Same principle, reducing water activity (aw), is how Nutella keeps fresh for so long without refrigeration: its water activity is even lower than honey. Most bacteria need an aw of around 0.85 to thrive, Nutella’s aw is around 0.4, honey’s around 0.5-0.6. Peanut butter is 0.7, so it stays fresh for relatively long, too.
This is something that I think about sometimes. Life on Earth has had billions of years and expanded to fill so many niches, but they're nearly all damp niches. Nothing has ever really managed to really thrive in deserts. Sure, there are a few cacti, succulents, a bit of scrub, a few palms and rodents and a few birds that eke out an existence. But really it's mostly barren, compared to temperate or tropical climates where nature takes over land entirely within years. Yes, the soil in deserts is poor, but that's a consequence: it was poor everywhere before plants conditioned it. It's just that evolution has never in a billion years hit on a way to capitalise on all that sunlight and those day/night temperature gradients without enough water to float all the microbiology in.
Probably just as well (invoke some kind of anthropic principle here if you like) or we'd have, say, fungus there can quickly eat dry things and storing food or building anything with longevity would be much harder.
Cacti aswell, mostly thrive because of desert floods. They've evolved to quickly suck up as much water as they can, then they use a special acidic form of photosynthesis to make it last as long as possible.
Different desert plants use similar ideas, the Aussie outback for example blooms for about a month after a given flood, reproduces, then dies out near completely except around the occasional waterhole.
In the end drying grass to create hay is also the same principle: dry enough (say < 15% water) and it doesn't do much at all, being pretty dead. Higher and you get all kinds of life having its go at it.
>> This doesn't mean that honey can withstand all challenges to freshness. Once a jar of honey is open, its surface is being regularly exposed to the air, and dipping licked spoons in will bring bacteria and moisture that weren't there when the jar was sealed.
I have plenty of observational, empirical data that contradicts this apparently theoretical statement. Not just licked spoons but breakfast knives with bits of toasted bread and peanut/butter, Greek yogurt, French moldy goat's cheese, bits of tart, croisssants or other confectionary, etc. All of those can be detected in significant concentrations in my honey jars. Not to mention that simply screwing a lid on an already-opened jar doesn't quite seal it, certainly not firmly enough to cut off the oxygen from it.
Yet I have never known honey to spoil. I mean it's quite remarkable. I think I have seen honey that has stayed at the bottom of a jar for years and it just doesn't go bad. I wouldn't eat it, because it tends to look a bit bleugh, but it won't go off (and that's how it ends up staying in the jar for so long).
Definitely give a little love to your honey jars, it does sound like the relationship is quite one-directional. Even cleaning the spoon/knife before interacting with the jar would increase the long-term stability of the relationship and it's just a nice thing to do for a SO.
I've recently been embracing the idea of co-evolutionary pressure. Reading the article I thought that if it was just the dryness, bacteria would have evolved to tap such a rich energy source. Hence the biology of bees must have something to do with the preservative nature of honey. I'm feeling vindicated!
I think co-evolution should be investigated for encoder-decoder architecture training.
The idea being that you pair multiple decoders with each encoder, and multiple encoders with each decoder (randomly sample if large populations). The selective pressure is a feedback loop between the encoder and decoder populations that requires the members to produce and interpret the latent vector as well as possible. In theory, this creates a form of generalization pressure wherein the encoders and decoders must perform well with a wide range of possible up/down stream states. I think with large enough populations, this could be robust to premature convergence and overfitting.
I remember playing around with RapidMiner about 10 years ago and it had a hyper parameter optimizing primitive that uses evolutionary search. It was quite pleasing. RapidMiner doesn't do any of the modern stuff though. Asking chatgpt turns up mostly pretty old (abandoned) projects from around 2017.
This article is missing what I think is a pretty important PSA on the topic of bacteria in honey:
Honey commonly contains small amounts of the anaerobic bacteria Clostridium botulinum, which causes botulism.
This is why you should not feed honey to infants, because their immune systems cannot safely handle any amount of it yet. Even though the levels apparently are small enough for the rest of humans to consume worry-free.
I remember having small kids we took this very seriously. I always wondered if this was just another overprotective order, or could really be an issue.
> Infantile botulism is extremely rare. There are an estimated 100 cases per year in the U.S., among approximately 4 million children in the age range under 1. That’s a risk of 1 in 40,000. This is somewhat less likely than the chance of visiting the ER for a blanket-related injury in a given year (yes, I looked that up, and I do think it’s a good comparison).
