Same principle, reducing water activity (aw), is how Nutella keeps fresh for so long without refrigeration: its water activity is even lower than honey. Most bacteria need an aw of around 0.85 to thrive, Nutella’s aw is around 0.4, honey’s around 0.5-0.6. Peanut butter is 0.7, so it stays fresh for relatively long, too.
This is something that I think about sometimes. Life on Earth has had billions of years and expanded to fill so many niches, but they're nearly all damp niches. Nothing has ever really managed to really thrive in deserts. Sure, there are a few cacti, succulents, a bit of scrub, a few palms and rodents and a few birds that eke out an existence. But really it's mostly barren, compared to temperate or tropical climates where nature takes over land entirely within years. Yes, the soil in deserts is poor, but that's a consequence: it was poor everywhere before plants conditioned it. It's just that evolution has never in a billion years hit on a way to capitalise on all that sunlight and those day/night temperature gradients without enough water to float all the microbiology in.
Probably just as well (invoke some kind of anthropic principle here if you like) or we'd have, say, fungus there can quickly eat dry things and storing food or building anything with longevity would be much harder.
> Life on Earth has had billions of years and expanded to fill so many niches, but they're nearly all damp niches. Nothing has ever really managed to really thrive in deserts.
By definition, the desert "niche" IS filled. It has as much life as it can support. That doesn't mean wall-to-wall forest; you wouldn't expect to find that covering a field of barely weathered granite, either.
All life on Earth uses water to transport chemicals and ions across its cells. Period. It's one immutable requirement of life on Earth.
I wonder if there's some general mathematical description one could form of the biomass per acre versus water content of the "surface soil". The oceans provide the extreme, but even then there are "biodeserts" far from land where there are insufficient nutrients (organic chemicals, probably) to keep even algae going.
an unfilled niche would have the known properties of life with resources so bounding that there isn't a strict need for competition for survival. (a brand new uncovered dish of agar media)
a populated biome has an active +- exchange of resources between participants that facilitates the need for competition due to resource bounds. (the rain forest, most of the biological world)
a sterile biome has no known properties of life, and no known participants. The participants that are there struggle to exist or are in some form of stasis to survive the condition. (a brand-new sealed blood vacuum vial.)
as for 'as much as it can support', i'm unaware of how to determine an optimal maxima for biological growth independent of species or environment. Maybe some exotic sphere-packing type idea might work with a reward function for 'resources' ? I don't know.
If there were an evolutionary advantage for more things to being in an arid region over being in a place with abundant, easily accessible water, I reckon the niche would have been filled. the natural world isn't really "interested", for lack of a better term, in maximal efficiency outside the context of following the path of least resistance in any given domain. Lightning might strike your chimney even tho there's a giant metal tower 300 feet in the air a quarter mile down the road that appears to be a much better path to ground.
There is plenty of natural selection pressure on not being eaten. If a mold or something could evolve to live off of a dry atmosphere plus sunlight and whatever minerals it can eek out of rocks, it could blanket millions of square kilometers of desert. Presumably other living things would find it hard to digest because its protein and chemical structures are so different. Nature is constantly finding weird little niches at the edge of sustainability. Waterless deserts should present an enormous opportunity for something to fill, but it hasn't happened.
Except in science fiction (so far); see, for example, "Dragon's Egg," Robert L. Forward's superb 1980 novel of life on a neutron star with surface gravity 67 billion times that of Earth:
May be unrelated, but it's also kinda funny how to cut / process / shape stone and rock you need a crap load of water, all the drills and saws for stone are wet in a way.
Cooling, lubrication, debris removal and dust control. Mostly in that order.
But yeah, you're completely right about the chisel. Hammer and chisel is how we've processed rocks for most of history (all the way back to flint knapping).
Wet processing for tile/stone is really only about 100 years old, since we didn't have a usable cutting abrasive until diamond blades came around in the late 1800s.
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All that aside, the problem with a hammer & chisel is that it's hard to be precise. It's not impossible, but it's definitely a skill requiring mastery.
If we expand the scope a little and include ceramics - then yes, we did need quite a bit of water.
Brick, Clay, Cement, etc - they were all good alternatives to chiseling stone to get a very hard, stone-like material in a very specific shape, and they all require good amounts of water.
>The models estimated that Oldowan stone tools originated 2.617-2.644 million years ago, 36,000 to 63,000 years earlier than current evidence. The Acheulean’s origin was pushed back further by at least 55,000 years to 1.815-1.823 million years ago.
These days, with high-power cutting tools also for cooling. If you have a 50 HP saw, that energy has to go somewhere, and it doesn't all go into the dust and get carried away. If carbide blades get too hot, the solder melts and the brazed inserts fall out, and for steel, carbide and diamonds, the hotter they get the softer they get and and the faster the tool wears.
And other than the cost of the tools, there is one thing harder to drill than a rock, and that's a rock with the previous drill bit's carbide insert stuck at the bottom of the hole!
Cacti aswell, mostly thrive because of desert floods. They've evolved to quickly suck up as much water as they can, then they use a special acidic form of photosynthesis to make it last as long as possible.
Different desert plants use similar ideas, the Aussie outback for example blooms for about a month after a given flood, reproduces, then dies out near completely except around the occasional waterhole.
Even then, you don't have to spend much time in a desert to realise that what does grow is in low lying places where there's water underground, or where brief rains collect.
I think GP knows that and it's exactly their point: why do you need slightly less water to stop mould growth as the temperature slightly drops? (If anything, one might expect the opposite anecdotally - it's e.g. hot and humid bathrooms that are particularly prone.)
In the end drying grass to create hay is also the same principle: dry enough (say < 15% water) and it doesn't do much at all, being pretty dead. Higher and you get all kinds of life having its go at it.
i grow weed( legal here) and its the same. last two weeks moisture and temp down because of fungi. and when harvesting the goal is getting the humidity of the buds down to 12% fast. the difference is so obviuos. sometimes in the summer heat and humidity are out of controll and thats when buds rotten :/
I've recently been embracing the idea of co-evolutionary pressure. Reading the article I thought that if it was just the dryness, bacteria would have evolved to tap such a rich energy source. Hence the biology of bees must have something to do with the preservative nature of honey. I'm feeling vindicated!
I think co-evolution should be investigated for encoder-decoder architecture training.
