| The maple syrup story is silmilar to the honey story, isotopically. Real maple syrup is, of course, the concentrated sap from sugar maple trees. The good folks in the New England states and eastern Canada have ready access to an affordable product that the rest of us pay dearly for. More often, we buy the fake stuff of corn heritage and pretend we hear the snow-softened sounds of horse drawn sleds visiting each tapped tree. As with honey, maple trees are C3 plants and produce sugars with isotopic ratios of -24.5 plus or minus a couple of tenths. A little bit of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) or cane sugar and the ratio travels north toward -10 in direct relation to the amount added. |
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| An inexpensive carbon isotope ratio test can detect even small amounts of cane or corn adulteration because of the narrow range of values that authentic maple sugar exhibits. A buyer can be spared a costly mistake when dealing with large quantities of syrup from an unproven source. We have tasted some pretty darned good fakes here at CSL. State agencies from deep in the heart of maple country have even sent us samples of sugar and syrup they believed to be pure only to find that several were blatent cane sugar or corn syrup fakes. |
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