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Do you still eat honey regularly?
If yes, how do you eat or use it?
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I eat my peas with honey, I've done it all my life,
It makes the peas taste funny, but it keeps them on my knife.
Shel Silverstein?
Edit: NM, attributed to Anonymous
Edward Lear, isn't it?
I grew up hearing that from my dad ! Thanks for the blast from the past!
Ogden Nash?
You remember The Owl & the Pussycat by Edward Lear you learned many years ago?
Oops, wrong poem. A line written by "Anonymous". but I remember Spike Milligan's version on his LP "Muses With Milligan" - a real collection of nonsense.
I was obsessed with honey as a kid! I'm o lying 30, but used to do that, and I'd even eat chicken with it, drink tea, and use it for almost anything
People don’t use honey now? 🤔
I guess it's less than before? I personally still have it. My favorite is unfiltered buckwheat honey from the Hudson Valley. Yum.
We’re lucky enough to be able to buy honey from our next door neighbor, and his bees of course… We also get our eggs from our post woman, and her chickens, she delivers them with our mail. I find all of this hilarious after living in London most of my life, but I also absolutely love it… Plus, the honey and the eggs are the best I’ve ever tasted…
They say that eating local honey is the best prevention for hay fever.
TIL - Interesting! I did not know that. Makes sense…
yes indeed. I’m five years into to country living, and I buy as much local & fresh as I can. Sometimes we also trade, and fresh eggs are a good way to get me to do whatever you need got done.
A tasty privilege for sure, or maybe I just feel that way after most of my life being spent in cities. 🙏
I do, and I give my kiddos honey too. We use the real stuff, put in in oatmeal, eat it with apples, it always goes in my kids’ tea
Not being snarky, genuinely curious: 'the real stuff' as opposed to what? I can't think of a honey substitute.
A ton of honey is mostly flavored corn syrup (check the labels on "honey" packets in restaurants) and its the third most faked food in the world, behind milk and olive oil
I found out about fake olive oil the hard way. I make soap and a family member requested pure Castile soap which is olive oil and lye - nothing else. The special thing about olive oil is that it will produce a hard bar of soap. Almost all oil that is liquid at room temperature won't harden at 100%. Well, I bought the expensive olive oil and had 5 pounds of mush. In the US the label can say olive oil even when it's not. It only needs to be plant based.
I look for the NAOOA certification now.
There is a lot of adulterated honey. Some of it is just mixed with another sweetener. Some of it is fed to the bees so that their honey stockpile yeilds will go up, of course the food winds up as part of the honey too
Is there an easy way to tell?
A lot of honey is fake and synthetic.
Jesus. I had no idea.
I do. Topper for cornbread, mint tea and sore throat. Expensive so family gives it as a gift.
Okay so the good stuff is just expensive in general. I thought it was just the place I get it from. On cornbread sounds heavenly though
The real stuff is expensive 😭 I legit dropped $40 on honey a couple of weeks ago. It’s super hyper local (like you buy it by neighborhood which helps allergies allegedly) and from a small business and lasts forever so I do it but it hurt this time around
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Maybe where you are. I've lived in a lot of different places and there have always been local beekeepers selling honey. Clover honey in most places in the eastern US, but flavors like mesquite in AZ. Good in tea, or for drizzling on pastry. It's also a nice substitute for jelly on toast, or instead of jelly in a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. It also doesn't need refrigeration.
Same. I'm in the midwest and there is "real" honey pretty much everywhere. There is a lot of Mead made around here as a result.
The problem isn't that there aren't local beekeepers, it's that it's nearly impossible to detect counterfeit honey. It's a big business, that stuff leaks into our supply chain masquerading as locally sourced products when it's just factory synthesized from corn.
There are a couple of documentaries in circulation on the topic, totally worth finding them.
That's why you always have to go to the source. I haven't bought honey in a store in decades.