The idea being that you pair multiple decoders with each encoder, and multiple encoders with each decoder (randomly sample if large populations). The selective pressure is a feedback loop between the encoder and decoder populations that requires the members to produce and interpret the latent vector as well as possible. In theory, this creates a form of generalization pressure wherein the encoders and decoders must perform well with a wide range of possible up/down stream states. I think with large enough populations, this could be robust to premature convergence and overfitting.
I remember playing around with RapidMiner about 10 years ago and it had a hyper parameter optimizing primitive that uses evolutionary search. It was quite pleasing. RapidMiner doesn't do any of the modern stuff though. Asking chatgpt turns up mostly pretty old (abandoned) projects from around 2017.
>> This doesn't mean that honey can withstand all challenges to freshness. Once a jar of honey is open, its surface is being regularly exposed to the air, and dipping licked spoons in will bring bacteria and moisture that weren't there when the jar was sealed.
I have plenty of observational, empirical data that contradicts this apparently theoretical statement. Not just licked spoons but breakfast knives with bits of toasted bread and peanut/butter, Greek yogurt, French moldy goat's cheese, bits of tart, croisssants or other confectionary, etc. All of those can be detected in significant concentrations in my honey jars. Not to mention that simply screwing a lid on an already-opened jar doesn't quite seal it, certainly not firmly enough to cut off the oxygen from it.
Yet I have never known honey to spoil. I mean it's quite remarkable. I think I have seen honey that has stayed at the bottom of a jar for years and it just doesn't go bad. I wouldn't eat it, because it tends to look a bit bleugh, but it won't go off (and that's how it ends up staying in the jar for so long).
Likewise. For some reason the article ignores the raft of antibacterial compounds found in honey:
> Various components contribute to the antibacterial efficacy of honey: the sugar content; polyphenol compounds; hydrogen peroxide; 1,2-dicarbonyl compounds; and bee defensin-1. All of these elements are present at different concentrations depending on the source of nectar, bee type, and storage. These components work synergistically, allowing honey to be potent against a variety of microorganisms including multidrug resistant bacteria and modulate their resistance to antimicrobial agents.
Definitely give a little love to your honey jars, it does sound like the relationship is quite one-directional. Even cleaning the spoon/knife before interacting with the jar would increase the long-term stability of the relationship and it's just a nice thing to do for a SO.
This article is missing what I think is a pretty important PSA on the topic of bacteria in 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.
Honey contains spores of Clostridium botulinum, not live bacteria. And as such, honey cannot in itself cause botulism.
But the intestinal microbiot of infants (not their immune system) is not necessarily developed enough, and as such Clostridium botulinum can colonize their intestine (it strives in anaerobic environment) and then they can develop a special kind of botulism where the toxin is actually produced in their own body (as opposed to ingested, like in regular botulism).
It's not the only way a child can stumble upon the bacteria's spore though.
I remember having small kids we took this very seriously. I always wondered if this was just another overprotective order, or could really be an issue.
> 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.
I don’t think these probabilities are correct. Every parent is told not to feed their under 1 year olds honey, many times.
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.
It is correct. They are considering the most extreme case; in the most extreme case, no non-botulism-infected infants eat honey, and honey was the cause of botulism for those 20 infants.
If that is so, then completely removing honey exposure for infants would mean that 80 rather than 100 infants get botulism poisoning.
So the new probability of contracting botulism is (80 / 100) * (old probability), and (80 / 100) * (1 / 40000) = 1 / 50000.
There are no errors in the calculation, but it's wrong anyways because it calculates the answer to the wrong question. "At best" suggests this is the largest possible effect, but it is the smallest possible. To get an upper bound estimate on the usefulness of avoiding honey, you would need to know how many parents of 1-year-olds are avoiding honey.
Yeah, and their infant mortality is on par with Sub-Saharan Africa.
"The second most common prelacteal feed is honey, a delicious natural sweetener. Numerous studies [29,30] have shown that the ingestion of honey under one year of age is linked with infant botulism, a disease that results in a blockade of voluntary motor and autonomic functions. Apart from this, other prelacteal feeds get contaminated due to unhygienic environment, especially in rural India and in urban slums, resulting in infantile diarrhea. Thus, a wide range of prelacteal feeds and the introduction of early supplements result in recurrent diarrhea with multiple illness finally ending lives because of inaccessibility and unaffordibility of treatment and delayed or inappropriate care seeking behavior."
The paper lists a bunch of other traditional practices that have deleterious effects on the infants' health, such as putting unsanitary herbal concoctions on the babies navel while it's still healing, etc.
"Diarrhoea is a leading killer of children, accounting for approximately 9 per cent of all deaths among children under age 5 worldwide in 2021. This translates to over 1,200 young children dying each day" - https://data.unicef.org/topic/child-health/diarrhoeal-diseas...
"OK, sister bees, now remember: this season we'll be feeding the hu-man's child, so wipe your feet before entering the hive, and if you feel the sniffles coming on, Don't Make Honey!"
It's more about the below minimum wage people harvesting, bottling for transport, transporting, then bottling for sale than the bees themselves. More intermediate steps to introduce contamination and more potentially contaminated sources all mixed together.
I'm not sure that number is meaningful without knowing how many parents are giving their infants honey. Granted I'm in a high-income, high-education area, but at least in my bubble, "don't give babies honey" seems to be common knowledge, so it's possible there are relatively few instances and a high percentage result in complications.
Whole food crunchy Instagram grifters push that infants should eat honey
Though tbh do people really eat that much honey? I only have some in my kitchen to have with tea when I have a cold. Other then that I almost never use it.
Oh man buttered toast with honey... English muffins... But most controversially, and most deliciously, it dresses up a pizza something lovely...
For me the shift happened when I stopped thinking of it as a sweetener for liquids and started thinking about it as a condiment to deploy conservatively but frequently.
The United States is the second largest honey consumer behind China according to the latest data available from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in 2019. In 2021, consumption increased 8 percent from the previous year. Between 1991 to 2021, the average rate of growth is 10.7 million pounds per year. This translates to about 1.9 pounds per capita of honey consumption in 2021 compared with 1.2 pounds per capita in the early 1990s.
Breakfast buns go well with honey. Often switched up with jam every few days. Also pancakes and waffles are great with honey from time to time when I'm tired of maple syrup. Jam works too.
Type 1 isn't caused by any of this stuff. Type 2 is caused by excess body fat -- consuming too many calories in total over a long period of time. It doesn't matter what the composition of those calories is. You can eat mostly sugar, at maintenance levels, and never be at risk for T2D.
