You can. I know a guy who eats a birch log every year. He literally sits on the couch pulling splinters from the log and chews on them while watching tv. He also grinds his egg shells and mixes with oatmeal.
For the majority of human history, we’ve eaten around wood (around a campfire, a hearth, etc), it makes sense it would become intertwined with our food palette
Also if you believe the stories ive heard from pizza chains like Papa Johns and Domino’s, sawdust is regularly added to pizza dough to make it cheaper to produce
Maple syrup is tree blood. Kind like tree vampirism.
I don’t think wood smells like food. But I wonder… apparently termites have a bunch of gut bacteria to digest wood. Maybe if you eat raw termites and bark beetles, you can then eat some sawdust. If you continue the process eventually you may be able to eat wood or paper with your own gut biome. Maybe start with a termite, sawdust, and banana smoothie and move up from there. Best of luck.
It only gets boiled down to pure sugar. You boil off or break down a lot of the aromatics and volatiles in the original sap to make syrup. It gets processed by boiling to concentrate the sugar and reduce the presence of the rest of what the tree was living on. Maple sap does not become “pure sugar” (maple syrup) until after it gets the good stuff processed out.
We can, and do, eat wood. It’s listed as “cellulose” in the ingredients, and it’s in everything. Your ice cream, your bread, probably up in yo closet doin your Mamma right now