"The province of Quebec is responsible for 75 percent of the maple syrup produced in the ENTIRE WORLD. So it’s no surprise that they keep a strategic maple syrup reserve -- hot weather ruins the volume and taste of the syrup crop, and pancake fiends can get ugly, so it pays to have backup. Which is all very good planning, until more than a quarter of the syrup nest egg disappears."
"Whoever took the syrup -- 10 million pounds of it, worth more than $30 million -- must have put a lot of care and energy into the heist. Painting yourself black, holding a balloon, and pretending to be a cloud is not sufficient to get this sweet stuff out of the vaults; the warehouse is behind a locked fence that is “visited regularly” for security checks. And if that’s not enough (which it really isn’t -- shouldn’t there be a trained attack moose and some of those alarm lasers, at the VERY least? We’re talking about the world’s syrup reserves here!), there’s the fact that 10 million pounds of syrup weighs 10 million pounds. But somehow, someone spirited out and emptied more than 15,000 oil-drum-sized barrels, slashing the 37,000-pound syrup reserve by 27 percent."
Jess Zimmerman reports for Grist September 4, 2012.
SEE ALSO:
"Quebec Whodunit: 1/4 of Province’s Syrup Reserves Go Missing" (Canada Realtime/Wall St. Journal)
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