When my kid was under one year old, we were especially careful about this we didn’t let her have even a tiny bit of honey. It really drove home the idea that everything has two sides. Honey can sit on a shelf for years without spoiling, but it can still be dangerous for the most vulnerable. It’s a reminder that just because something is natural and long lasting doesn’t mean it’s safe for everyone.
In Finland honey is rarely pasteurized. It is seen as a quality defect if honey is heated after extraction from the hive. Heating is thought to destroy some of the beneficial compounds in honey.
Similarly one should not put honey to too hot tea if one wants the benefits instead of just sugar.
Pasteurization would also destroy the delicate honey taste. It takes almost nothing to do that, and heating honey above about 40 C even for 30 seconds will kill any honeyness and all you have left is the sweet.
I'll bet only the imported Chinese honey is pasteurized on the supermarket shelf. Most of that goes to industrial use anyway.
I doubt it, but even if that were the case it would not support your earlier claim. When fermenting things you will generally intentionally introduce a very small quantity of a carefully controlled culture to the bulk media. Which is to say, you would almost certainly have your own yeast culture at home that you would inoculate the mead-to-be with. Maintaining a sourdough start is an example of this practice.
If you want to start your own culture from scratch there are established practices for culturing "wild" yeast from the environment.
It's absolutely why its done, because people would otherwise inadvertently initiate fermentation with it.
Not seeing this and instead going for 'hehe my little dude, pasteurisation doesn't destroy the sugar, you can still add yeast and ferment it' doesn't come across as particularly impressive from my perspective.
I never said that? It's well known that heat alters honey.
Obviously the purpose of pasteurization is either preservation or food safety (but I repeat myself) as opposed to preventing people from making mead. I claim no particular knowledge of which specific microorganisms are primarily responsible for the spoilage that might otherwise occur, nor the precise consequences of such spoilage.
This story can be summarized as "Low water activity and low pH keep honey fresh permanently." The other 14 paragraphs are just filler. Moreover, even that summary is factually incorrect; low water activity and low pH don't come close to explaining honey's astounding shelf life, which amounts to centuries in many cases.
It'd be fascinating if something like methylglyoxal was responsible, but I doubt it. Molasses also has an extremely long shelf life, and it doesn't have any of honey's exotic constituents. I would bet it mostly comes down to water content and pH (and a sturdy, sealed container.)
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.
Can you make molasses bandages to speed wound healing, though? Honey really seems to have antimicrobial properties that go way beyond just low water activity and low pH, and in particular the peroxide production seems to be important.
It does seem plausible that some wines might last longer than honey.
After doing some more reading, I think you might be right. I've been looking at various sugary solutions such as molasses and it seems that it's not uncommon for them to be sold with mold inhibitors such as propanoic acid. I suspect the hydrogen peroxide might play a role, but it's not very stable, I wonder how long it lasts in the 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
Oh, I should have mentioned that (according to, IIRC, the children's book cited in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44495658) some glucose oxidase remains in the honey, and when enough water gets into the honey for it to become active, it produces more hydrogen peroxide at that point. So the peroxide itself doesn't have to remain stable for centuries.
I didn't know that about molasses! It wouldn't be surprising actually if bees were synthesizing specifically propanoate to add to the honey and that nobody had noticed yet. But there are probably other molecules that would work at lower doses that they might use instead.
Thank you both for an illuminating thread. Comments were concise, curious, and dense with information. Most notably, there was respectful disagreement and a levelheaded exchange of perspective.
Are you sure this isn’t just the Gell-Mann effect? It sounds like you’re probably better informed about this than the typical person and might be expecting a lot more detail than a newspaper would be endeavoring to try to convey.
Sure although I interpret it a little bit differently. All news is low quality but raises the overall bar of ignorance for people not familiar with the topic. So experts get no value from them on topics they are familiar while improving their level of baseline ignorance on topics they aren't.
I think reading this article could result in acquiring the misconception that honey stays fresh for centuries only because it has low water activity and low pH, worsening your level of baseline ignorance and leading you to potentially significant false conclusions; for example, the conclusion that honey bandages are useless or harmful. I think that's the usual problem that Gell–Mann amnesia conceals: news that is so low quality that it actively makes you stupider when you read it.
I had a vague memory that it had some kind of antibacterial properties, but no, I don't know a lot about honey; I just went and looked it up in Wikipedia.
vlovich123 may be correct that I am giving the BBC too much credit in general. But I don't think I'm especially well-informed; I'd never heard of methylglyoxal before looking this up in Wikipedia.
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.
I edited "millennia" into "centuries" in my comment above because the Wikipedia article claimed those claims didn't pan out:
> (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.
I'm so sorry but I can't help myself: 01975 is the dialling code for somewhere in Aberdeenshire!
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.
> [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.
The Gwern link is just a PDF copy of an article from a 1975 issue of "Bee World": https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0005772X.1975.11... I can't speak to the journal's rigor in the 1970s, but they seem like a more reliable source than any other mentioned in this discussion.
Also, peer review is almost unrelated to rigor. Plenty of sloppy crap gets peer reviewed, and, for example, none of Einstein's annus mirabilis papers did.
> I'm going to call out the WP article as being factually wanting on that point.
No, it's not. What is factually wanting is any case of an actual tomb honey.
When I looked into it, every single supposed tomb honey, not already debunked by Leek, deadends in a useless citation which is 'someone somewhere once found tomb honey trust me bro'. Clearly made-up. They don't exist.
The burden of proof is on anyone who still believes in tomb honey to name a single specific verified instance, with time and place and tomb, and someone actually witnessing it and analyzing or eating it and proving it's honey, rather than several other possible residues like the Leek examples. Otherwise, it's just more telephone game nonsense.
(Note: the Leek PDF is unfortunately not working right now, because Hetzner has temporarily disabled my account over torrenting alerts.)
Since you evidently haven't looked up the account of the person you're replying to, whose website is linked in his profile, this is spam. Spam is not what this site is for.
I don't see why anything other than low water and pH are necessary. Stories about ultra long lasting honey come from the desert, which will dessicate it further.
(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.
If you can get an aqueous solution of solids to completely crystallize (and sucrose does like to crystallize), it won't support microorganisms, but if it doesn't crystallize, it will have a critical "deliquescence relative humidity". When the relative humidity of the air is above the DRH†, the solution absorbs water from the air rather than giving up water to the air, and if there are crystals in it, they tend to shrink instead of growing.
