So bacteria and spoil-ready organisms must look elsewhere for a home–the life expectancy inside of honey is just too low.īut honey isn’t the only hygroscopic food source out there. “It has a pH that falls between 3 and 4.5, approximately, and that acid will kill off almost anything that wants to grow there,” Harris explains. Honey is also naturally extremely acidic. With such an inhospitable environment, organisms can’t survive long enough within the jar of honey to have the chance to spoil. They’re smothered by it, essentially.” What Harris points out represents an important feature of honey’s longevity: for honey to spoil, there needs to be something inside of it that can spoil. Very few bacteria or microorganisms can survive in an environment like that, they just die. As Amina Harris, executive director of the Honey and Pollination Center at the Robert Mondavi Institute at Univeristy of California, Davis explains, “Honey in its natural form is very low moisture. Honey is, first and foremost, a sugar. Sugars are hygroscopic, a term that means they contain very little water in their natural state but can readily suck in moisture if left unsealed. The first comes from the chemical make-up of honey itself. The answer is as complex as honey’s flavor–you don’t get a food source with no expiration date without a whole slew of factors working in perfect harmony. Which raises the question–what exactly makes honey such a special food? Moreover, honey’s longevity lends it other properties– mainly medicinal–that other resilient foods don’t have. But there’s something about honey it can remain preserved in a completely edible form, and while you wouldn’t want to chow down on raw rice or straight salt, one could ostensibly dip into a thousand year old jar of honey and enjoy it, without preparation, as if it were a day old. There are a few other examples of foods that keep–indefinitely–in their raw state: salt, sugar, dried rice are a few. Through millennia, the archeologists discover, the food remains unspoiled, an unmistakable testament to the eternal shelf-life of honey. 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.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |