https://kinghavenfarms.com/blogs/from-the-hive/the-sticky-bu...
It's fun to purchase honey from beekeepers a hundred miles away and see how the flavor changes. I personally like late-season honeys, which tend to have richer flavors from late-summer and fall flowers.
A rare treat I've had was honey from Pitcairn Island. This is how you get in the queue for a jar. https://pitkernartisangallery.pn/products/pipco-pitcairn-isl... https://livebeekeeping.com/honey/pitcairn-island-honey/
No, it's a lie. I researched it a bunch back in September 2024 (I was curious what the oldest possible edible food was*), and the Smithsonian knows it's BS (because I emailed them about this to get it corrected). I was able to correct Wikipedia, but I see Smithsonian hasn't gotten around to bothering, so this keeps making the social media echo chamber rounds...
To be clear: no edible honey has ever been discovered in Egyptian tombs. Every single anecdote is either unverifiable, or a garbled telephone-game description of some decayed residue which might have been honey thousands of years ago (and often on further chemical testing, proves to not have been).
See https://gwern.net/doc/history/1975-leek.pdf
* https://gwern.net/oldest-food 'Abyssal bacteria' and 'dinosaur collagen' were my final answers.
Honey. :)
At home, we had a beekeeper that'd keep his bees on our land. He'd give us 5 gal drums of honey on request (no joke) which lasted years for us. The honey in those drums would crystalize and harden on top, but with just a bit of stirring it'd re-honeyify. It always just tasted like honey. I never noticed a difference as it aged.
Doesn't this make honey somewhat less unique? Aren't there many foods that will keep for hundreds of years if kept sealed?
Ferments could be an outlier but usually dance on the edge of rot by design and can last longer than the raw cabbage or milk or meat they start from, but like honeycomb, they must be carefully stored.
As long as honey retains its original water content, it will not spoil.
In sufficiently dry air, you could keep honey without a seal.
For most sealed food, the integrity of the seal is much more important, because it must prevent bacteria and fungal spores to land on the food.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6263724 The Science Behind Honey’s Eternal Shelf Life (smithsonianmag.com) 86 comments
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