Yesterday, my husband, Clif, said, “I wish wedding anniversaries happened more than once a year.”

I could see his point. On Sunday, Shannon and Mike came over to our house to cook us something special in honor of our thirty-fourth wedding anniversary.

Oh, the food they made: puff pastry cheese straws; sausage simmered in wine and spices; homemade tortilla chips; curried pancakes; pork moo-shu; plum sauce; and rice. For dessert—a layered parfait consisting of pound cake pieces spread with raspberry jam, whipped cream mixed with lemon curd, and strawberries.

Clif and I ate and ate. Maybe it’s just as well we only have one wedding anniversary a year.

For our family, March has two events that perk up an otherwise dreary month—the first is my husband, Clif’s, and my wedding anniversary and the second is the beginning of maple syrup season. The fourth Sunday of March has been designated as Maine Maple Sunday, and on that day, Clif and I always like to go visit a sugarhouse where the precious substance is being made.

This year we went to Mike’s Maple House, which is off the Holmes Road in Winthrop, right around the corner from us. (Had it not been so cold and blowy, we could have walked.) We went midafternoon, and cars were lined along the side of the dirt road, a little squishy despite the chilly weather. No surprise that there was a crowd. Mainers are crazy about maple syrup, and they prefer the real stuff—strong and sweet with an intense maple flavor.

The sugarhouse, a good-sized brown building, was an easy trip down an equally squishy driveway. The sugarhouse had steam pouring out a vent in a cupola on top of the roof, and alongside the driveway were stacks and stacks of wood used for boiling down the sap. By the side of the building is a huge barrel—one that can hold forty gallons—with a gallon maple syrup jug sitting next to it. Yes, readers, this is how much sap, collected from maple trees in the spring, is needed to make one gallon of maple syrup. A very good visual.

Inside the building, visitors could witness the birth of maple syrup. A huge wood-fired evaporator dominated one side of the room, and between the flames, visible through cracks in the wood box, and the steam of the evaporating sap, it felt as though we were in some kind of alchemist’s workshop. In a way, I suppose we were, with maple syrup rather than gold being the product. The sweet scent of sap filled the sugarhouse, and when combined with the smoky smell of the fire, the effect was intoxicating, producing a nearly irrational desire for maple syrup products.

A table, of course, with such products was set up on the other side of the room. But before whipping out my checkbook, I spoke to Mike Smith, the genial, outgoing owner, and his equally friendly children, Christy Andrews and Ryan Smith. Christy was handing out samples of vanilla ice cream topped with maple syrup, and Ryan was tending the evaporator.

Mike told me that unlike last year, this was a good year for syrup, and he expected to get at least 125 gallons. (Go ahead. Do the math and figure how much sap needs to be boiled down to get this much syrup.)  Mike has been boiling sap since he was small, and for years his family did it for home use. Now Mike makes enough to sell. One year, with the help of an old farmer to collect the sap, he and his family made 210 gallons of syrup. Mike mentioned how his oldest boy has caught on with making maple syrup, and that his youngest son was catching on, too.

Good! May the Smith tradition of boiling sap continue for a long, long time.

Before leaving, I bought four maple whoopie pies—I can’t get away from them, and I’m not sure I want to. The whoopie pies were made by Steve’s Snacks Bakery in Skowhegan, Maine. I also bought a jug of extra-dark maple syrup. While both Clif and I like any grade of maple syrup, even the light, we prefer the rich, dark amber syrup.

I’m thinking I might save this syrup for dessert, to be combined with roasted walnuts and then ladled on vanilla ice cream. So good! And then perhaps invite our friends Diane and Sybil to come over and share the treat. Shannon and Mike could be included, too, if they are free. There is plenty to go around.

More pictures of Mike’s Maple House in Winthrop, Maine.

This just in from the Maine Sunday Telegram: Yesterday, at the Maine Mall in South Portland, Amy Bouchard, of Wicked Whoopies, oversaw the construction of a whoopie that weighed a half-ton. And why, you might ask, did she do this? Why, to beat Pennsylvania’s 250-pound whoopie pie, which until then had been the largest whoopie pie in the known—and no doubt the unknown—world. 

We might have a governor whose idea of fun is to tear down murals and denigrate labor leaders such as Frances Perkins, who was FDR’s Secretary of Labor and made life better for many, many Americans. But we can at least make a giant whoopie pie and outdo Pennsylvania. 

All is not lost.

A few days ago Clif and I made a decision to really change our diet. Despite our natural liking for fish and meat—especially chicken—we have decided that the time has come to become “mostly vegetarian.”

We’ve been edging this way for a while, with quite a few of our meals being meatless every week. Now, we want to take it another step so that most of our meals are meatless, with fish and meat being very occasional treats saved for special occasions or for going out.

Our decision is based on simple arithmetic as well as geometry. We live on a finite planet with limited resources and an ever-growing population. We humans just seem to multiply and multiply. In a recent post, I quoted Jason Clay: “In the next 40 years we’re going to have produce as much food as was produced in [the] last 8,000.”

Then, I came across the following numbers from a beautifully written book called The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World by Carl Safina. “[W]e now take roughly 40 percent of the life that the land produces; we take a similar proportion of what the coastal seas produce. For one midsized creature that collectively weighs just half a percent of the animal mass on Earth, that is a staggering proportion…If the human population again doubles, as some project, could we commandeer 80 percent of life?”

Could we? I don’t see how it is possible and still have a liveable planet.

And now consider this: According to Mark Bittman, “About two to five times more grain is required to produce the same amount of calories through livestock as through direct grain consumption…It is as much as 10 times more in the case of grain-fed beef in the United States.”

In a world with 2 billion people, it might be possible to justify eating a lot of meat. In a world where the population will soon reach 7 billion, not so much. In fact, not at all. Being a “good eater” can and should also mean eating with a conscience, and Clif and I, in all good conscience, simply cannot justify eating meat on a regular basis.

The same applies to fish. Our oceans have been overfished, and in The View from Lazy Point, Safina writes about how the ocean has been depleted of once plentiful fish, like flounder. When Safina was young, flounder were plentiful in the waters off Long Island. Now they are not. This is true for many species of fish around the world. We are eating fish to the edge of extinction.

Dairy and eggs are more tricksy, as Gollum might say. We will do our best to eat them in moderation, choosing alternatives when it makes sense. For example, broiled bread with olive oil rather than bread and butter with our meal. However, milk, cheese, and eggs are the foundations for good cooking, and I cannot eschew them entirely.

In Maine, at least, it is possible to get eggs and dairy that come from animals that have been raised in ways that don’t wreak havoc on the environment. A lot of cows in Maine eat plenty of grass and hay, and it’s pretty easy to find eggs that come from hens who are fed scraps as well as grain.

So, in the upcoming months many of the recipes and dishes featured will be vegetarian, and I will make occasional forays into vegan cooking.

I’m going to end with a quotation from The View from Lazy Point: “To advance compassion and yet survive in a world of appetites—that is our challenge.”

Yes, it is, and a very difficult one for A Good Eater, but one I am accepting nonetheless