> ... In an estimated 20% of cases — that’s about 20 cases a year — honey is one of the exposures. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the botulism actually came from honey; it’s just that because we know the spores can live in honey … it seems possible.
> At best, this suggests that by avoiding honey, you could lower the risk of infantile botulism from 1 in 40,000 to 1 in 50,000.
I don’t think these probabilities are correct. Every parent is told not to feed their under 1 year olds honey, many times.
In an extreme example… only 20 parents fed their kids honey and 20 kids contracted botulism.
That would be a 100% risk. Obviously in real life it’s not 100% of kids, but still could be a meaningful percentage and likely higher than 1 in 50,000 for babies that eat honey.
It is correct. They are considering the most extreme case; in the most extreme case, no non-botulism-infected infants eat honey, and honey was the cause of botulism for those 20 infants.
If that is so, then completely removing honey exposure for infants would mean that 80 rather than 100 infants get botulism poisoning.
So the new probability of contracting botulism is (80 / 100) * (old probability), and (80 / 100) * (1 / 40000) = 1 / 50000.
There are no errors in the calculation, but it's wrong anyways because it calculates the answer to the wrong question. "At best" suggests this is the largest possible effect, but it is the smallest possible. To get an upper bound estimate on the usefulness of avoiding honey, you would need to know how many parents of 1-year-olds are avoiding honey.
I'm not sure that number is meaningful without knowing how many parents are giving their infants honey. Granted I'm in a high-income, high-education area, but at least in my bubble, "don't give babies honey" seems to be common knowledge, so it's possible there are relatively few instances and a high percentage result in complications.
Whole food crunchy Instagram grifters push that infants should eat honey
Though tbh do people really eat that much honey? I only have some in my kitchen to have with tea when I have a cold. Other then that I almost never use it.
The United States is the second largest honey consumer behind China according to the latest data available from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in 2019. In 2021, consumption increased 8 percent from the previous year. Between 1991 to 2021, the average rate of growth is 10.7 million pounds per year. This translates to about 1.9 pounds per capita of honey consumption in 2021 compared with 1.2 pounds per capita in the early 1990s.
Oh man buttered toast with honey... English muffins... But most controversially, and most deliciously, it dresses up a pizza something lovely...
For me the shift happened when I stopped thinking of it as a sweetener for liquids and started thinking about it as a condiment to deploy conservatively but frequently.
Breakfast buns go well with honey. Often switched up with jam every few days. Also pancakes and waffles are great with honey from time to time when I'm tired of maple syrup. Jam works too.
Honey contains spores of Clostridium botulinum, not live bacteria. And as such, honey cannot in itself cause botulism.
But the intestinal microbiot of infants (not their immune system) is not necessarily developed enough, and as such Clostridium botulinum can colonize their intestine (it strives in anaerobic environment) and then they can develop a special kind of botulism where the toxin is actually produced in their own body (as opposed to ingested, like in regular botulism).
It's not the only way a child can stumble upon the bacteria's spore though.
When my kid was under one year old, we were especially careful about this we didn’t let her have even a tiny bit of honey. It really drove home the idea that everything has two sides. Honey can sit on a shelf for years without spoiling, but it can still be dangerous for the most vulnerable. It’s a reminder that just because something is natural and long lasting doesn’t mean it’s safe for everyone.
Pasteurization would also destroy the delicate honey taste. It takes almost nothing to do that, and heating honey above about 40 C even for 30 seconds will kill any honeyness and all you have left is the sweet.
I'll bet only the imported Chinese honey is pasteurized on the supermarket shelf. Most of that goes to industrial use anyway.
In Finland honey is rarely pasteurized. It is seen as a quality defect if honey is heated after extraction from the hive. Heating is thought to destroy some of the beneficial compounds in honey.
Similarly one should not put honey to too hot tea if one wants the benefits instead of just sugar.
This story can be summarized as "Low water activity and low pH keep honey fresh permanently." The other 14 paragraphs are just filler. Moreover, even that summary is factually incorrect; low water activity and low pH don't come close to explaining honey's astounding shelf life, which amounts to centuries in many cases.
It'd be fascinating if something like methylglyoxal was responsible, but I doubt it. Molasses also has an extremely long shelf life, and it doesn't have any of honey's exotic constituents. I would bet it mostly comes down to water content and pH (and a sturdy, sealed container.)
Personally, I would bet that certain wines have a longer shelf life than honey. The evidence for honey's stability on extreme time scales is scanty, lots of very poor quality sources and hearsay. Meanwhile, we have countless wines that are hundreds of years old and in excellent shape. It only takes a fairly small amount of degradation of one small component of honey to taste "off", and many of the components of honey are in their non-oxidized, non-heat damaged states. Contrast that with a wine such as Madeira, where the entire wine is intentionally heat-damaged and oxidized to produce the final product. I would put my money on the Madeira any day.
