Mid-Week Mini: Honey Lasts Forever

In this week’s Mid-Week Mini Episode, we talk how honey lasts forever.

There’s a food in your kitchen right now that, if you store it correctly, could theoretically still be edible thousands of years after you’re gone.

Honey.

And I don’t mean that honey has a really long shelf life. I mean properly sealed honey can essentially last indefinitely.

Archaeologists have found ancient honey preserved in containers thousands of years old, including honey placed in Egyptian tombs. And you’ll sometimes hear the story told as, “They opened the tomb, tasted the honey, and it was still perfectly good.” That part is harder to verify, but the science behind the larger claim is real: honey stored under the right conditions is remarkably resistant to spoiling.

And the reason is basically that honey is a terrible place to live.

Not for us. We love it. But if you’re a bacterium or some other microorganism trying to set up shop, honey is a nightmare.

Honey contains very little available water, and all that sugar actually pulls water away from microorganisms through osmosis. Honey is also acidic, usually with a pH somewhere around 3 to 4.5. And when bees make honey, an enzyme they add called glucose oxidase helps produce small amounts of hydrogen peroxide.

So honey is basically a sugary little security system with several different ways of keeping microbes out.

And humans figured out that honey was useful long before we understood any of that chemistry.

Ancient Egyptian medical texts describe honey being used in wound dressings. One recipe combined honey with grease and lint or plant fiber and put it directly on wounds. Ancient medical traditions in Greece, India and other parts of the world also incorporated honey into treatments, particularly for wounds and burns.

Which sounds like the kind of ancient medicine where you expect the next ingredient to be powdered lizard and a prayer to the moon god. But honey is different, because versions of this idea are still used today. Medical-grade honey is actually used in some modern wound dressings because of its antimicrobial properties and the environment it creates around a wound.

Honey was valuable for other reasons, too. Before refined sugar became cheap and widely available, it was one of humanity’s major concentrated sources of sweetness. We have evidence of humans collecting bee products going back thousands of years, and ancient Egyptians even left honey in tombs as offerings for the dead.

So imagine putting a jar of honey in a tomb because you want someone to have something sweet in the afterlife — and accidentally choosing one of the few foods with a legitimate chance of still being recognizable thousands of years later.

There is one catch. Honey’s immortality depends on keeping moisture out. Leave it exposed to enough water and microorganisms can eventually take over. And if your honey turns cloudy and crystallizes into something that looks like you should probably throw it away, that doesn’t necessarily mean it has spoiled. Crystallization is a normal physical change and can often be reversed simply by gently warming the container. One great way is just place your little bear-shaped honey container into a pot of hot water.

So somewhere in your pantry may be a food that could conceivably outlast your house, your city, your country and pretty much every expiration date you’ve ever ignored.

And the bees figured out how to make it before humans figured out how to write down a recipe.

The Internet Says it’s True.