wanted a sweetener for themselves. Every
couple of days, the farmers would pour the contents of

(25:40):
the buckets into a bigger vessel and haul them off
to a sugar house. There they'd boil the sap over
a fire to get the syrup. A sixteen seventy one
account from a French Jesuit priest mentions a liquor that
runs from the trees called maple water. Once the Europeans
followed the Native American example, many folks began using it

(26:01):
as their main sweetener. Over two centuries ago, Early Americans
were consuming maple syrup at a rate of four times
higher than our current one, and the reason why this
was largely priced at the time and up until at
least eighteen sixty, cane sugar from the Spanish West Indies
would run you way, way, way, way more, and according
to records from the eighteen seventies, the Winnebago and Chipplewood

(26:25):
tribes were rumored to sell fifteen thousand pounds of maple
sugar a year to the Northwest Fur Company. Yeah other
written descriptions described the map the maple harvesting season as
a sort of carnival for the Native Americans, when children
had boiled a sack to sugar then pour it into
the snow to make candy. Still a thing, Is it really? Yeah,

(26:46):
that's so exciting. Did you ever do that? No? Oh, man,
but i've but I've watched it. Then, Oh that's cool. Later,
a German explorer wrote that you could find maple candies
in all kinds of shapes, like flowers and animals. The
authors of the aforementioned Eating in America contended that the prominence, popularity,
and sweetness of maple syrup led to a prevalence of

(27:07):
sweetness in the New American cuisine, particularly in the North
and New England. And they gave honey baked ham as
kind of an example, or sweetened pork meats. It's a
weird way to say that, but yeah, you know, like
the sugared ham or sugar bacon or kind of that thing. Yeah. Um.
The Quakers, who were abolitionist, made and promoted maple sugar

(27:31):
as a replacement for sugarcane obtained through slave labor in
the West Indies. In sight, they were led by Dr
Benjamin Rush, and he caught the air. Someone who comes
up a lot in our episodes. No, not Columbus, Napoleon. No,
he hasn't come up in a while, right, Napoleon, you've
been slacking. Yeah, come on, it's Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson

(27:57):
became a member of Russia's Society for from notching the
manufacturer of sugar from the sugar maple tree just rolls
off the tongue, I tell you. Jefferson thought that if
American farmers could produce enough maple sugar to satisfy the
country's in need and still have some left to export,
then they could put a stop to the British cane
sugar operation UM At the time, even though maple sugar

(28:20):
wasn't exactly the easiest thing to produce, this was not unfeasible.
An average farm family reasonably could have churned out two
hundred pounds a season. Rush and Jefferson made pamphlets. I
don't know why I got so excited, and I read UM.
Along with the anti slavery sentiments, it did come with

(28:41):
less than scientific claims. The pamphlets did like this one.
The plague has never been known in any country where
sugar composes a material part of the diet of the inhabitants.
I mean no, right, that's no, I can't. I haven't
fact checked that. We haven't fact checked it. We did

(29:01):
not fact check Jefferson's claim there's no plague where they
eat sugar positive. I don't think so. But anyway, he
Jefferson started up his own maple plantation in seventeen ninety
one in his Monticello home. By eighteen eighteen, maple sugars
price tag was half that of cane sugar. In eighteen

(29:23):
fifty eight, the evaporating pan is patented. In eighteen sixty
the first metal sap spout. That same year, the US
produced forty million pounds of maple sugar and one point
six million gallons of maple syrup, the highest in our
history peak qus maple syrup um. We see a lot

(29:44):
of a vaporing pan innovations all the way up until
the nineteen hundreds, and the first sugar evaporator in eight
four I'll last. The very next year, for the first time,
the price of cane sugar fell below that of maple sugar.
The ver Maple Sugar Makers Association was founded in eight

(30:04):
three and started putting those standards together. The Pure Food
and Drug Act passed in nineteen o six, and it
made adulteration of maple syrup with good close illegal. In
nineteen sixty six, Robert Lamb, not not not our Robert Lamb. No,
not that Robert Lamb patented a plastic tubing system for

(30:25):
getting your maple syrup. Meanwhile, researchers had begun experimenting with
that reverse osmosis for water filtration around the nineteen fifties.
It had been around for a couple centuries before then,
but they really in earnest started in the nineteen fifties,
specifically forgetting the salt out of salt water. By the
nineteen seventies, maple farmers began applying this technology to syrup production.