Can you make molasses bandages to speed wound healing, though? Honey really seems to have antimicrobial properties that go way beyond just low water activity and low pH, and in particular the peroxide production seems to be important.
It does seem plausible that some wines might last longer than honey.
After doing some more reading, I think you might be right. I've been looking at various sugary solutions such as molasses and it seems that it's not uncommon for them to be sold with mold inhibitors such as propanoic acid. I suspect the hydrogen peroxide might play a role, but it's not very stable, I wonder how long it lasts in the honey.
I'm still putting my money on the wine as far as long term storage goes, but I think honey might have a solid second place above any other common foods. I've been trying to find others that might last a while but obviously most results these days are contentless slop or straight up fabrications. I did find one report of Irish chef Kevin Thornton trying 4,000 year old butter, unfortunately he described it as "rancid": https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p03yf4kj
I didn't know that about molasses! It wouldn't be surprising actually if bees were synthesizing specifically propanoate to add to the honey and that nobody had noticed yet. But there are probably other molecules that would work at lower doses that they might use instead.
Are you sure this isn’t just the Gell-Mann effect? It sounds like you’re probably better informed about this than the typical person and might be expecting a lot more detail than a newspaper would be endeavoring to try to convey.
vlovich123 may be correct that I am giving the BBC too much credit in general. But I don't think I'm especially well-informed; I'd never heard of methylglyoxal before looking this up in Wikipedia.
I agree that its focus is somewhat wrong.
I don't think that the backgrounder on the importance of food preservation is completely without value. It's just that it's already fairly well known that food rots and why.
My larger objection, though, is that there are important, well-established reasons for honey to be far less perishable than other substances of similar water activity and pH, and the article does not mention them even briefly. I think it's fine to have lots of the wrong kind of details, but it's not fine to omit the right ones.
I edited "millennia" into "centuries" in my comment above because the Wikipedia article claimed those claims didn't pan out:
> (However, no edible honey has been found in Egyptian tombs; all such cases have been proven to be other substances or only chemical traces.[29])
...but the citation is from 01975.
The Smithsonian page is a great link! It mentions that the pH of honey is 3–4.5 (another crucial fact omitted from the BBC article) and mentions the peroxide, but not the methylglyoxal.
The Smithsonian article contains this link:
> Modern archeologists, excavating ancient Egyptian tombs, have often found something unexpected amongst the tombs’ artifacts: pots of honey, thousands of years old, and yet still preserved
which goes to a Google Books page I can't see (perhaps because I'm in Argentina) of a book from 02006 that is apparently about beekeeping, not archaeology, called "Letters from the Hive", published by Random House Children's Books.
The copy of the book that I've been able to get does talk extensively about the uses of honey in ancient Egypt, but, unless I missed it, doesn't mention pots of honey being found in tombs at all.
Even if so, it's unclear whether the book would have evidence posterior to Wikipedia's 01975 citation; it isn't the kind of book that cites its sources.
I'm so sorry but I can't help myself: 01975 is the dialling code for somewhere in Aberdeenshire!
WP: "(However, no edible honey has been found in Egyptian tombs; all such cases have been proven to be other substances or only chemical traces.[29])"
[29] is https://gwern.net/doc/history/1975-leek.pdf - this does not look like a peer reviewed paper. They do look to be reputable and they refute some rubbish documented cases of ancient honey but not all of them.
I'm going to call out the WP article as being factually wanting on that point.
I don't see why anything other than low water and pH are necessary. Stories about ultra long lasting honey come from the desert, which will dessicate it further.
(The stories about pyramid honey always imply that it's fresh and liquid. It's not. It's dried out and usually completely crystallized.)
There may be other effects on top of that, but if you made a sucrose solution thick enough it too will last forever.
If you can get an aqueous solution of solids to completely crystallize (and sucrose does like to crystallize), it won't support microorganisms, but if it doesn't crystallize, it will have a critical "deliquescence relative humidity". When the relative humidity of the air is above the DRH†, the solution absorbs water from the air rather than giving up water to the air, and if there are crystals in it, they tend to shrink instead of growing.
Different solutes have different DRHs, but there are many of them whose affinity for water is so strong that their DRH is so low that under normal circumstances they never completely dry out. Some of them are commonly used as desiccants, such as lye, calcium chloride, and magnesium chloride. In general, mixing solutes tends to impede crystallization, so more heterogeneous mixtures like honey tend to have lower DRH than more homogeneous mixtures like pure sucrose.