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.
I had a planter wart surgically removed which they packed with Manuka honey and because it's a deep open wound it needs to heal from the inside. I changed the dressing and repacked it every few days for weeks and the wound was absolutely pristine ever time.
I live in the tropics where people die because due to infection which makes it even more interesting that they use honey.
No, low. High sugar concentrations mean low water activity, which osmotically pumps water out of cells, not into them, so they shrivel rather than popping.
I used to keep a few bee hives until I started getting increasingly severe reactions to bee stings, so reluctantly quit before I had an anaphylactic reaction.
Utterly fascinating and wonderful hobby and contributes towards the environment, while having a delicious outcome. Could not recommend enough!
I’d be curious to see if similar principles could be applied to non food preservation. Nature’s solutions often scale better than synthetic ones, especially when stability over long timeframes is needed.
Honey's hydrogen peroxide production and hygroscopic properties have already inspired antimicrobial coatings for medical devices and water-resistant biomaterials for tissue engineering.
> Contrary to best practices in the medical community, LLMs 1) express stigma toward those with mental health conditions and 2) respond inappropriately to certain common (and critical) conditions in naturalistic therapy settings — e.g., LLMs encourage clients’ delusional thinking, likely due to their sycophancy. This occurs even with larger and newer LLMs,...
Isn't all this just a problem of how the system prompt is set?
You can take honey that has crystalized and set it in sunlight to "melt" back into the gooey goodness, but you can't do that to chocolate that has that white powdery stuff on it.
Let's see, set a jar of honey in sunlight, or get out your double boiler to melt down chocolate and be sure to get out the molds that I'm sure everyone has.
yeah, that's the same thing. roughly. but you'd be good to go to be sure
If you're looking to have a reason.... That's probably going to over-heat the honey, which comes at a cost to flavor.
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.
Same principle, reducing water activity (aw), is how Nutella keeps fresh for so long without refrigeration: its water activity is even lower than honey. Most bacteria need an aw of around 0.85 to thrive, Nutella’s aw is around 0.4, honey’s around 0.5-0.6. Peanut butter is 0.7, so it stays fresh for relatively long, too.
Here’s the definition of water activity from FDA:https://www.fda.gov/inspections-compliance-enforcement-and-c...
This is something that I think about sometimes. Life on Earth has had billions of years and expanded to fill so many niches, but they're nearly all damp niches. Nothing has ever really managed to really thrive in deserts. Sure, there are a few cacti, succulents, a bit of scrub, a few palms and rodents and a few birds that eke out an existence. But really it's mostly barren, compared to temperate or tropical climates where nature takes over land entirely within years. Yes, the soil in deserts is poor, but that's a consequence: it was poor everywhere before plants conditioned it. It's just that evolution has never in a billion years hit on a way to capitalise on all that sunlight and those day/night temperature gradients without enough water to float all the microbiology in.
Probably just as well (invoke some kind of anthropic principle here if you like) or we'd have, say, fungus there can quickly eat dry things and storing food or building anything with longevity would be much harder.
> Life on Earth has had billions of years and expanded to fill so many niches, but they're nearly all damp niches. Nothing has ever really managed to really thrive in deserts.
By definition, the desert "niche" IS filled. It has as much life as it can support. That doesn't mean wall-to-wall forest; you wouldn't expect to find that covering a field of barely weathered granite, either.
All life on Earth uses water to transport chemicals and ions across its cells. Period. It's one immutable requirement of life on Earth.
I wonder if there's some general mathematical description one could form of the biomass per acre versus water content of the "surface soil". The oceans provide the extreme, but even then there are "biodeserts" far from land where there are insufficient nutrients (organic chemicals, probably) to keep even algae going.
How do you know that that "It has as much life as it can support"? What would an unfilled niche look like?
an unfilled niche would have the known properties of life with resources so bounding that there isn't a strict need for competition for survival. (a brand new uncovered dish of agar media)
a populated biome has an active +- exchange of resources between participants that facilitates the need for competition due to resource bounds. (the rain forest, most of the biological world)
a sterile biome has no known properties of life, and no known participants. The participants that are there struggle to exist or are in some form of stasis to survive the condition. (a brand-new sealed blood vacuum vial.)
as for 'as much as it can support', i'm unaware of how to determine an optimal maxima for biological growth independent of species or environment. Maybe some exotic sphere-packing type idea might work with a reward function for 'resources' ? I don't know.
Thank you, and I knew all that time studying spherical cows would come in handy one day!
I think you missed the point of parent's comment.
> All life on Earth uses water to transport chemicals and ions across its cells. Period. It's one immutable requirement of life on Earth.
They were pondering this. With billions of years of evolution, life has found no way around this, and that's interesting.
That's all they were saying.
If there were an evolutionary advantage for more things to being in an arid region over being in a place with abundant, easily accessible water, I reckon the niche would have been filled. the natural world isn't really "interested", for lack of a better term, in maximal efficiency outside the context of following the path of least resistance in any given domain. Lightning might strike your chimney even tho there's a giant metal tower 300 feet in the air a quarter mile down the road that appears to be a much better path to ground.
There is plenty of natural selection pressure on not being eaten. If a mold or something could evolve to live off of a dry atmosphere plus sunlight and whatever minerals it can eek out of rocks, it could blanket millions of square kilometers of desert. Presumably other living things would find it hard to digest because its protein and chemical structures are so different. Nature is constantly finding weird little niches at the edge of sustainability. Waterless deserts should present an enormous opportunity for something to fill, but it hasn't happened.
Except in science fiction (so far); see, for example, "Dragon's Egg," Robert L. Forward's superb 1980 novel of life on a neutron star with surface gravity 67 billion times that of Earth:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Egg
May be unrelated, but it's also kinda funny how to cut / process / shape stone and rock you need a crap load of water, all the drills and saws for stone are wet in a way.
You can cut and shape rock with chisels. Isn't the water used primarily for dust control in powered stone drills/saws?
Cooling, lubrication, debris removal and dust control. Mostly in that order.
But yeah, you're completely right about the chisel. Hammer and chisel is how we've processed rocks for most of history (all the way back to flint knapping).
Wet processing for tile/stone is really only about 100 years old, since we didn't have a usable cutting abrasive until diamond blades came around in the late 1800s.
