We took a break from the pre-sugaring-season woods work last weekend and went to the annual Vermont Maple Sugarmakers’ Association (VMSMA) conference in Bellows Falls. It’s always a nice time – you get to catch up with your fellow sugarmakers, get excited about the coming season, and hopefully learn a few things. After a poor season in 2012, everyone’s anxious to make some syrup.
What was unique about this conference was the talk about sugarhouse certification that’s being pushed by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the VMSMA, and the syrup packing industry. The FDA is worried about consumer safety and national security (for real – a national sugarhouse registration program was established as part of the Bioterrorism act of 2002). The packing industry is worried about consumer safety and covering their butts; one bad barrel of syrup could conceivably contaminate a hundred other barrels and lead to a PR nightmare, so they want to be able to tell their customers that everything they buy has a chain of custody that stretches back to a certified producer.
You can see a draft of the proposed standards on the VMSMA website – most will find the ideas relatively commonsensical, and it won’t take much to bring most sugarhouses into compliance. They want shatterproof light bulbs around the evaporator, floor drains, rodent control, basic cleanliness. The running-water handwash station probably seems the most onerous at first glance, as not many of us have running water in our sap barns, but I’m told that this requirement can be fulfilled with a Coleman water cooler with spigot, a roll of paper towels, and a bottle of hand soap all set up next to each other on a shelf in the corner.
If you’re a sugarmaker who sells any amount of bulk syrup you should look at these certification requirements, because this is where the industry is going. And it’ll be region wide. A spokeswoman from Butternut Maple Farm – a big bulk syrup buyer in Morrisville, Vermont – said that these requirements won’t apply to the syrup they buy this year, but hinted that it’s on the horizon.
It’s hard to argue with the rationale behind all of this; we are making a food item, we all want consumers to be safe, we’ve all heard horror stories of producers who make bad syrup, and we all know that we’re one national news story away from a festering, open wound that brings the whole industry to its knees. Ask an apple grower how the Alar scare in the late 1980s was for business.
But at the same time, I think the fears about where the bureaucratic meddling will lead are fair. (Flush toilet requirements in the sugarhouse? Hair nets?) And that twinge of nostalgia – that feeling that the world may be getting too organized and litigious for its own good – is understandable, too. We’ll comply, of course. It’s the sane thing to do. But not without first recalling the old days of boiling syrup on Grandpop’s dairy farm in an old lead-soldered flat pan (illegal today), in the old sugarshack with the dirt floor (gravel or concrete, no dirt under the new regs), defoaming the pans with fresh cream (NO! People are lactose intolerant), Uncle Tommy boiling eggs in the front pan (My God . . .), four-year-old me standing outside with my dad, a belly full of syrup and dirty hands, watching the sparks mingle with the stars and thinking that everything was right with the world.
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