The Secret History of Food

by Matt Siegel

  However, female flies have the added burden of foraging for their offspring and finding places to lay their eggs, and their larvae require a completely different resource, namely rotting fruit, so they’re attracted to vinegary chemicals not for themselves but for their larvae—and fertile males are sometimes drawn to these sources, too, because they’re good places to pick up females. Then, to make things more complex, fruit that’s overly decayed can have too much bacteria, which can be fatal to larvae, so flies tend to seek out Goldilocks concentrations20 of these vinegary chemicals and avoid sources that are either too vinegary or not vinegary enough.

  So really, whether you’ll attract more flies with honey or vinegar depends on the age, gender, sex drive, and mating status of each fly as well as the concentration of the vinegar—and possibly on the season,21 the thirst and stress levels of each fly, and the time of day,22 for reasons not worth getting into. If you’re desperate to attract flies and don’t know this information, you’re probably best served by mixing honey and vinegar together, which has a cumulative effect23, and maybe adding a packet of Truvia, which contains a low-calorie (corn-based) sweetener called erythritol24 that doesn’t attract flies but does sterilize and kill them.*

  Or you could try using beer or semen, which, evidence suggests, might work even better. There aren’t a ton of studies on this, for obvious reasons, but beer outperformed decayed banana,25 fresh banana, sugar, vinegar, and sugar mixed with vinegar in a series of tests dating back to 1913—and Annalisa Durdle, a forensics expert who more recently tested the food preferences of flies for biological fluids commonly found at crime scenes (e.g., blood, semen, and saliva), calls semen “the crack cocaine of the fly world.”26 (Coincidentally, beer and semen tend to be more popular than honey with humans, too, which is another reason to revise the adage.)

  That history tends to euphemize honey isn’t just due to its sweetness but also to its supposed simplicity. Even in ancient times, honey wasn’t the only available sweetener. Before colonists introduced honeybees to North America (Native Americans called them “white man’s flies”27), indigenous cultures were cutting into maple trees with tomahawks28 to extract maple syrup; people in the Middle East were boiling raisins, grapes, and locust beans to make a sweet syrup called dibs;29 and the Romans were boiling grapes30 to make a sweet reduction called sapa or defructum and using a sweetener they called sugar of lead, also known as lead acetate, which looked and tasted like rock candy but was also highly poisonous, sort of the Roman equivalent of eating lead paint chips. (Not to suggest sapa and defructum were any safer, as they were usually boiled in lead pots, resulting in a concentration about 170,000 times as high as today’s legal limit for lead in bottled drinking water.*)31,32,33,34

  What stood out most about honey, then, wasn’t just that it was sweet but that it was simple and ready to eat—no straining, skinning, boiling, fermenting, or killing required. If you think about it, eating, throughout most of recorded history, was a particularly bloody and noxious affair: you were either slaughtering and butchering animals or scavenging from those that were already dead, pulling your dinner directly from the dirt, or milking it from the glands of goats or cows (and maybe storing some of that milk in the dried stomach of another animal until it spoiled and turned into cheese). Even your bread would have pieces of dirt, insects, and stone in it from milling. So there was a lot of blood, sinew, and nature involved, and you also needed tools to clean things, make fire, and cut away the rot.

  But then there’s honey—this glistening, golden syrup that just magically appears in the forest, prepackaged in cute little rows of tiny wax hexagons.

  As food historian Bee Wilson writes, “Honey was so extraordinary, so ready to eat35 and utterly unlike the other basic foods—consider how much more edible and instantly nourishing a honeycomb is than a sheaf of wheat, a pig, a cow—that it seemed it could be fabricated only in the heavens.”

