Eggs are Green and Food is Dirty, by Stephanie Hample (Community Maple Project, the Wild Center!)

Описание: When her children see green eggs for the first time, Stephanie Hample realizes how far modern life has removed them from where food actually comes from. In Eggs Are Green and Food is Dirty, she reflects on tapping maple trees and starting a garden as a way to close that gap. What begins as a simple family experiment becomes a hands-on lesson about nature, patience, and the messy truth behind the meals on our table.

Stephanie created her story in the My Maple Story project hosted by The Wild Center! - a premier 115-acre natural history museum and science center in Tupper Lake, NY dedicated to the Adirondack ecosystem. The project was a community storytelling initiative that gathered personal reflections around the Adirondack tradition of maple sugaring.

The My Maple Story project was implemented by StoryCollab facilitators, inviting local residents to share how maple connects them to heritage, nature, and community. Participants documented what maple means to them — from memories of childhood and family to rediscovering ancestral practices — as part of The Wild Center’s Community Maple Project, which engages residents in collecting, boiling, and celebrating maple sap and syrup together.

To learn more about a custom digital storytelling workshop or program for your organization, please visit our website at: https://www.storycollab.org/

Transcript:

‘Will it be like in Green Eggs and Ham?’ my daughter asked as she fought with her brother over who gets to pick the green egg at my friend’s chicken coop. Until then, my kids had only seen white eggs—clean, white, sterile eggs neatly packaged in rows at the grocery store.

These eggs were green, and blue, and brown. They were warm and dirty with bits of straw, splattered mud, and scat. Looking at the egg, my daughter turns to me with that look of hers that says, ‘You’re kidding, right?’. ‘What were you expecting?’ I chuckled to myself. ‘They come from chickens. Chickens are dirty’.

Food is dirty. It all comes from the earth. Suddenly, I wanted to teach them this. This year, to start, we did two things: we tapped four trees for maple and started a garden. Palin was more into the garden, and Briggs was more into the trees. We would all collect sap together on the weekends and the kids would fight over who got to dump it.

Weekdays, I often debated: should I collect the sap with Briggs or wait until after I drop him off at daycare?. It took so much longer with him. He always asked a bunch of questions, pointed out every fleck of dirt and bug in the sap, and had to be the one to twist the top on the bucket. On top of that, we usually lost half of the sap to the ground in his failed attempt to pour it from one bucket to the next.

Eventually, I realized that none of this mattered. They were learning about trees and weather and nature—learning that good maple syrup doesn’t magically appear in a bottle. It runs clear from the tree only to get dirty with bits of bark and sometimes even bugs. Not unlike the yummy vegetables we’ve begun to pull from our new garden, covered in dirt, buried with worms and slugs. They’re learning: eggs are green, and food is dirty.

‘Get washed anyway’. ‘You’re right. It’s going to get washed anyway. Can you get this one here?’. ‘Good job. Nice throw. Just the one. Wow. You should see this tomato. It’s not ready yet, but it’s huge’. ‘Huge. Oh, watch this. Right here’. ‘What you’re stepping on, dude. Isn’t that huge?’. ‘Where? Let me see. Right here. What? Briggsy. You guys find any beans or peas? Okay, let’s find some peas’.