---
All that aside, the problem with a hammer & chisel is that it's hard to be precise. It's not impossible, but it's definitely a skill requiring mastery.
If we expand the scope a little and include ceramics - then yes, we did need quite a bit of water.
Brick, Clay, Cement, etc - they were all good alternatives to chiseling stone to get a very hard, stone-like material in a very specific shape, and they all require good amounts of water.
And, WAY back in the day, other rocks.
>The models estimated that Oldowan stone tools originated 2.617-2.644 million years ago, 36,000 to 63,000 years earlier than current evidence. The Acheulean’s origin was pushed back further by at least 55,000 years to 1.815-1.823 million years ago.
https://www.kent.ac.uk/news/science/28246/the-worlds-earlies...
>Statistical inference of earlier origins for the first flaked stone technologies
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...
These days, with high-power cutting tools also for cooling. If you have a 50 HP saw, that energy has to go somewhere, and it doesn't all go into the dust and get carried away. If carbide blades get too hot, the solder melts and the brazed inserts fall out, and for steel, carbide and diamonds, the hotter they get the softer they get and and the faster the tool wears.
And other than the cost of the tools, there is one thing harder to drill than a rock, and that's a rock with the previous drill bit's carbide insert stuck at the bottom of the hole!
Cacti aswell, mostly thrive because of desert floods. They've evolved to quickly suck up as much water as they can, then they use a special acidic form of photosynthesis to make it last as long as possible.
Different desert plants use similar ideas, the Aussie outback for example blooms for about a month after a given flood, reproduces, then dies out near completely except around the occasional waterhole.
Even then, you don't have to spend much time in a desert to realise that what does grow is in low lying places where there's water underground, or where brief rains collect.
More counterintuitively: why hasn't any major bacteria evolved to feast on lipids like oils? Much denser source of energy than desert dirt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lipophilic_bacteria
Related good read[0] - “I contain Multitudes”
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27213168-i-contain-multi...
There are many such bacteria, some of which are living in and on your skin right now.
like frogs around a pond, phaedo
Managing moisture levels is probably the #1 way to control microbial activity.
You see the exact same idea in HVAC - if you can keep the relative humidity below 50%, mold growth becomes nearly impossible.
In laundry care, the dryer does all of the sanitizing action.
Etc.
Why is it relative humidity that matters here instead of absolute humidity?
Relative humidity is an easier unit to work with because it auto scales with temperature.
I think GP knows that and it's exactly their point: why do you need slightly less water to stop mould growth as the temperature slightly drops? (If anything, one might expect the opposite anecdotally - it's e.g. hot and humid bathrooms that are particularly prone.)
In the end drying grass to create hay is also the same principle: dry enough (say < 15% water) and it doesn't do much at all, being pretty dead. Higher and you get all kinds of life having its go at it.
i grow weed( legal here) and its the same. last two weeks moisture and temp down because of fungi. and when harvesting the goal is getting the humidity of the buds down to 12% fast. the difference is so obviuos. sometimes in the summer heat and humidity are out of controll and thats when buds rotten :/
> Higher and you get all kinds of life having its go at it.
Yep, and you end up with silage if it's stored anaerobically.
The story misses that lactic acid bacteria are fairly common in honey and seem to be out competing other bacteria and have anti microbial effects.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7949542/
I've recently been embracing the idea of co-evolutionary pressure. Reading the article I thought that if it was just the dryness, bacteria would have evolved to tap such a rich energy source. Hence the biology of bees must have something to do with the preservative nature of honey. I'm feeling vindicated!
I think co-evolution should be investigated for encoder-decoder architecture training.
The idea being that you pair multiple decoders with each encoder, and multiple encoders with each decoder (randomly sample if large populations). The selective pressure is a feedback loop between the encoder and decoder populations that requires the members to produce and interpret the latent vector as well as possible. In theory, this creates a form of generalization pressure wherein the encoders and decoders must perform well with a wide range of possible up/down stream states. I think with large enough populations, this could be robust to premature convergence and overfitting.
I remember playing around with RapidMiner about 10 years ago and it had a hyper parameter optimizing primitive that uses evolutionary search. It was quite pleasing. RapidMiner doesn't do any of the modern stuff though. Asking chatgpt turns up mostly pretty old (abandoned) projects from around 2017.
>> This doesn't mean that honey can withstand all challenges to freshness. Once a jar of honey is open, its surface is being regularly exposed to the air, and dipping licked spoons in will bring bacteria and moisture that weren't there when the jar was sealed.
I have plenty of observational, empirical data that contradicts this apparently theoretical statement. Not just licked spoons but breakfast knives with bits of toasted bread and peanut/butter, Greek yogurt, French moldy goat's cheese, bits of tart, croisssants or other confectionary, etc. All of those can be detected in significant concentrations in my honey jars. Not to mention that simply screwing a lid on an already-opened jar doesn't quite seal it, certainly not firmly enough to cut off the oxygen from it.
Yet I have never known honey to spoil. I mean it's quite remarkable. I think I have seen honey that has stayed at the bottom of a jar for years and it just doesn't go bad. I wouldn't eat it, because it tends to look a bit bleugh, but it won't go off (and that's how it ends up staying in the jar for so long).
Likewise. For some reason the article ignores the raft of antibacterial compounds found in honey:
> Various components contribute to the antibacterial efficacy of honey: the sugar content; polyphenol compounds; hydrogen peroxide; 1,2-dicarbonyl compounds; and bee defensin-1. All of these elements are present at different concentrations depending on the source of nectar, bee type, and storage. These components work synergistically, allowing honey to be potent against a variety of microorganisms including multidrug resistant bacteria and modulate their resistance to antimicrobial agents.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8071826/
Definitely give a little love to your honey jars, it does sound like the relationship is quite one-directional. Even cleaning the spoon/knife before interacting with the jar would increase the long-term stability of the relationship and it's just a nice thing to do for a SO.
Indeed it is. I'm not the one not cleaning the utensils before dipping them in btw ;)
> toasted bread and peanut/butter, Greek yogurt, French moldy goat's cheese, bits of tart, croisssants or other confectionary
You turned your kitchen into a bed and breakfast, though you make it sound like a microbiology lab :)
My honey jars basically turn into forensic time capsules of breakfast past, and still nothing grows
But the same holds for my sugar jar.
Are you all barbarians?
Nothing but clean spoons go in my sugar jar, and I rarely dip out honey with anything but its own dipper - which never touches food.
