RE: Honey in Recipes

[Guest guest]

I appreciate the recipes being posted as is. It seems fairly hypocritical to

banish one fruit of the honeybees labor, while making your main diet all the

other products thereof. Yes, grains and seaweed don't depend on honeybees,

but much of you diet does - almonds, soybeans, squash, pumpins, melons,

blueberries (and most other berries), apples, pears, and on and on,

including many seeds used for sprouting. Unless you grow these yourself,

honeybees are used to get them to your table (and if you do so yourself,

you've discovered how low your yield is on some of these when depending only

on native bees ... which are practically absent from large farms). There

are some crops using other bees - tomatoes use bumblebees, apples in Japan

use orchard bees (most here use honeybees), for example. Honey is simply the

nectar of the flowers visited, combined with enzymes to convert the sugars

to a more digestible form (sucrose ==> glucose+fructose). Not really much

different from using bacteria to create soy yogurt or enzymes in making rice

syrup.

 

These honeybees would cease to exist without the beekeeper to treat for some

parasites, as have the feral honeybees other than africanized bees in this

country. And the beekeeper would not truck those bees around without some

method of profit, which includes the honey crop from a few of the crops they

are set on (many pollination crops require feeding the bees at the same time

or they will starve). Few of these beekeepers pursue barbaric practices such

as killing off their stock for the winter -- by purchasing honey from a

local beekeeper you are almost assured of getting honey from someon who

cares for them well. Commercial honey is also heat treated (to kill off the

enzymes) and ultra filtered (to remove proteins such as pollen) - it is not

carcinogenic, but lacks the vitality of a raw honey (which research has

proven is the only known source of antioxidants that when ingested results

in an almost immediate increase in blood level antioxidants). A lot of

commercial honey is also mixed from countries such as China (where what they

are producing isn't really honey and banned chemicals are used).

 

Yes, you can use some alternatives - maple syrup, various grades of molasses

or even brown rice syrup (but watch out, many of these are not GF and the

barley enzymes used are not declared on the labels). But these won't have

quite the same properties or taste (honey is hygroscopic and keeps baked

goods fresh longer, as they don't dry out as quickly).

 

Karen

 

 

>

>

> Also, for pure vegans, the honey question is always a problem when posting

> recipes from others. " Some " vegans use honey. Yes, I know that those who

> are pure vegans do not. When posting recipes I try to post them as

> originally written the the recipe developer/author/source. They are the

> ones who have tested the recipe and so forth. So. . .for recipes that

call

> for honey, I generally post it as such but make a note somewhere in the

> recipe given what appropriate vegan substitutions can be. I just wanted

to

> mention that, as I don't wish to offend anyone here.

 

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