  And the fact that honey was made in the secrecy of a hive only reinforced this idea. By the way, we’re not talking about the beliefs of Neanderthals or illiterate peasants but of great thinkers like Aristotle, who believed that “honey falls from the air, principally about36 the rising of the stars, and when the rainbow rests upon the earth.” Pliny the Elder was slightly more specific, insisting that honey fell “mostly at the rising of the constellations,37 and more especially when Sirius is shining; never, however, before the rising of the Vergiliae, and then just before day-break,” and that it was either “the sweat of the heavens,” “a saliva emanating from the stars,” or “a juice exuding from the air while purifying itself.”*38

  This opacity over honey’s origins also led to its biblical kosher status, even though it comes from “winged swarming things,” which aren’t kosher. The logic was that honey was the product of flowers rather than bees and that bees merely transferred and transformed existing flower nectar39 rather than producing honey themselves. But that’s sort of like saying cows transfer and transform grass into milk, cheese, and hamburgers. Also, honey in its natural state tends to have pieces of bees in it, which, being the flesh of an unclean insect, should have also precluded honey from kosher status—but scholars decided these pieces were theoretically part of a bee’s exoskeleton40 and technically bones rather than flesh. So maybe they just really wanted it to be kosher.

  Anyway, the point here is that honey is astoundingly complex and not as wholesome as one might think; it might be the one food that never goes bad, but it’s still far from being good, as popular culture perceives it, and for every connotation of love or godliness in its sugarcoated history, there’s an opposite connotation of death, pain, or the macabre.

  The ancient Egyptians, for example, used honey to heal people—but also to bury them. More than half of early Egyptian medicines contained honey as an ingredient,41 and while there are a lot of bogus claims about the health benefits of honey and honey by-products like bee pollen and royal jelly, it does have medicinal value beyond just soothing sore throats. In 2007, the FDA approved medical-grade honey42 for the treatment of diabetic and arterial ulcers, first- and second-degree burns, and traumatic and surgical wounds—and there’s further evidence it accelerates healing while decreasing pain,43 inflammation, and scar formation. A 2004 study even showed that honey healed genital and labial herpes44 faster and with less pain and crusting than prescription Acyclovir, a leading antiviral medication, while other studies suggest it outperforms leading cough medicines45 and kills antibiotic-resistant bacteria.46

  A lot of this is due to the same properties that give honey its seemingly infinite shelf life; for example, honey is naturally acidic and hygroscopic47, meaning it sucks moisture from its surroundings, not unlike salt, creating a harsh environment for bacteria and microorganisms to survive in by essentially burning and smothering them to death. This is why foods high in sugar48 like jams and jellies (or Colonial-era pies) tend to last longer, similar to foods that are salted, cured, or brined. Honey also contains a bee enzyme called glucose oxidase,49 which naturally produces small amounts of hydrogen peroxide, which your mother probably kept under the sink to sterilize cuts and scrapes.

  So in a way, the Egyptians were way ahead of their time by using honey medicinally. Then again, they also believed in the medicinal value of beer, cooked dog vulva, statue dust, semen (primarily as a medical-grade flavoring agent, though, in a pinch, it could also be used to remove splinters50), and penis water, meaning both urine and the actual water left over from washing penises.51 So their medicinal use of honey was probably accidental, and if we give them credit for treating burns with it, we should also take credit away for treating burns with crushed cake and cat hair.*52

  And we should take away credit, too, for their feeding honey to babies without realizing this can cause infant botulism—though, to be fair, no one else realized this until the 1970s.53 (Botulism spores thrive in the absence of oxygen,54 so honey’s propensity for suffocating things paradoxically keeps them alive. For healthy adults, this isn�
��t generally a problem, but it’s potentially fatal to infants, as spores can colonize in their digestive tracts, which is why you shouldn’t give honey to children younger than twelve months.)

  Yet the Egyptians were right about honey being a preservative, even if they wrongly attributed it to magic and supernatural forces. Archeologists have uncovered three-thousand-year-old honey in Egyptian burial tombs that’s still perfectly good to eat; however, you’d probably want to check it for hairs first. There’s an old story about grave robbers who crack open an ancient jar of honey55 and start eating it with their hands—until, about halfway through, one of them finds a hair in his mouth, then a few more hairs . . . and finally grabs his torch and discovers they’re coming from the head of a mummified child at the bottom of the container. No one knows if the story is true, but Egyptians did use honey to preserve the dead, so it’s certainly plausible.