(This is an engineering reason to add something like lemon juice when you make simple syrup: the citrate hydrolyzes some of the sucrose into glucose and fructose, greatly impeding crystallization and greatly improving your chances of having a pourable syrup when you want to use it next month.)
Under many circumstances, honey will eventually absorb enough water from the air by this mechanism to permit the growth of yeasts and bacteria. But it takes a remarkably long time.
______
† The DRH does vary with temperature, but in most cases only slightly over the human-survivable range, so you can say "CaCl₂ has a DRH of about 40%" and be correct enough for many purposes.
I had a planter wart surgically removed which they packed with Manuka honey and because it's a deep open wound it needs to heal from the inside. I changed the dressing and repacked it every few days for weeks and the wound was absolutely pristine ever time.
I live in the tropics where people die because due to infection which makes it even more interesting that they use honey.
No, low. High sugar concentrations mean low water activity, which osmotically pumps water out of cells, not into them, so they shrivel rather than popping.
I’d be curious to see if similar principles could be applied to non food preservation. Nature’s solutions often scale better than synthetic ones, especially when stability over long timeframes is needed.
You can take honey that has crystalized and set it in sunlight to "melt" back into the gooey goodness, but you can't do that to chocolate that has that white powdery stuff on it.
If you're looking to have a reason.... That's probably going to over-heat the honey, which comes at a cost to flavor.
But your grocery store honey is already pasteurized. That's more controlled than your microwave, so if you were looking to feel guilty about something, save it for when your neighbor gives you some from her hive next door.
Same principle, reducing water activity (aw), is how Nutella keeps fresh for so long without refrigeration: its water activity is even lower than honey. Most bacteria need an aw of around 0.85 to thrive, Nutella’s aw is around 0.4, honey’s around 0.5-0.6. Peanut butter is 0.7, so it stays fresh for relatively long, too.
Here’s the definition of water activity from FDA:https://www.fda.gov/inspections-compliance-enforcement-and-c...
This is something that I think about sometimes. Life on Earth has had billions of years and expanded to fill so many niches, but they're nearly all damp niches. Nothing has ever really managed to really thrive in deserts. Sure, there are a few cacti, succulents, a bit of scrub, a few palms and rodents and a few birds that eke out an existence. But really it's mostly barren, compared to temperate or tropical climates where nature takes over land entirely within years. Yes, the soil in deserts is poor, but that's a consequence: it was poor everywhere before plants conditioned it. It's just that evolution has never in a billion years hit on a way to capitalise on all that sunlight and those day/night temperature gradients without enough water to float all the microbiology in.
Probably just as well (invoke some kind of anthropic principle here if you like) or we'd have, say, fungus there can quickly eat dry things and storing food or building anything with longevity would be much harder.
Cacti aswell, mostly thrive because of desert floods. They've evolved to quickly suck up as much water as they can, then they use a special acidic form of photosynthesis to make it last as long as possible.
Different desert plants use similar ideas, the Aussie outback for example blooms for about a month after a given flood, reproduces, then dies out near completely except around the occasional waterhole.
More counterintuitively: why hasn't any major bacteria evolved to feast on lipids like oils? Much denser source of energy than desert dirt.
Managing moisture levels is probably the #1 way to control microbial activity.
You see the exact same idea in HVAC - if you can keep the relative humidity below 50%, mold growth becomes nearly impossible.
In laundry care, the dryer does all of the sanitizing action.
Etc.
In the end drying grass to create hay is also the same principle: dry enough (say < 15% water) and it doesn't do much at all, being pretty dead. Higher and you get all kinds of life having its go at it.
>> This doesn't mean that honey can withstand all challenges to freshness. Once a jar of honey is open, its surface is being regularly exposed to the air, and dipping licked spoons in will bring bacteria and moisture that weren't there when the jar was sealed.
I have plenty of observational, empirical data that contradicts this apparently theoretical statement. Not just licked spoons but breakfast knives with bits of toasted bread and peanut/butter, Greek yogurt, French moldy goat's cheese, bits of tart, croisssants or other confectionary, etc. All of those can be detected in significant concentrations in my honey jars. Not to mention that simply screwing a lid on an already-opened jar doesn't quite seal it, certainly not firmly enough to cut off the oxygen from it.
Yet I have never known honey to spoil. I mean it's quite remarkable. I think I have seen honey that has stayed at the bottom of a jar for years and it just doesn't go bad. I wouldn't eat it, because it tends to look a bit bleugh, but it won't go off (and that's how it ends up staying in the jar for so long).