I noticed at some fast food restaurants, the honey packets say “Honey Sauce” because they’re not real.
Honey sauce. Now I’ve seen everything
I have friends that started a bee farm. Grow their own flowers to produce different flavors every year. It’s the best honey. No corn syrup to be found.
LUCKY you!! Do they sell any??
Yes. They been growing their business for a few years. Getting government subsidies to help small businesses grow. They are starting to sell in small local stores after word of mouth. They also sell the flowers they grow. Have picking parties to make your own bouquet. They have a small area to sell their honey and other related things, some from other community members.
The different flavors are what made me a fan of honey. I’ve learned I don’t like the mass produced honey but I love local honey and single variety honey (except clover. Not a fan of clover honey).
Made in USA honey is the real stuff. Imports from China are not.
Where?
What? Where do you shop?
If it comes in a bear-shaped squeeze bottle, don't buy it.
If it says "pure honey" on it, in the US it has to be actual honey. A lot of it is sold in bears, my father sold most of his pure honey in bears (he kept bees.).
That's fine. Most of the bears in the supermarket contain imported honey, though. Despite what the label may say, the honey may not be pure, and imported honey is the least trustworthy.
My uncle was an apiarist. We had honey that was so fresh and all the beeswax candles you could shake a jar of honey at. After he passed away, we hoarded the honey we had that was from his farm. I have a new fresh honey connection (friends I know through the renaissance faire), but it took us years to find someone.
As a kid, we would put it on buttered toast, we'd use it in tea if we were sick, I'd put it on crackers for a sweet/salty snack. I drink hot tea as an adult and that's mostly what I use it for now.
At my old job, the property manager kept bees on the back lawn. They would jar the honey and also make lip balm and give it to the tenants. It was pretty awesome.
We’d have peanut butter and honey sandwiches. I preferred that to jelly.
As kids we (44f) loved peanut butter and honey sandwiches! My kids (23, 20, 13) prefer it to jelly/jam. Issue is I and the oldest kid developed a peanut allergy so I have to settle on sunbutter. It’s sort of like peanut butter, made with sunflower seeds and is an ok alternative…
I have a late diagnosed peanut allergy and the sunbutter grows on you! Or will for your kid if they remember/miss peanut butter
Yea, I’ve (44f) been doing sunbutter for 15 years. I still miss chunky peanut butter and the price… son is 23. We both developed the allergy at about 20.
We used it rarely, basically when someone was ill. So to me it’s medicinal. However my ILs put it in their crumpets. It’s the only way you eat them.
yessss. honey and butter are a very perfect combo.
My Mom would make us honey and butter for sore throats. So delicious.
Yepp. Honey on bread.
Honey in tea.
Honey on toast
Honey on porridge, on weetbix, etc.
Honey is better for you than sugar.
My mum used to make us Honey and Banana sandwichs whenever bananas were cheap.
We had honey and peanut butter sandwiches.
Actually now you say it I remember my mother making that once in a while. I must not have liked it because I don't remember ever eating it myself.
We have honey in the house... I only use it on Cereal and in a cup of tea, and only have either of those perhaps 3 times a year
There’s two schools of thought on honey and PB sandwiches. If you put the PB on one side and honey on the other, the honey side bread gets a delightful weird crunch. If you put PB on one side then mix the honey into the PB you get a homogeneous yummy substance
You're like a PB&H savant!
In my front yard there are 4 Live oaks trees and every year when they flower the pollen would kill me. So I used to take some Claritin or Allegra, one of those over the counter meds. The problem is they only last about 12 hrs and you have to be taking it all the time till the pollen season is over.
One day while listening to Paul Harvey he talked about the uses of honey and how it was used for allergies.
Then the next year my wife's cousin brought use some honey and starting in October would eat honey (about at teaspoon/tablespoon) on some bread till after the Oak trees finished with the pollen.
This pretty much cured my pollen troubles from the Live Oak trees. Now I eat honey every so often.
