Earth Month Challenge

April is when it really starts to feel like spring. I start to notice all the natural beauty and enjoy the outdoors again. With Earth Day on April 22nd it's also a time to think about our impact on the world around us and try to be a bit kinder to the environment. This year I am challenging myself to think of everyday ways I can make a difference. One of those efforts is to phase out corn syrup. I will be replacing corn syrup in all my caramel recipes with locally produced honey.

A little information on corn and our environment from "When a Crop Becomes King" By Michael Pollan from the July 18th, 2002 NY Times

"We know a lot more about what 80 million acres of corn is doing to the health of our environment: serious and lasting damage. Modern corn hybrids are the greediest of plants, demanding more nitrogen fertilizer than any other crop. Corn requires more pesticide than any other food crop. Runoff from these chemicals finds its way into the groundwater and, in the Midwestern corn belt, into the Mississippi River, which carries it to the Gulf of Mexico, where it has already killed off marine life in a 12,000 square mile area.

To produce the chemicals we apply to our cornfields takes vast amounts of oil and natural gas. (Nitrogen fertilizer is made from natural gas, pesticides from oil.) America's corn crop might look like a sustainable, solar-powered system for producing food, but it is actually a huge, inefficient, polluting machine that guzzles fossil fuel - a half a gallon of it for every bushel."

I have been working for the past several weeks to reformulate all my recipes with honey instead of corn syrup. The results have been good, they turn out a bit different than the usual corn syrup variety: a little bit softer, the color of the candy is affected by the color of the honey, and there's a bit of a honey flavor too.