My honey jars basically turn into forensic time capsules of breakfast past, and still nothing grows
But the same holds for my sugar jar.
Definitely give a little love to your honey jars, it does sound like the relationship is quite one-directional. Even cleaning the spoon/knife before interacting with the jar would increase the long-term stability of the relationship and it's just a nice thing to do for a SO.
Indeed it is. I'm not the one not cleaning the utensils before dipping them in btw ;)
> toasted bread and peanut/butter, Greek yogurt, French moldy goat's cheese, bits of tart, croisssants or other confectionary
You turned your kitchen into a bed and breakfast, though you make it sound like a microbiology lab :)
The story misses that lactic acid bacteria are fairly common in honey and seem to be out competing other bacteria and have anti microbial effects.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7949542/
I've recently been embracing the idea of co-evolutionary pressure. Reading the article I thought that if it was just the dryness, bacteria would have evolved to tap such a rich energy source. Hence the biology of bees must have something to do with the preservative nature of honey. I'm feeling vindicated!
I think co-evolution should be investigated for encoder-decoder architecture training.
The idea being that you pair multiple decoders with each encoder, and multiple encoders with each decoder (randomly sample if large populations). The selective pressure is a feedback loop between the encoder and decoder populations that requires the members to produce and interpret the latent vector as well as possible. In theory, this creates a form of generalization pressure wherein the encoders and decoders must perform well with a wide range of possible up/down stream states. I think with large enough populations, this could be robust to premature convergence and overfitting.
I remember playing around with RapidMiner about 10 years ago and it had a hyper parameter optimizing primitive that uses evolutionary search. It was quite pleasing. RapidMiner doesn't do any of the modern stuff though. Asking chatgpt turns up mostly pretty old (abandoned) projects from around 2017.
This article is missing what I think is a pretty important PSA on the topic of bacteria in honey:
Honey commonly contains small amounts of the anaerobic bacteria Clostridium botulinum, which causes botulism.
This is why you should not feed honey to infants, because their immune systems cannot safely handle any amount of it yet. Even though the levels apparently are small enough for the rest of humans to consume worry-free.
I remember having small kids we took this very seriously. I always wondered if this was just another overprotective order, or could really be an issue.
https://parentdata.org/honey-botulism-babies/
> Infantile botulism is extremely rare. There are an estimated 100 cases per year in the U.S., among approximately 4 million children in the age range under 1. That’s a risk of 1 in 40,000. This is somewhat less likely than the chance of visiting the ER for a blanket-related injury in a given year (yes, I looked that up, and I do think it’s a good comparison).
> ... In an estimated 20% of cases — that’s about 20 cases a year — honey is one of the exposures. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the botulism actually came from honey; it’s just that because we know the spores can live in honey … it seems possible.
> At best, this suggests that by avoiding honey, you could lower the risk of infantile botulism from 1 in 40,000 to 1 in 50,000.
I don’t think these probabilities are correct. Every parent is told not to feed their under 1 year olds honey, many times.
In an extreme example… only 20 parents fed their kids honey and 20 kids contracted botulism.
That would be a 100% risk. Obviously in real life it’s not 100% of kids, but still could be a meaningful percentage and likely higher than 1 in 50,000 for babies that eat honey.
It is correct. They are considering the most extreme case; in the most extreme case, no non-botulism-infected infants eat honey, and honey was the cause of botulism for those 20 infants.
If that is so, then completely removing honey exposure for infants would mean that 80 rather than 100 infants get botulism poisoning.
So the new probability of contracting botulism is (80 / 100) * (old probability), and (80 / 100) * (1 / 40000) = 1 / 50000.
There are no errors in the calculation, but it's wrong anyways because it calculates the answer to the wrong question. "At best" suggests this is the largest possible effect, but it is the smallest possible. To get an upper bound estimate on the usefulness of avoiding honey, you would need to know how many parents of 1-year-olds are avoiding honey.
Feeding honey to newborn babies is a common practice in India. Sometimes it's their first ever food.
We waited until our kid was four, just to be safe, but it's was also honey from our own bees, so I somehow felt it less safe.
Kid went full Winnie-the-Pooh on the jar.
I'm not sure that number is meaningful without knowing how many parents are giving their infants honey. Granted I'm in a high-income, high-education area, but at least in my bubble, "don't give babies honey" seems to be common knowledge, so it's possible there are relatively few instances and a high percentage result in complications.
I think the rate was similar before we told parents not to give their infants honey. So we sort of have an A/B comparison.
> Some people have pointed out that botulism cases haven’t fallen over time despite parents being told not to give kids honey.