  And the Egyptians weren’t the only ones to do this; the Babylonians, the Greeks, and even the English used honey as embalming fluid,56 and traces of it have been found on bones in Bronze Age burial sites57 (alongside “astonishingly well preserved” 4,300-year-old berries) and leaking out of coffins from sixteenth-century England.58

  Many of the same cultures simultaneously used honey as an instrument of love—but also an instrument of war. For example, Cupid’s arrows were dipped into honey, but also into gall59 (a bitter bile secreted from the liver of animals) to symbolize love’s accompanying agony. Even Cupid’s own mother, Venus, called him a tameless and deceitful brat60 with an evil heart and honeyed tongue for his habit of ruining marriages61 by sneaking into houses at night and shooting spouses with honey-tipped arrows to incite infidelity. There’s also this great series of paintings done by Lucas Cranach the Elder in the 1520s called Venus with Cupid the Honey Thief that depicts a naked Cupid being stung by bees while stealing honeycomb with an inscription that reads Dvm pver alveolo fvratvr mella cvpido,/fvranti digitvm sedvla pvnxit apis./sic etiam nobis brevis et moritvra volvptas/qvam petimvs tristi mixta dolore nocet (“As Cupid was stealing honey from the hive/62A bee stung the thief on the finger/And so do we seek transitory and dangerous pleasures/That are mixed with sadness and bring us pain.”). The inscription is based on a much older poem by the Greek poet Theocritus (c. 300–260 BC)63 that tells the story of Cupid stealing honey64 and complaining about his bee stings to his mother, who responds by telling him he deserves it for being—just like the bees—a small creature that brings both sweetness and profound suffering.

  More tangibly, honey has also been used to inflict harm in place of arrows. In his book Six-Legged Soldiers: Using Insects as Weapons of War, entomologist Jeffrey A. Lockwood explains how beehives were used as wartime projectiles going all the way back to the Stone Age.65 Cavemen covered them with mud66 and threw them into enemy caves; Roman armies loaded them into catapults;67 medieval Englishmen tossed them over castle walls during sieges and even built permanent hives within their own walls, called “bee boles,”68 for easy access; Mayans lobbed bee grenades69 at their enemies and constructed dummy warriors from hollow gourds that released swarms of bees when hit; and before cannonballs, ships’ crews waged war at sea by hurling hives onto one another’s decks.70 In fact, the word bombard, explains Lockwood, comes from the Greek bombos, meaning “bee.”71

  Ancient Persians and Native Americans also used honey to inflict torture by smearing it on victims and marooning them on boats or anthills to attract stinging insects,72 with the Persians sometimes adding to this by force-feeding their victims honey to induce diarrhea, which would then attract flies to lay eggs in the victim’s anus and festering bite and sting wounds.

  And two thousand years ago, the Persians booby-trapped the path of the invading Romans by baiting it with enticing chunks of “mad honeycomb”73 that caused them to vomit and hallucinate—then killed them while they vomited.*74 (The honey had been collected from areas dense in rhododendron flowers, the toxic nectar of which makes the resulting honey poisonous and hallucinogenic—and today worth about $166 per pound75 on the black market, where it’s sold as a psychedelic and natural remedy for everything from erectile dysfunction to cancer and hair loss.*)76

  Though the biblical reference to “the land of milk and honey”77 actually refers to date honey (a paste made from crushed dates) and goat or sheep’s milk, actual honey still holds a place in a lot of religions: the Buddha ate honeycomb,78 delivered by a monkey, on his path to enlightenment; Jews dip apples in honey during Rosh Hashanah in hopes of a sweet New Year; and the Norse god Odin drank honey wine79, or mead, that was served to him by virgins in the skulls of his enemies while his army of undead warriors sipped it from the teats of his celestial goat, Heidrun.

  Meanwhile, beekeeping was closely tied to the Christian Church because it provided beeswax for candles. Explains food historian Bee Wilson, “Wherever Christianity spread in Europe,80 so did beekeeping and candlemaking. As candles were used more and more in church services, so Christians revered the bee and its works, with a kind of circular reasoning. The bee was a sacred being because it made sacred wax; and wax was holy because the bee was holy.” Honey, then, became a churchly symbol of chasteness and virginity,81 both because it was pure and unadulterated (i.e., eaten in its natural state) and because bees were industrious virgins, which made honey a great allegory for abstinence and societal order—though most of that went out the window once people realized that all the power in the bee community was held by a single queen82 who kept a harem of male slaves to have sex with, several at a time, before ripping out their penises.*83,84

  Similarly, vegans who abstain from honey for ethical reasons, citing the exploitation of bees, face a similar predicament in the paradox that if honey isn’t vegan, nothing is.