Reginald, bring me my fainting couch, stat!
We are truly surrounded by heathens. A soiled yogurt spoon in the honey jar?!?!?
[I'm kind of being whimsical here but c'mon - get a squeeze bottle of honey if you can't handle keeping the jar clean plz]
This article is missing what I think is a pretty important PSA on the topic of bacteria in 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.
Honey contains spores of Clostridium botulinum, not live bacteria. And as such, honey cannot in itself cause botulism.
But the intestinal microbiot of infants (not their immune system) is not necessarily developed enough, and as such Clostridium botulinum can colonize their intestine (it strives in anaerobic environment) and then they can develop a special kind of botulism where the toxin is actually produced in their own body (as opposed to ingested, like in regular botulism).
It's not the only way a child can stumble upon the bacteria's spore though.
You state honey cannot cause botulism, and in the very next sentence explain how it can.
I think you're making a novel semantic difference, which is irrelevant to anyone puking their guts out from botulism.
I for one found the technical difference interesting
I remember having small kids we took this very seriously. I always wondered if this was just another overprotective order, or could really be an issue.
https://parentdata.org/honey-botulism-babies/
> 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.
I don’t think these probabilities are correct. Every parent is told not to feed their under 1 year olds honey, many times.
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.
It is correct. They are considering the most extreme case; in the most extreme case, no non-botulism-infected infants eat honey, and honey was the cause of botulism for those 20 infants.
If that is so, then completely removing honey exposure for infants would mean that 80 rather than 100 infants get botulism poisoning.
So the new probability of contracting botulism is (80 / 100) * (old probability), and (80 / 100) * (1 / 40000) = 1 / 50000.
There are no errors in the calculation, but it's wrong anyways because it calculates the answer to the wrong question. "At best" suggests this is the largest possible effect, but it is the smallest possible. To get an upper bound estimate on the usefulness of avoiding honey, you would need to know how many parents of 1-year-olds are avoiding honey.
Thanks! You said that much better than I did.
Feeding honey to newborn babies is a common practice in India. Sometimes it's their first ever food.
Yeah, and their infant mortality is on par with Sub-Saharan Africa.
"The second most common prelacteal feed is honey, a delicious natural sweetener. Numerous studies [29,30] have shown that the ingestion of honey under one year of age is linked with infant botulism, a disease that results in a blockade of voluntary motor and autonomic functions. Apart from this, other prelacteal feeds get contaminated due to unhygienic environment, especially in rural India and in urban slums, resulting in infantile diarrhea. Thus, a wide range of prelacteal feeds and the introduction of early supplements result in recurrent diarrhea with multiple illness finally ending lives because of inaccessibility and unaffordibility of treatment and delayed or inappropriate care seeking behavior."
Rohini Ghosh - Child mortality in India: a complex situation (https://doi.org/10.1007/s12519-012-0331-y)
The paper lists a bunch of other traditional practices that have deleterious effects on the infants' health, such as putting unsanitary herbal concoctions on the babies navel while it's still healing, etc.
> result in recurrent diarrhea
This mind-blowing statistic stays in my head:
"Diarrhoea is a leading killer of children, accounting for approximately 9 per cent of all deaths among children under age 5 worldwide in 2021. This translates to over 1,200 young children dying each day" - https://data.unicef.org/topic/child-health/diarrhoeal-diseas...
Almost one per minute.
We waited until our kid was four, just to be safe, but it's was also honey from our own bees, so I somehow felt it less safe.
Kid went full Winnie-the-Pooh on the jar.
"OK, sister bees, now remember: this season we'll be feeding the hu-man's child, so wipe your feet before entering the hive, and if you feel the sniffles coming on, Don't Make Honey!"
It's more about the below minimum wage people harvesting, bottling for transport, transporting, then bottling for sale than the bees themselves. More intermediate steps to introduce contamination and more potentially contaminated sources all mixed together.
> Every parent is told not to feed their under 1 year olds honey, many times.
Huh, I think this might be my first time hearing it.
I'm not sure that number is meaningful without knowing how many parents are giving their infants honey. Granted I'm in a high-income, high-education area, but at least in my bubble, "don't give babies honey" seems to be common knowledge, so it's possible there are relatively few instances and a high percentage result in complications.
I think the rate was similar before we told parents not to give their infants honey. So we sort of have an A/B comparison.
> Some people have pointed out that botulism cases haven’t fallen over time despite parents being told not to give kids honey.
Whole food crunchy Instagram grifters push that infants should eat honey
Though tbh do people really eat that much honey? I only have some in my kitchen to have with tea when I have a cold. Other then that I almost never use it.
Oh man buttered toast with honey... English muffins... But most controversially, and most deliciously, it dresses up a pizza something lovely...
For me the shift happened when I stopped thinking of it as a sweetener for liquids and started thinking about it as a condiment to deploy conservatively but frequently.
Hot honey on pizza is the BEST
The United States is the second largest honey consumer behind China according to the latest data available from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in 2019. In 2021, consumption increased 8 percent from the previous year. Between 1991 to 2021, the average rate of growth is 10.7 million pounds per year. This translates to about 1.9 pounds per capita of honey consumption in 2021 compared with 1.2 pounds per capita in the early 1990s.
Breakfast buns go well with honey. Often switched up with jam every few days. Also pancakes and waffles are great with honey from time to time when I'm tired of maple syrup. Jam works too.
Yes. I literally collect different honey (including from my own hives) and my love of it is very strong.
And no, I don’t have diabetes yet. I’m not insane about it, but I do have it frequently.
(Diabetes isn't caused by sugar intake.)
Not directly, no. But indirectly, by increasing weight gain and eventual metabolic syndrome, if eaten in excess… which was my point :)
Type 1 isn't caused by any of this stuff. Type 2 is caused by excess body fat -- consuming too many calories in total over a long period of time. It doesn't matter what the composition of those calories is. You can eat mostly sugar, at maintenance levels, and never be at risk for T2D.
No honey with greek yoghurt?
A truncated version of Bayes used here:
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!
When my kid was under one year old, we were especially careful about this we didn’t let her have even a tiny bit of honey. It really drove home the idea that everything has two sides. Honey can sit on a shelf for years without spoiling, but it can still be dangerous for the most vulnerable. It’s a reminder that just because something is natural and long lasting doesn’t mean it’s safe for everyone.