Whole food crunchy Instagram grifters push that infants should eat honey
Though tbh do people really eat that much honey? I only have some in my kitchen to have with tea when I have a cold. Other then that I almost never use it.
The United States is the second largest honey consumer behind China according to the latest data available from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in 2019. In 2021, consumption increased 8 percent from the previous year. Between 1991 to 2021, the average rate of growth is 10.7 million pounds per year. This translates to about 1.9 pounds per capita of honey consumption in 2021 compared with 1.2 pounds per capita in the early 1990s.
Oh man buttered toast with honey... English muffins... But most controversially, and most deliciously, it dresses up a pizza something lovely...
For me the shift happened when I stopped thinking of it as a sweetener for liquids and started thinking about it as a condiment to deploy conservatively but frequently.
Hot honey on pizza is the BEST
Yes. I literally collect different honey (including from my own hives) and my love of it is very strong.
And no, I don’t have diabetes yet. I’m not insane about it, but I do have it frequently.
Breakfast buns go well with honey. Often switched up with jam every few days. Also pancakes and waffles are great with honey from time to time when I'm tired of maple syrup. Jam works too.
A truncated version of Bayes used here:
A=Infantile botulism
B=Kid eats honey
P(A|!B) = P(A) * (1 - P(B|A))
Not sure it is correct!
The ACX signature says:
P(A|B) = [P(A)*P(B|A)]/P(B)
So
P(A|!B) = [P(A)*P(!B|A)]/P(!B)
= (1/40000) * .8 / ???
??? Is very small though if people take the medical advice.
Their number assumes nobody follows the advice!
Honey contains spores of Clostridium botulinum, not live bacteria. And as such, honey cannot in itself cause botulism.
But the intestinal microbiot of infants (not their immune system) is not necessarily developed enough, and as such Clostridium botulinum can colonize their intestine (it strives in anaerobic environment) and then they can develop a special kind of botulism where the toxin is actually produced in their own body (as opposed to ingested, like in regular botulism).
It's not the only way a child can stumble upon the bacteria's spore though.
It's one of those things where honey is both a wonder of nature and a reminder that biology doesn’t always play nice with everyone
When my kid was under one year old, we were especially careful about this we didn’t let her have even a tiny bit of honey. It really drove home the idea that everything has two sides. Honey can sit on a shelf for years without spoiling, but it can still be dangerous for the most vulnerable. It’s a reminder that just because something is natural and long lasting doesn’t mean it’s safe for everyone.
same with immunocompromised folks, though all that only applies to raw honey; pasteurized honey is more common in grocery stores and totally safe
Pasteurization would also destroy the delicate honey taste. It takes almost nothing to do that, and heating honey above about 40 C even for 30 seconds will kill any honeyness and all you have left is the sweet.
I'll bet only the imported Chinese honey is pasteurized on the supermarket shelf. Most of that goes to industrial use anyway.
I would not expect this to make a difference as pasteurization does not inactivate Clostridium endospores.
In Finland honey is rarely pasteurized. It is seen as a quality defect if honey is heated after extraction from the hive. Heating is thought to destroy some of the beneficial compounds in honey.
Similarly one should not put honey to too hot tea if one wants the benefits instead of just sugar.
Spores of Clostridium botulinum require temperatures way above boiling point to destroy. Pasteurization doesn't do anything to them.
It's pasteurised to stop you from making mead, not because it does anything to Clostridium spores.
Pasteurization doesn't in any way prevent honey from remaining fermentable.
OK. So?
This story can be summarized as "Low water activity and low pH keep honey fresh permanently." The other 14 paragraphs are just filler. Moreover, even that summary is factually incorrect; low water activity and low pH don't come close to explaining honey's astounding shelf life, which amounts to centuries in many cases.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey#Preservation in particular mentions gluconic acid and hydrogen peroxide produced by the bees' glucose oxidase, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey#Medical_use_and_research also mentions its content of methylglyoxal, which damages DNA and cross-links proteins somewhat like formaldehyde, thus killing microorganisms; mãnuka honey is required to contain at least 85mg/kg of methylglyoxal, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C4%81nuka_honey. I suspect that there is a great deal more research on the topic.
It's disappointing to see such a low-quality article on the BBC website; I generally regard the BBC as a reliable source.
It'd be fascinating if something like methylglyoxal was responsible, but I doubt it. Molasses also has an extremely long shelf life, and it doesn't have any of honey's exotic constituents. I would bet it mostly comes down to water content and pH (and a sturdy, sealed container.)
