I feel for the beleaguered Duke of York this evening, for whom the term ‘car crash interview’ seems to have invented. But no one can tell me that Buckingham Palace didn’t have a delicious sense of irony when the first gig they send him on for a couple of months is a trot round to the Chinese Embassy to pass on the best wishes of the nation in their battle against the new coronavirus.
But the Duke of York is transitory, whereas the pot of supermarket honey in front of me isn’t. I won’t name the supermarket, or the brand, as I don’t want a letter from my learned friends to drop onto my doormat, but I know rather more about that pot than they might like to think I do. More, I suspect, than even the professional buyer who first purchased it from the supplier.
The difference between you and me in this respect is only that I have written and researched for a book about bees, and you – probably- haven’t. Therefore, unlike me, you are entitled to think that, in order to produce that honey, hives full of bees (about 50,000 per hive) flew around the local vegetation (around 12 flights and 500 flower visits per day), and went back and forth to the hive until they had produced enough honey (one twelfth of a spoonful in the duration of a worker bee’s life) for the beekeeper to take out the frames, spin them, and then jar up the proceeds and pass them along into the food chain. After all, that kind of describes a generally accepted definition of honey which has lasted for around 8000 years.
With some brands, in some supermarkets, you may be right. But in many, maybe even most, of the others, the truth is probably rather more industrial and chemical than you might like to think. For a start, it has probably had all the pollen filtered out of it so that it stays nice and runny; but not having pollen also allows it to be sold as ‘blend of EU and non EU honeys’ which is code for one of two or three giant processing plants in South America and China. Only you put a picture of a cheerful English garden on the label, as a picture of a factory doesn’t really do the trick. Honey is a living thing, but the nutrients in it can only live up to about 40C; the honey I am looking at has been pasteurized up to about 75C and is therefore technically dead, no more than ‘honey-flavoured sugary syrup’. Ask yourself how come, on the one hand, they have taken 3000 year old honey out of a pyramid and eaten it, whilst on the other, EU regulations insist that modern honey has a two-year sell-by date. I could go on about contamination scandals involving harmful antibiotics and lots of other stuff but I suspect you will get bored, and my point will be lost.
Which is that it is quite like Schrodinger’s cat, in the sense that you don’t know if it is dead or alive till you open the container. Except that you do: it is almost certainly dead. It comes into that grey area that includes ‘organic’ vegetables, ‘grass fed’ beef and ‘line caught’ tuna amongst other things, all of which it is probably worth putting some research in to make sure that you are eating what you think you are eating. After all, we are responsible for ourselves, and all the information is readily available for us if we want to use it.
Supermarkets do many great things, and, by and large, there is no conspiracy to confuse and defraud us. They supply what we want, and try to get it to us as quickly, and cheaply, as they can. They have made shopping easier, and are even starting to understand that we actually mean it about all that plastic they use. But definitions get blurred, and the pot in front of me has no right at all to be called honey.
The irony is that I can’t even feed it to my bees to get them through the remaining bit of winter.
If you can bear it, please support a local deli who sells honey from reliable beekeepers. Everything about it will be better.
Speaking for ourselves, Duncan and I eat everything we harvest, not because we are greedy, but because we aren’t yet very good at it.
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