It's one of those things where honey is both a wonder of nature and a reminder that biology doesn’t always play nice with everyone
Americans/people on the internet worry far far far too much about botulism.
same with immunocompromised folks, though all that only applies to raw honey; pasteurized honey is more common in grocery stores and totally safe
I would not expect this to make a difference as pasteurization does not inactivate Clostridium endospores.
In Finland honey is rarely pasteurized. It is seen as a quality defect if honey is heated after extraction from the hive. Heating is thought to destroy some of the beneficial compounds in honey.
Similarly one should not put honey to too hot tea if one wants the benefits instead of just sugar.
Pasteurization would also destroy the delicate honey taste. It takes almost nothing to do that, and heating honey above about 40 C even for 30 seconds will kill any honeyness and all you have left is the sweet.
I'll bet only the imported Chinese honey is pasteurized on the supermarket shelf. Most of that goes to industrial use anyway.
Spores of Clostridium botulinum require temperatures way above boiling point to destroy. Pasteurization doesn't do anything to them.
It's pasteurised to stop you from making mead, not because it does anything to Clostridium spores.
Pasteurization doesn't in any way prevent honey from remaining fermentable.
OK. So?
So your claim is refuted
The pasteurisation is not done to destroy yeast?
I doubt it, but even if that were the case it would not support your earlier claim. When fermenting things you will generally intentionally introduce a very small quantity of a carefully controlled culture to the bulk media. Which is to say, you would almost certainly have your own yeast culture at home that you would inoculate the mead-to-be with. Maintaining a sourdough start is an example of this practice.
If you want to start your own culture from scratch there are established practices for culturing "wild" yeast from the environment.
It's absolutely why its done, because people would otherwise inadvertently initiate fermentation with it.
Not seeing this and instead going for 'hehe my little dude, pasteurisation doesn't destroy the sugar, you can still add yeast and ferment it' doesn't come across as particularly impressive from my perspective.
> pasteurisation doesn't destroy the sugar
I never said that? It's well known that heat alters honey.
Obviously the purpose of pasteurization is either preservation or food safety (but I repeat myself) as opposed to preventing people from making mead. I claim no particular knowledge of which specific microorganisms are primarily responsible for the spoilage that might otherwise occur, nor the precise consequences of such spoilage.
This story can be summarized as "Low water activity and low pH keep honey fresh permanently." The other 14 paragraphs are just filler. Moreover, even that summary is factually incorrect; low water activity and low pH don't come close to explaining honey's astounding shelf life, which amounts to centuries in many cases.
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.
It'd be fascinating if something like methylglyoxal was responsible, but I doubt it. Molasses also has an extremely long shelf life, and it doesn't have any of honey's exotic constituents. I would bet it mostly comes down to water content and pH (and a sturdy, sealed container.)
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.
Can you make molasses bandages to speed wound healing, though? Honey really seems to have antimicrobial properties that go way beyond just low water activity and low pH, and in particular the peroxide production seems to be important.
It does seem plausible that some wines might last longer than honey.
After doing some more reading, I think you might be right. I've been looking at various sugary solutions such as molasses and it seems that it's not uncommon for them to be sold with mold inhibitors such as propanoic acid. I suspect the hydrogen peroxide might play a role, but it's not very stable, I wonder how long it lasts in the 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
Oh, I should have mentioned that (according to, IIRC, the children's book cited in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44495658) some glucose oxidase remains in the honey, and when enough water gets into the honey for it to become active, it produces more hydrogen peroxide at that point. So the peroxide itself doesn't have to remain stable for centuries.
I didn't know that about molasses! It wouldn't be surprising actually if bees were synthesizing specifically propanoate to add to the honey and that nobody had noticed yet. But there are probably other molecules that would work at lower doses that they might use instead.
Thank you both for an illuminating thread. Comments were concise, curious, and dense with information. Most notably, there was respectful disagreement and a levelheaded exchange of perspective.
Thank you! I try, but often I fail.
Are you sure this isn’t just the Gell-Mann effect? It sounds like you’re probably better informed about this than the typical person and might be expecting a lot more detail than a newspaper would be endeavoring to try to convey.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
Isn’t the entire point of the Gell Man amnesia effect that all news is low quality, you just only realize it for topics you know a lot about?
And OP evidently knows a lot about honey :)
Sure although I interpret it a little bit differently. All news is low quality but raises the overall bar of ignorance for people not familiar with the topic. So experts get no value from them on topics they are familiar while improving their level of baseline ignorance on topics they aren't.
I think reading this article could result in acquiring the misconception that honey stays fresh for centuries only because it has low water activity and low pH, worsening your level of baseline ignorance and leading you to potentially significant false conclusions; for example, the conclusion that honey bandages are useless or harmful. I think that's the usual problem that Gell–Mann amnesia conceals: news that is so low quality that it actively makes you stupider when you read it.
I had a vague memory that it had some kind of antibacterial properties, but no, I don't know a lot about honey; I just went and looked it up in Wikipedia.
I think the point is that the article is conveying too much of the wrong kind of details.
vlovich123 may be correct that I am giving the BBC too much credit in general. But I don't think I'm especially well-informed; I'd never heard of methylglyoxal before looking this up in Wikipedia.
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.
>I think it's fine to have lots of the wrong kind of details, but it's not fine to omit the right ones.
Who decides which are "wrong" and which are "right?"
The title of the article, "The chemical secrets that help keep honey fresh for so long," seems like a good criterion in this case.
"which amounts to centuries in many cases."
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...
I edited "millennia" into "centuries" in my comment above because the Wikipedia article claimed those claims didn't pan out:
> (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.
I'm so sorry but I can't help myself: 01975 is the dialling code for somewhere in Aberdeenshire!
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.
Ha, I had no idea about Aberdeenshire!
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.
> [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.
The Gwern link is just a PDF copy of an article from a 1975 issue of "Bee World": https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0005772X.1975.11... I can't speak to the journal's rigor in the 1970s, but they seem like a more reliable source than any other mentioned in this discussion.
Also, peer review is almost unrelated to rigor. Plenty of sloppy crap gets peer reviewed, and, for example, none of Einstein's annus mirabilis papers did.
> I'm going to call out the WP article as being factually wanting on that point.
No, it's not. What is factually wanting is any case of an actual tomb honey.
When I looked into it, every single supposed tomb honey, not already debunked by Leek, deadends in a useless citation which is 'someone somewhere once found tomb honey trust me bro'. Clearly made-up. They don't exist.