Besides allergies honey has a lot of other uses.
Use local honey and raw honey. The best 15 dollars you can spend.
I went crazy at a bee farm once and spent over $100 on honey. My husband was like, ummm can we not do that again.
lol I feel like it’s easy to do that with honey! Beekeepers love their bees and beekeeping so much and bees are so important and I’m like give me everything you got!
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Same here. Always got a spoon after taking meds, whether crushed up pills or cough syrup. ::shudder:: That stuff was nasty. The cough syrup, not the honey.
Probably popular due to supposed health benefits. I have no idea if they're true or not but that's my suspicion. I eat honey all the time though. From the farmer's market, not the grocery store.
My dad was a beekeeper, so yes.
I don't eat it as often, now I usually use it as the sugar in my bread dough's warm water/yeast mixture.
Used to put it on my oatmeal, don't eat much oatmeal anymore. Could be people prefer it to sugar.
Local honey is fantastic for seasonal allergy sufferers
Sokka-Haiku by Duck_Walker:
Local honey is
Fantastic for seasonal
Allergy sufferers
Remember that one time Sokka accidentally used an extra syllable in that Haiku Battle in Ba Sing Se? That was a Sokka Haiku and you just made one.
That's just a myth perpetuated by big local honey to drive sales
But honey has anti-inflamatory and antioxident benefits, including wound healing. Not info from "big honey", read some of the research.
I think they were joking 😃
You wish lol
We always had the bear in the cupboard but it hardly ever got used.. I seem to remember Mom giving us honey and lemon tea for sore throats but don't recall ever using it for anything else..
We use it frequently; I like it on toast. Used to have butter and honey sandwiches, or peanut butter and honey.
We had a neighbor when I was a kid, that kept bees, & they would bring us honey. They once gave us a big can of honey, that we had for years. It moved with us three times, until it sat forgotten in our food storage room. I was probably about 17 or 18, when my dad found it, while cleaning out the room. Honey was still edible & pretty good!
If properly heated to homogenize it, honey basically lasts forever. Even if it crystallizes, you can heat it back up.
I mean the core reason it obvious: honey is MUCH more expensive than it was even a decade ago.
And the reason is obvious - climate change. It is getting harder and more expensive to get the same amount of honey as it was in years past.
well, we had it for putting on bread if we wanted, same as we could have bovril or jam or cheese if we liked. my mom used to buy it in big bulk tins and decant it into separate jars, but that was maybe once a year. my dad used to eat it with cheddar cheese occasionally; one of those aren't things we used to watch with many gleeful cries of disgust. it was just a household staple to us.
I don't buy it now. used to, when my son wanted to live on french toast, but those days are long gone. I do prefer it to syrup to put on pancakes, but I'd use it so rarely it would crystallize before it was used up, and I can't be bothered.
fun fact: honey on wounds was one of my dad's farm-kid home remedies. sugar is actually better since it's not already liquid, but the science of it may be legitimate.
It is legit. We use ‘medical grade’ honey in the hospital and local pharmacy for wound care.
This was a good read. And I read it in Abe Simpsons voice.
I used to live in Austin, Texas which is an allergy capital. If it can grow in Austin, it will grow and it will produce pollen.
One of the most virulent allergens is ash juniper (mountain juniper) pollen. It produces reactions so intense that people can be hospitalized.
I was told if I used local wildflower honey, I could inoculate myself against allergies. I started using a tablespoon in my coffee.
One particularly terrible pollen year, I was outside when the cedar pollen count was about 20,000 grains/cubic meter, which is absurdly high. I was not reacting to it.
I’ve since moved to Indianapolis, which has its fair share of pollens. I put local, wildflower honey in my coffee, and pollen doesn’t bother me.
I swear by the stuff. It’s certainly cheaper than allergy shots.
A relative lives there now, and she gets "cedar fever" every year.