Personally, I would bet that certain wines have a longer shelf life than honey. The evidence for honey's stability on extreme time scales is scanty, lots of very poor quality sources and hearsay. Meanwhile, we have countless wines that are hundreds of years old and in excellent shape. It only takes a fairly small amount of degradation of one small component of honey to taste "off", and many of the components of honey are in their non-oxidized, non-heat damaged states. Contrast that with a wine such as Madeira, where the entire wine is intentionally heat-damaged and oxidized to produce the final product. I would put my money on the Madeira any day.
Can you make molasses bandages to speed wound healing, though? Honey really seems to have antimicrobial properties that go way beyond just low water activity and low pH, and in particular the peroxide production seems to be important.
It does seem plausible that some wines might last longer than honey.
After doing some more reading, I think you might be right. I've been looking at various sugary solutions such as molasses and it seems that it's not uncommon for them to be sold with mold inhibitors such as propanoic acid. I suspect the hydrogen peroxide might play a role, but it's not very stable, I wonder how long it lasts in the honey.
I'm still putting my money on the wine as far as long term storage goes, but I think honey might have a solid second place above any other common foods. I've been trying to find others that might last a while but obviously most results these days are contentless slop or straight up fabrications. I did find one report of Irish chef Kevin Thornton trying 4,000 year old butter, unfortunately he described it as "rancid": https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p03yf4kj
I didn't know that about molasses! It wouldn't be surprising actually if bees were synthesizing specifically propanoate to add to the honey and that nobody had noticed yet. But there are probably other molecules that would work at lower doses that they might use instead.
Are you sure this isn’t just the Gell-Mann effect? It sounds like you’re probably better informed about this than the typical person and might be expecting a lot more detail than a newspaper would be endeavoring to try to convey.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
Isn’t the entire point of the Gell Man amnesia effect that all news is low quality, you just only realize it for topics you know a lot about?
And OP evidently knows a lot about honey :)
I think the point is that the article is conveying too much of the wrong kind of details.
vlovich123 may be correct that I am giving the BBC too much credit in general. But I don't think I'm especially well-informed; I'd never heard of methylglyoxal before looking this up in Wikipedia.
I agree that its focus is somewhat wrong. I don't think that the backgrounder on the importance of food preservation is completely without value. It's just that it's already fairly well known that food rots and why.
My larger objection, though, is that there are important, well-established reasons for honey to be far less perishable than other substances of similar water activity and pH, and the article does not mention them even briefly. I think it's fine to have lots of the wrong kind of details, but it's not fine to omit the right ones.
"which amounts to centuries in many cases."
Pretty sure I read about honey found in a Pharaoh's tomb - that's millennia, not centuries.
Quick search:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-science-be...
I edited "millennia" into "centuries" in my comment above because the Wikipedia article claimed those claims didn't pan out:
> (However, no edible honey has been found in Egyptian tombs; all such cases have been proven to be other substances or only chemical traces.[29])
...but the citation is from 01975.
The Smithsonian page is a great link! It mentions that the pH of honey is 3–4.5 (another crucial fact omitted from the BBC article) and mentions the peroxide, but not the methylglyoxal.
The Smithsonian article contains this link:
> Modern archeologists, excavating ancient Egyptian tombs, have often found something unexpected amongst the tombs’ artifacts: pots of honey, thousands of years old, and yet still preserved
which goes to a Google Books page I can't see (perhaps because I'm in Argentina) of a book from 02006 that is apparently about beekeeping, not archaeology, called "Letters from the Hive", published by Random House Children's Books.
The copy of the book that I've been able to get does talk extensively about the uses of honey in ancient Egypt, but, unless I missed it, doesn't mention pots of honey being found in tombs at all.
Even if so, it's unclear whether the book would have evidence posterior to Wikipedia's 01975 citation; it isn't the kind of book that cites its sources.
I'm so sorry but I can't help myself: 01975 is the dialling code for somewhere in Aberdeenshire!
WP: "(However, no edible honey has been found in Egyptian tombs; all such cases have been proven to be other substances or only chemical traces.[29])"
[29] is https://gwern.net/doc/history/1975-leek.pdf - this does not look like a peer reviewed paper. They do look to be reputable and they refute some rubbish documented cases of ancient honey but not all of them.
I'm going to call out the WP article as being factually wanting on that point.
Ha, I had no idea about Aberdeenshire!
I agree that in 01975 peer review was not a given, but it does seem to be academic work, as opposed to a children's book.
I don't see why anything other than low water and pH are necessary. Stories about ultra long lasting honey come from the desert, which will dessicate it further.
