Once upon a ______ . Fill the space with any word or words and write a story using this as your central theme .

Once upon a pancake there was some hot maple syrup from a real canadian maple tree. Now all you can find is that artificial crap that tastes like rubber brandy. With that being said, I, like all of my fellow living humans, have never actually had real maple syrup. So there is admittedly a chance that the artificial stuff we find now is virtually identical to the real deal from all those years ago. Why would n't it be? We have been mastering chemistry for the last 1000+ years, I am pretty sure they nailed down the formula for the sap years ago. Why would n't the artificial stuff be as good? It is identical in every aspect except for its source. Yet, I bet people would think it would taste better from a maple tree. Even if it tasted worse, even if because it is natural every glorious, sticky morsel could contain some fungi or bacterium that could make you burst forth with your own brown sap, I bet that people would love it. Hell, if I was half as a decent human being as I am I might go ahead and pretend I had managed to come across a preserved maple seed and had produced the real deal. The money that could be made! But I bet some sap said the same thing about artificial diamonds when that chemical engineer first was able to design the process that made the production of them dirt cheap. I guess it really does n't matter if it is the same thing. Maybe someone smarter than me could argue that they are n't but is n't that exactly what advertising is all about? Once upon a pancake there was real maple syrup and I bet it tasted just as good as the stuff I am having now.
