In my experience, five or six gallons of propane are needed to boil down enough sap for three-to-four quarts of syrup. That's roughly $20-25 per gallon of syrup, which isn't bad considering that high quality maple syrup retails in the grocery store for $20 per pint. Yet when you consider that we frequently use maple syrup in place of sugar, which is dirt-cheap at the grocery store, the financial benefit evaporates more rapidly than the excess liquid evaporates from my kettle of boiling sap.
So why bother? Why bother raising our own meat and cultivating our own garden produce, as we do? Why spend all those hours starting seeds and weeding plants; all the evenings during the summer and fall canning, pickling, and preserving? We produce our own milk, turning it into kefir, and cheese; we process our own pigs, rendering their fat for our own lard and and brining and smoking their bellies for our own bacon. I make my own wines and ciders, fermenting apples, pumpkins, rhubarb, grapes, currents, raspberries, even dandelions. All of this comes at great cost-- I mean literally, since these activities take a great deal of my time, and time is money. I could be working more hours. If I devoted my time and energy to it, I could be making far, far more money than I do. It would be so much more efficient, and likely cost effective as well, simply to buy things.
***
It's a funny thing, because modern society promises to free us from the supposed slavery of making our own food, building and repairing our own house, etc. All these things are available at the grocery store, over the internet, or at the hands of an expert who would be happy to do it for us. It's more efficient that way. But more efficient for whom? Certainly not for the individual, if it only frees a person from work so that he can do other work. It seems to me that it's efficiency simply for the sake of efficiency, or, worse, efficiency for the sake of industry moguls whose wealth is in the billions-- which is why I am speaking of efficiency-worship. The irony is that we've traded the tether of meeting of our own basic needs for the tether of making the money that we need to pay for our basic needs.
To be clear, this is a complicated matter. For many folks, careers are vocational, not merely a means to the end of making money. Freed from menial tasks to some degree, many people have the time to pursue careers of importance to the community broadly speaking. I'm thinking of lawyers devoted to the pursuit of justice, teachers to helping students to learn, doctors to healthcare, etc., etc. This sort of specialization is only possible when folks are freed from the obligation to spend long hours cultivating food, and mending clothes. The rewards that follow from deep immersion in an area of specialty are likewise great. Humanly speaking, we desire not only to know, but to know deeply.
Yet again, I'm suspicious that what is good has been made into a god, because, humanly speaking, we also desire to know broadly. But why bother knowing broadly when there are experts to handle pretty much anything, and when we're often tired out from whatever specialized task we've been trained to perform on the weekdays? What results, therefore, is a sort of infantilization, a sort of communal forgetting of the sort of basic knowledge that it was once taken for granted that a person would possess-- knowing how to feed oneself, how to cloth oneself, how to shelter oneself. It instead leaves a person at the mercy of the "experts," and it hardly seems like freedom to me.
***
And so, the cycle repeats itself, and life passes us by while we're busy raising the money to live. Maybe we get a weekend here and there, and maybe retirement, too, if our health holds out. Yet a sure sign of our societal slavery is that fully four-fifths of the American workforce is living paycheck-to-paycheck. Like gerbils running on our wheels, we work more and more. We make more money, yet the things we need to pay others to do for us because we're too busy working to do them ourselves is endless. We pay somebody to grow our food because we're too busy to weed a garden. A person's yard may be full of maple trees, but he's too constrained by work obligations to tap them and boil the sap. Somebody else will have to grow his food, cure his bacon, change the oil in his car, repair his leaky roof...
As for me, homesteading, and all the work that it entails, most of which is wholly unnecessary in this day-and-age, is a conscious non serviam. I will not participate in efficiency-worship. I will not serve that god.
