The great maple syrup swindle

As reported here recently, Trader Joe’s, a specialty food chain here in California, got caught selling inferior quality maple syrup as Grade A. They claimed their supplier foisted the inferior glop upon them, and who knows, this may even be true. But ignorance of maple syrup is no excuse!

This sticky scandal is spreading. I just bought a quart of alleged Grade A maple syup at Whole Foods, sold under their house name. The proof is in the tasting. I compared it to maple syrup I’d bought from a family farmer in Conecticut. It wasn’t even close. The farmer’s syrup was pleasant, sweet, and bursting with maple flavor. The Whole Foods syrup had a bitter smell and tasted even worse, with a strong metallic aftertaste. Bleagh.

So back it went for a refund, and even Whole Foods agreed it smelled noxious.

So, the only solution is to ask my sister, who lives near the Connecicut farmer, to ship me real maple syrup. Because, among other things, it is wonderful in coffee as a substitute for sugar.

As for the black-hearted fiends who sell commercial grade maple syrup as Grade A, may they fall into a vat of their own inferior swill!

PS Aha! I just found a gaggle of websites in New England selling maple syrup, and ordered from Green Mountain Sugar House! (”Sugaring” is what the process of making maple syrup is called).

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The Guardian gets it right.

A new clarion call is echoing through TV stations across the United States: No sex please… we’re American.

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Will Nader run?

While Ralph Nader says that he will decide within the next week or two whether there is enough grass-roots support for him to run for president, so far it is not easy to discern a groundswell.

Hmm, I’m not sure Nader needs a groundswell to run. Plus, with Kerry being the presumptive Democratic candidate, we need a genuine antiwar candidate. Kerry wants 40,000 more troops in the Army and wants more of them stationed overseas. This is a recipe for disaster, should he become President.

From Kerry’s website:

As we internationalize the work in Iraq, we need to add 40,000 troops – the equivalent of two divisions – to the American military in order to meet our responsibilities elsewhere – especially in the urgent global war on terror.

That’s not even remotely an antiwar view. In fact, it is indistinguishable from what Bush is doing now. Oh yes, Kerry promises a kinder gentler foreign policy, but if you’re sending more troops to occupy countries, then it’s not kinder and gentler at all, is it?

If you keep doing what you’re doing, you keep getting what you’re getting. What we’ve been getting is the enmity of the world, an Iraq trap we arrogantly blundered into, and ballooning budget deficits. I see nothing in Kerry’s ‘plan’ that even attempts to resolve any of these problems.

His pretend antiwar stance is just another example of that old trick of the Democratic Party - to co-opting and  defusing any real dissent.

As Peter Camejo eloquently puts it in the Avocado Declaration

The difference is not over whether to “defeat Bush” - understanding that to mean the program of corporate globalization and the wars and trampling of the Constitution that come with it - but rather how to do it. We do not believe it is possible to defeat the “greater” evil by supporting a shamefaced version of the same evil. We believe it is precisely by openly and sharply confronting the two major parties that the policies of the corporate interests these parties represent can be set back and defeated.

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