The burden of proof is on anyone who still believes in tomb honey to name a single specific verified instance, with time and place and tomb, and someone actually witnessing it and analyzing or eating it and proving it's honey, rather than several other possible residues like the Leek examples. Otherwise, it's just more telephone game nonsense.
(Note: the Leek PDF is unfortunately not working right now, because Hetzner has temporarily disabled my account over torrenting alerts.)
Hi there, You mentioned us briefly. If you haven't already contacted us about getting your account unlocked, you can find some more info about how to do it here: https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/dedicated-server/troubleshoot... --Katie (Hetzner)
Since you evidently haven't looked up the account of the person you're replying to, whose website is linked in his profile, this is spam. Spam is not what this site is for.
Thank you very much! Maybe a real case will come to light one day, but "almost certainly don't exist" seems like a good default until then.
Condolences about the censorship.
gwern FTW!
I don't see why anything other than low water and pH are necessary. Stories about ultra long lasting honey come from the desert, which will dessicate it further.
(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.
If you can get an aqueous solution of solids to completely crystallize (and sucrose does like to crystallize), it won't support microorganisms, but if it doesn't crystallize, it will have a critical "deliquescence relative humidity". When the relative humidity of the air is above the DRH†, the solution absorbs water from the air rather than giving up water to the air, and if there are crystals in it, they tend to shrink instead of growing.
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.
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† 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.
Recently went through first aid training and the instructor claimed putting honey on wounds would help them heal faster.
(Sample size 1) I tried it on myself and a wound that was stubborn about healing was better very quickly.
I had a planter wart surgically removed which they packed with Manuka honey and because it's a deep open wound it needs to heal from the inside. I changed the dressing and repacked it every few days for weeks and the wound was absolutely pristine ever time.
I live in the tropics where people die because due to infection which makes it even more interesting that they use honey.
plantar wart. all wart removals should heal pristinely, warts are on only the outermost layers of skin above where scarring occurs.
Surgical wart removal can involve some pretty deep incisions and month long recovery. Scars aren't unheard of as I understand it
(And it can be futile ! The wart can easily come back)
The wound was about 6mm deep on my heel and took months to heal properly. And yes I did check those homophones :-)
And thanks for the other homophone correction!
Pristine implies not only a lack of scarring, but no infection during the healing process.
Medical grade honey: https://www.uclahealth.org/news/article/medical-grade-honey-...
Which is ironically just honey that is filtered to remove plant pollen (a potential antigen), AFAIK.
I've had great success with using propolis[0] on burns and wounds. Definitely anecdotal but the ones I've used it on have definitely healed faster.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propolis
https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...
>Honey in wound healing: An updated review
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8496555/
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Really high sugar concentrations will pop the cells of any simple organisms.
No, low. High sugar concentrations mean low water activity, which osmotically pumps water out of cells, not into them, so they shrivel rather than popping.
Thanks.
Sure!
I like to imagine it as humans stranded in a strange land where all the geography is dry cake. And only dry cake.
I definitely have been in some countries where their desserts felt from a strange land indeed: everything dried :'(. I need moist.
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Pretty wild how bees basically invented a biochemical preservation system thousands of years before we had food science labs
Millions of years!
The fact that they navigate by memorising visual landmarks like trees, buildings, and flowers to recognise familiar routes is unbelievable
I think the most interesting thing about them is that they can communicate the location of flowers to other bees.
Amazing what well trained small neural networks can achieve.
Associative learning
The real secret is osmotic pressure.
I used to keep a few bee hives until I started getting increasingly severe reactions to bee stings, so reluctantly quit before I had an anaphylactic reaction.
Utterly fascinating and wonderful hobby and contributes towards the environment, while having a delicious outcome. Could not recommend enough!
I’d be curious to see if similar principles could be applied to non food preservation. Nature’s solutions often scale better than synthetic ones, especially when stability over long timeframes is needed.
Honey's hydrogen peroxide production and hygroscopic properties have already inspired antimicrobial coatings for medical devices and water-resistant biomaterials for tissue engineering.
Imagine a honey-inspired environment for stabilizing sensitive compounds or preserving biological samples without refrigeration
That's what honey-preserved foods are: biological samples without refrigeration.
Osmotic pressure? Ok I'll read the article.
> Contrary to best practices in the medical community, LLMs 1) express stigma toward those with mental health conditions and 2) respond inappropriately to certain common (and critical) conditions in naturalistic therapy settings — e.g., LLMs encourage clients’ delusional thinking, likely due to their sycophancy. This occurs even with larger and newer LLMs,...
Isn't all this just a problem of how the system prompt is set?
Similarly, chocolate.
You can take honey that has crystalized and set it in sunlight to "melt" back into the gooey goodness, but you can't do that to chocolate that has that white powdery stuff on it.
Right. Once the undesirable crystals in chocolate have formed it has to be re-tempered to get the desirable ones to dominate. But it hasn't spoiled.
The white stuff is just fat or sugar blooming, so you can totally melt down chocolate and be good to go.
Let's see, set a jar of honey in sunlight, or get out your double boiler to melt down chocolate and be sure to get out the molds that I'm sure everyone has.
yeah, that's the same thing. roughly. but you'd be good to go to be sure
Is this you confidently asserting the opposite of what TFA says and what is known to be true about chocolate? Impressive.
A wise citizen once said:
It is telling how someone can think their idea is so novel, and rather than doing research go ahead and announce it like it is something new.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44503723
Bloom isn't spoilage.
Is it eatable though ?
ANytime I've had chocolate that has the white stuff I've binned it. Even if it isn't spoiled, doesn't it taste bad ?
White stuff is just either fat or sugar bloom, due to changes of temperature.
Not harmful. It's like the white "powder" on hard cheeses, which is just calcium crystalizing over time. Totally safe.
No. It doesn't taste bad, but the texture might not be as good.
Also, you can melt it and use it to make frosting, ganache or hot fudge sauce.
It's just fat.
I've often wondered about this - is sunlight really all that's needed?
Heat is needed, not sunlight.
You can zap it in the microwave for 10-15 seconds, but I always feel terribly guilty for some inexplicable reason.
If you're looking to have a reason.... That's probably going to over-heat the honey, which comes at a cost to flavor.
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.
reminder that there's a lot of fake honey that gets put on shelf out there! probably doesn't last as long either https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ej6WVP7cxXQ
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