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Off the treadmill? Technology and tourism in the north American maple syrup industry

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Abstract

The contrast between the nostalgic pictures on maple syrup packaging and sophisticated technologies actually used in the sugarbush and sugarhouse suggests disjunctures between image and practice in the contemporary North American maple syrup industry. This paper argues that although evidence of a “technological treadmill” exists within the maple syrup industry, as it does in other rural production sectors, such a trend is incomplete due to the increasing importance of consumption-based activities and concerns in the countryside. In response to the interests of tourists, second home owners and other increasingly influential non-producer groups, “traditional” maple enterprises persist, demonstrating a logic and appeal unaccounted for by treadmill theory. By addressing growing consumer concern about the appearance of the rural landscape, the health of the environment, and the quality of food, these “traditional” maple practices can provide distinct advantages for producers over technological modernization. The tension between technology use and tourism in the maple syrup industry offers insights about the role of small-scale specialty agriculture for sustainability in rural areas of advanced industrial countries undergoing social and economic change.

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Authors
  1. C. Clare Hinrichs
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Clare Hinrichs is a Research Associate at the Center for the Environment and Waste Management Institute of Cornell University. Her research interests include the social and economic restructuring of rural areas, land use planning, and environmental justice.

Suppose you buy a quart of syrup in the village store in South Strafford. It comes in a can with brightly colored pictures on it. These pictures show men carrying sap pails on yokes, sugarhouses with great stacks of logs outside, teams of horses, and all the rest. They are distinctly last-stand pictures.

But suppose you decide to go into the sugaring business for yourself. When you write away for advice, you get a go-modern or private-reality answer. You are told not to hang pails at all, much less carry them to the sugarhouse on a yoke. Instead, install pipes. Don't bother to cut any four-foot logs, you're told, even though your hills are covered with trees. Texas oil gives a better-controlled heat. And finally, your instructions say, the right way to market the stuff is to put it in cans that show men carrying sap pails, sugarhouses with great stacks of logs ....

Noel Perrin, “The Two Faces of Vermont” inFirst Person Rural (1978: 87)

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Hinrichs, C.C. Off the treadmill? Technology and tourism in the north American maple syrup industry. Agric Hum Values 12, 39–47 (1995). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02218073

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