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.
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.
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.
And OP evidently knows a lot about honey :)
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...
> (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.
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 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.
(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.
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.
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.
It does seem plausible that some wines might last longer than 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
(Sample size 1) I tried it on myself and a wound that was stubborn about healing was better very quickly.
I live in the tropics where people die because due to infection which makes it even more interesting that they use 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.
> 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.
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.
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!
Here’s the definition of water activity from FDA:https://www.fda.gov/inspections-compliance-enforcement-and-c...
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