  “There would be no almond crop—not to mention avocados,85 apples, cherries and alfalfa—without honeybees,” writes New York Times columnist Stephanie Strom, adding that nearly three-quarters of the crops that account for 90 percent of the world’s food supply86 require bees for pollination.

  California almonds alone depend on pollination from nearly 1.5 million beehives87 annually; local insects just don’t have the numbers to pollinate the state’s 1.26 million acres of almond trees,88 so farmers rent commercial hives that are confined to trailers89 for months at a time and trucked across the country—feeding the bees, of course, on corn syrup.

  This, in addition to the nearly eighteen hundred varieties of plants pollinated by bees, naturally or commercially, just in North America:90 agave, alfalfa, apricots, blueberries, cabbage, carrots, celery, corn, cranberries, cucumbers, grapes, hops, lettuce, lime, mint, mustard, okra, olives, onions, oranges, parsley, parsnips, peaches, pumpkins, radishes, raspberries, rosemary, sage, sorghum, squashes, strawberries, thyme, turnips, watermelons, yucca.

  People tend to picture bees buzzing around wildflowers and ornamental gardens, but the truth is they’re attracted to just about anything they can turn into honey, including the nectar of plants like poison oak91 and tobacco, and even industrial waste. Bees living near tourist attractions have been found to produce cola-flavored honey92 after sucking sugar from discarded soda cans, and those in the vicinity of chocolate makers, chocolate-flavored honey; meanwhile, urban beekeepers in New York have reported cases of green honey,93 traced back to bees drinking antifreeze, and red honey, traced back to red food coloring from maraschino cherry factories.

  In 1969, a graduate student at Louisiana State University evaluated fifty-four commercial honey samples94 for her PhD dissertation in botany and found that nearly 80 percent contained traces of poison ivy nectar95—noting that the beekeepers involved “seemed reluctant to admit . . . that poison ivy might96 be significant among the nectar-secreting flora,” for obvious reasons.

  Some artisan beekeepers, like Henry Storch97 of Old Blue Raw Honey in Philomath, Oregon, specialize in small-batch honeys from unconventional nectar sources, including pumpkin, coriander, and poison oak (reported to have mellow notes of butterscotch). Unl
ike “mad honey,” these varieties are perfectly safe to eat; however, it’s difficult to get past the stigma of the word poison on food labels.

  Meanwhile, a lot of honey sellers aren’t sure where their honey comes from. Vaughn Bryant—a legend in the honey industry who once helped the CIA search for Osama bin Laden98 by forensically analyzing pollen remnants recovered from terrorist weapons, cell phones, and shoelaces—has spent more than forty years analyzing honey samples99 and says that when it comes to honey, “consumers rarely get what is written on the label.”100

  “Beekeepers and honey producers selling their products101 to commercial stores or at roadside stands,” he adds, “are frequently amazed to discover they have been selling types of honey that are completely different from what labels they were putting on their jars.”

  Of course, this isn’t really their fault. “The federal laws that govern labeling honey are minimal,”102 explains Bryant, and testing requirements are basically nonexistent. And even if testing were enforced, the current methods are costly, time consuming,103 and not exactly foolproof. For example, DNA tests can tell you the sources of honey but not the amount that comes from each source, making it hard to tell whether your expensive Manuka honey is 99 percent Manuka and 1 percent lawn weed or the other way around.

  That’s not to say that fraudulent manufacturers don’t exist; fraud is a massive problem in the honey industry, and although we’ve talked a lot about the symbolic and religious misrepresentations of honey, perhaps the bigger misrepresentation deals with the labeling of honey itself. Ever since the United States raised the tariffs on Chinese honey in 2001,104 there’s been an epidemic of international honey counterfeiters conspiring to beat these tariffs by laundering shipments through places like India, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Indonesia to conceal their origins. To further cover their tracks and elude forensic experts like Bryant, who can use pollen fingerprints to trace honey’s geographical source, they also take advantage of loose federal regulations that allow manufacturers to filter their honey excessively,105 removing all traces of pollen and essentially destroying the evidence.