(30:48):
In nineteen seventy five, the Maple Syrup Institute was formed,
and similar to most organizations we've talked about that are
sort of like the Mushroom Council um, the goal was
to set standards and to increase awareness and to increase sales.
Of course, and these days many maple farms are implementing
a lot of green energy technology, solar and wind power,

(31:09):
even methane from cow manure as a sort of up
cycled fuel, and this is less expensive in the long
run than traditional grid power. But the push for cleaner
energy sources is perhaps particularly important to maple sugar farmers
because climate change and global warming are particularly threatening to them.
Shorter winters means shorter sugaring seasons and thus lower yield,

(31:31):
and eventually in some areas that may see like significantly
higher temperatures and less rainfall, less healthy trees, and an
even lower yield over time. UH, though that is partially
being offset by improvements and other technologies, for example sanitation, UH,
SAP collection techniques that those reverse osmoses machines, evaporators, they're

(31:52):
all getting more efficient all the time, both in terms
of energy use and total output of SAP per tree,
more efficient all the time. That's the history portion I am.
I found this excellent, very thorough document from a I

(32:14):
believe a maple syrup museum, and it went like into
every every type of spout that had ever been used,
or just so much detail, and I glossed over it
in here, but it exists out there. There's so much information.

(32:35):
Should you like to want to dig in more? UM yeah,
if you want to go down that rabbit hole or
tap hole as the case, maybe it's there. It is there.
And I loved it too because it was, like someone
told me once, you can tell when someone is really
good at their job if their website is bad because

(32:57):
they're too busy to update webs Yeah, and it was.
So it's very much like that. It's very very bad.
Yes you're listening. If whatever museum it was, it was great.
I love the whole thing, great experience. Um, okay, so
we do have a little bit of science for you.
We do, but first one more quick word from our

(33:18):
sponsor and we're back. Thank you sponsor, Yes, thank you.
So uh. There are folk remedies a plenty involving maple
sap and syrup, perhaps mostly for digestive and throat sort

(33:40):
of issues, but it's also been taken orally for all
kinds of things, mostly in the preventative category, but there
is some maple syrup science in terms of medicine. There's
a compound in maple syrup that may help fight inflammatory
diseases like arthritis, a compound you say calmpound as as

(34:04):
you boil maple sap into syrup. One of the molecules
that forms has been found to make our immune system
just kind of chill out a little bit. Uh. Specifically,
it inhibits the secretion of a couple of pro inflammatory
signal proteins. In inflammation is part of the body's useful
immune system of getting extra resources to an injured area

(34:26):
to help it heal. But in diseases like arthritis, the
immune system has started attacking your own healthy tissue, causing
needless inflammation and pain and reduced function. And a lot
of the current medicines for treating this, you know, steroids,
for example, have have seriously negative side effects, especially when
used in the long term. So this compound out of

(34:47):
maple syrup is potentially really amazing. That sounds like something
my uncle would say about me. It's she's potentially really amazing.
More more work needs to be done. She could get there, though,
dang researchers named not not you or your uncle, but

(35:09):
rather this compound um quebec all oh, I love it
after Quebec, and they've been able to synthesize it, which
is extra great because that way you don't have to
take large amounts of maple syrup to get this compound
out of uh. Yeah, and more research is needed, more
work is needed, but potentially really amazing. Yeah, and there's

(35:32):
more more. Yes. Quebec All and a few other compounds
in maple syrup have been found to inhibit the growth
of some cancer cells and to boost the effectiveness of antibiotics.
And the higher grade syrups, the darkest ones typically harvested
later in the year, as the maple trees start to
prepare for their new growing season, they have the most

