Honey

The only product we eat that is made by insects is honey. Plenty of people eat insects. In Oaxaca you can buy roasted grasshoppers by the kilo in the markets, reddish with I guess chili powder although I wasn't feeling very well that day and decided to wait. At dinner there were grasshoppers prepared several different ways, Oaxacan style, but even though I had been so determined I just couldn't bring myself to, which, as my Grandma Anne used to say, was another demerit for me!

One may ask, what is the difference between a grasshopper and, say, a tiny shrimp, probably very nutritious and high in protein. A long time ago American settlers in the West had their crops decimated by plagues of locusts, and their fields covered with grasshoppers by the millions, but it never occurred to them to eat the hoppers once the bugs had eaten all their grain. Foolish settlers!

In China I once had a fried scorpion, but I don't know about the protein, calories, etc., and in Australia the aborigines ate witchety grub larvae, which were out of season when I was there although many Australian nouvelle cuisine restaurants do now serve them from time to time. How terrible I felt at missing this special opportunity, although those people I spoke to who had tried them said they were terrible, not sweet and nutty?as one would assume?but rancid and bitter.

But to me it's as much the concept as anything else. Also once I owned a can of chocolate-covered ants, but the expiration date came before I had a chance to serve.

Probably I'm leaving out a lot?those Explorers' Club feasts or insect festivals when nothing but insects of varying sorts are served, biscuits made with bee larvae ground into flour and so forth. I saved the article by Arline Bleecker from the New York Post of Jan. 19, 1999, regarding Montreal's annual bug festival. It sounded fascinating, with puff-pastry bug pizza and meal worms spice cookies, but I've not yet been able to find any publication willing to send me to this event to cover it.

So there is a global cuisine of insects that has never caught on in mainstream European and Western culture; which in a sense is a bit peculiar. After all, frogs' legs are, if not popular, then acceptable, and I can't think of other edible amphibians. Yet frog eggs are not eaten. I suppose ant eggs, which are served in very expensive restaurants in the Monterrey area of Mexico, might be considered a manufactured insect product, but this is no different than if one were to eat an ant, it's just an insect in another form, in this case the egg.

Which is why, instead, I've opted for honey. I am not a fan of honey. Yet it's a product available in every supermarket and bodega and upscale gourmet food store. And nobody ever thinks it's strange, if you go in and ask for a jar of bee food, made from flowers and bee spittle: it has to have some bee spittle in it, doesn't it, the bees had to suck it up their probosci, didn't they, or am I sorely mistaken?

Nobody you ask will know how honey is made. I mean, bees make it. But how? The bees go out and they come back with nectar and pollen, right, and the next thing there's honey. But I couldn't find out anywhere how honey is actually made. I looked on the Internet, but as usual I only found where to buy it. I did read about some beekeepers producing a special kind of clove honey from clove plantations somewhere near the Andaman Islands, but there wasn't enough of a market to sustain an industry.

Finally my daughter showed me a brochure from her kindergarten. It said the bees wave their wings very fast until the nectar turns into honey. You can't give honey to a child under two years of age because the infant might get botulism. This, too, is peculiar, almost as if announcing that some cans of tuna fish might be poisoned.

People who are into macrobiotic diets and natural organic things eat honey, but I would rather not. There is something beyond plain old sweetness, and how a bee takes pollen and makes honey out of it, I truly don't know or understand, and also how a bee can live off a diet without nutritional value, for honey is just sugar.

They also make wax and that in a hexagonal shape, again profoundly bizarre. Somehow the bees produce wax from scales located under their wings.

I can't do this. If bees can do this they can do anything.

Some people eat propolis, which is the resinous substance collected from the buds of trees by bees, which they use to seal their hives. Why the bee would do this is understandable, but the person who eats this should also be eating the saliva from birds that is used in certain kinds of Chinese food. What other product is produced by insects that is universally popular and yet something that an insect makes to consume... It's bug food, really.

And the taste of honey is terrible, I do not like honey, it has a strange alien taste, that whirring bee flavor, there is nothing else like honey, hot not in temperature or spiciness but in that sort of preserved sunlit heat of pollen and the stale bee scent of the hive, a million organized neutered insects, the worker bees laden with the dust of flowers in little leg sacs. And some old grandmother's honey cake, dry, sticky, flavorless except for this bee stuff. It is too hideous to contemplate.

So whenever I traveled I picked up a jar of this substance. You can pretty much count on having a souvenir that will last a lifetime, nobody ever touches the stuff, it crystallizes in the cabinets, even the cockroaches are not attracted to the sticky drips. (Believe me, I tested by putting out a little dish of honey, thinking I could attract and glue roaches, but in the morning I hadn't caught one.) It's the sort of thing people bring as unwelcome house presents.

Finally I decided to embrace honey and work on my collection. In the U.S., all the store brands?unless gourmet?are just a mixture of different flower varietals, glopped together; otherwise the stuff is specific, allegedly, to the type of flower the bees are draining of fluid. In my kitchen is a honey from Wiltshire, England, and something special and expensive from the swamps of Georgia (Gallberry honey that cost nine dollars a jar from Sunnyland Farms, a nut-and-dried-fruit mail order catalog, which they advertised as being the connoisseur's choice). I even have a second jar of this, a gift, made by the Woodard Family of White Springs, FL, "from the flowers of a Southern piney-woods shrub."

I have D'arbo, "genuine foreign bee honey derived from the nectar of many different blossoms" (Austria, '97) and, from the supermarket, Krasdale Farm US Grade A Clover Honey, which is also probably the only authentically pure product in the entire supermarket, not raw, but just the plain old unadulterated product of bees. And from Bermuda (pure Bermuda honey), and Oregon (Fireweed pure honey of the Pine Hill Bee Farm, Molalla, OR) and California (Marshalls Farm Sonoma County Wildflower honey of the Bay Area and California Sage Honey from the coastal foothill range of CA).

I plan to go on collecting honey, too, at least one jar from each place I visit, until I have my own equivalent of a wine cellar. Under the right conditions, it'll be something to pass down to the next generation and might even go up in value.

Each honey should have a different flavor, depending on what the bees of that region had access to in the way of flowers. But do they?

One thing about taking out 20 jars of honey and eating spoonfuls from each, you start to feel...less perturbed by the arthropod quality of the stuff. The sage honey was very good, almost like candy, but the most delicious of all was the Bermuda honey, which really was in a realm of its own, so perfumey and tropical it was like an exotic dessert with no dusty pollen aspect at all.

Some friends of mine kept bees in upstate New York and for years I had a jar of their honey that did, somehow, get eaten, but they stopped keeping bees after New England bees all died of some terrible bee plague. Without bees there would be no pollination of fruits and vegetables; it takes hundreds of thousands of flowers' nectar to make even a tiny quantity of honey?the stuff should be considered more desirable than caviar, but it's not. It's just honey.

Where do the bees go to the bathroom, anyway? Does anybody eating honey care about this? We might as well have a group of aliens living among us, making some horrible alien glop that you could buy?and eat, if you wanted to?without anybody saying, "Hey, isn't this a bit peculiar?"