(The stories about pyramid honey always imply that it's fresh and liquid. It's not. It's dried out and usually completely crystallized.)
There may be other effects on top of that, but if you made a sucrose solution thick enough it too will last forever.
If you can get an aqueous solution of solids to completely crystallize (and sucrose does like to crystallize), it won't support microorganisms, but if it doesn't crystallize, it will have a critical "deliquescence relative humidity". When the relative humidity of the air is above the DRH†, the solution absorbs water from the air rather than giving up water to the air, and if there are crystals in it, they tend to shrink instead of growing.
Different solutes have different DRHs, but there are many of them whose affinity for water is so strong that their DRH is so low that under normal circumstances they never completely dry out. Some of them are commonly used as desiccants, such as lye, calcium chloride, and magnesium chloride. In general, mixing solutes tends to impede crystallization, so more heterogeneous mixtures like honey tend to have lower DRH than more homogeneous mixtures like pure sucrose.
(This is an engineering reason to add something like lemon juice when you make simple syrup: the citrate hydrolyzes some of the sucrose into glucose and fructose, greatly impeding crystallization and greatly improving your chances of having a pourable syrup when you want to use it next month.)
Under many circumstances, honey will eventually absorb enough water from the air by this mechanism to permit the growth of yeasts and bacteria. But it takes a remarkably long time.
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† The DRH does vary with temperature, but in most cases only slightly over the human-survivable range, so you can say "CaCl₂ has a DRH of about 40%" and be correct enough for many purposes.
Pretty wild how bees basically invented a biochemical preservation system thousands of years before we had food science labs
Millions of years!
The fact that they navigate by memorising visual landmarks like trees, buildings, and flowers to recognise familiar routes is unbelievable
Recently went through first aid training and the instructor claimed putting honey on wounds would help them heal faster.
(Sample size 1) I tried it on myself and a wound that was stubborn about healing was better very quickly.
I had a planter wart surgically removed which they packed with Manuka honey and because it's a deep open wound it needs to heal from the inside. I changed the dressing and repacked it every few days for weeks and the wound was absolutely pristine ever time.
I live in the tropics where people die because due to infection which makes it even more interesting that they use honey.
plantar wart. all wart removals should heal pristinely, warts are on only the outermost layers of skin above where scarring occurs.
Surgical wart removal can involve some pretty deep incisions and month long recovery. Scars aren't unheard of as I understand it
(And it can be futile ! The wart can easily come back)
The wound was about 6mm deep on my heel and took months to heal properly. And yes I did check those homophones :-)
And thanks for the other homophone correction!
I've had great success with using propolis[0] on burns and wounds. Definitely anecdotal but the ones I've used it on have definitely healed faster.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propolis
https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...
Medical grade honey: https://www.uclahealth.org/news/article/medical-grade-honey-...
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Really high sugar concentrations will pop the cells of any simple organisms.
No, low. High sugar concentrations mean low water activity, which osmotically pumps water out of cells, not into them, so they shrivel rather than popping.
Thanks.
I like to imagine it as humans stranded in a strange land where all the geography is dry cake. And only dry cake.
I definitely have been in some countries where their desserts felt from a strange land indeed: everything dried :'(. I need moist.
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The real secret is osmotic pressure.
I’d be curious to see if similar principles could be applied to non food preservation. Nature’s solutions often scale better than synthetic ones, especially when stability over long timeframes is needed.
Imagine a honey-inspired environment for stabilizing sensitive compounds or preserving biological samples without refrigeration
Osmotic pressure? Ok I'll read the article.
reminder that there's a lot of fake honey that gets put on shelf out there! probably doesn't last as long either https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ej6WVP7cxXQ
Similarly, chocolate.
You can take honey that has crystalized and set it in sunlight to "melt" back into the gooey goodness, but you can't do that to chocolate that has that white powdery stuff on it.
Right. Once the undesirable crystals in chocolate have formed it has to be re-tempered to get the desirable ones to dominate. But it hasn't spoiled.
I've often wondered about this - is sunlight really all that's needed?
Heat is needed, not sunlight.
You can zap it in the microwave for 10-15 seconds, but I always feel terribly guilty for some inexplicable reason.
If you're looking to have a reason.... That's probably going to over-heat the honey, which comes at a cost to flavor.
But your grocery store honey is already pasteurized. That's more controlled than your microwave, so if you were looking to feel guilty about something, save it for when your neighbor gives you some from her hive next door.
Bloom isn't spoilage.
Is it eatable though ?
ANytime I've had chocolate that has the white stuff I've binned it. Even if it isn't spoiled, doesn't it taste bad ?
It's just fat.
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