(35:55):
of these compounds in them. Interesting, which does not mean
that you should just go out and dousing everything in
the most expensive maple syrup that you can find, no um.
But it does mean that in like five or ten years,
treatments that use extracts of maple syrup may be helping
us all stay healthier. That's cool, Thanks maple syrup. Thank
you maple syrup. Just using you on pancakes, but all alone,

(36:19):
we've had our health in mind. It kind of reminds
me of honey a little bit. Oh yeah, yeah. It's
stuff that plants bank is good for us sometimes sometimes,
and stuff that bees vomit is good for us sometimes too. Sometimes.
You heard it here first, And this brings us to

(36:46):
the end of this classic episode. We hope that you
enjoyed it as much as we enjoyed doing it and
revisiting it. Maybe you get to hear from clone Anny,
who knows. I don't like to think about what she
could be up to right Maybe she's had maple syrup.
Maybe she has. We have had some of some of
y'all lovely listeners sent us some some maple sugar candy

(37:10):
and like a can of really high quality maple syrup,
and I think Annie, you haven't gotten any of that.
I think the can is still sitting in my cupboard.
Especially these last like you know, two and a half
three years that have been pandemic, E have really cut

(37:30):
down in the number of wacky food parties that we've had.
So it's true, but we have an epic one that
we're weaving together that's becoming more and more unwieldy. But
I'm excited and nervous as well. You should be, thank you,

(37:51):
and you also you're welcome. I don't know, um well Listeners.
As always, if you would like to contact us, if
you've done anything with a maple syrup during this pandemic time, gosh,
please let us know. You can email us at Hello
at saver pod dot com. We're also on social media.
You can find us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at

(38:11):
saver pod and we do hope to hear from you.
Saver is production of My Heart Radio. For more podcasts
from my Heart Radio, you can visit the I Heart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows. Thanks as always to our super producers Dylan
Fagan and Andrew Howard. Thanks to you for listening, and
we hope that lots more good things are coming your way. Hello,

(38:34):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Annie Reese and I'm
Annie Reese, and today on food Stuff, we're trying an experiment. Um. Well, Dylan,
I are super producer. Dylan. Um, we've been talking about
cloning and uh, well I figured it out. So there
are two Annie's in the studio now. It is weird.

(38:57):
I'm trying to like not freak out about it. We
haven't told the scientific community or anything because, um, I
don't know. It feels like it feels like it could
be used for evil, don't you think, Anny? Yeah? Yeah,
I mean, don't get me wrong. I appreciate that I
um that I exist, but I mean yesterday I was nothing,

(39:19):
and now I'm a twenty nine year old woman who's
just always hungry, and I'm not, like, I'm not sure
what to do or what any of this all means. Yeah,
I think we all feel that way. It's well, I mean,
you're only a day old right now, so yeah, you're
just gonna have to get used to it. Um. And

(39:41):
the way that I do that is by eating a
lot of food and drinking taking a lot of beer wine. Um,
I read a lot too. I mean, you find things
to distract yourself, I suppose. But anyway, just try not
to like be too weirded out by this whole situation. Okay,
Lauren will be back later because she's really busy and

(40:05):
um we needed a quick fix, so it's too an
easy day and we're going to talk about maple syrup. Unfortunately, UM,
I was really counting on having Lauren here for this
because I've actually never had a real maple syrup, and
neither of you. Clearly she's only existed for one day. Um. Oh, man,

(40:30):
I gotta say it. It's so strange because like, if you,
I'm worried, I'm going to be very very jealous of
like the life that you get up to. Maybe you're
going to try maple syrup before me, and that's gonna
be really upsetting, and I also just a dynamic we're
gonna have. Liken'll be honest, I'm always going to see

(40:50):
you a bit different because you're you're like you might
be twenty nine, but you don't have to lived experience
that I do. So it's like you're a child. It's
so strange anyway back in maple syrup. I'm so sorry.
M I think I think what would be best is, um,
maybe we should wait for Lauren