Thursday, October 11, 2012

Nature imitates art; or funny honey

Yellow/orange is so last year.

You've probably seen the pictures of the French blue and green honey produced when bees dumpster-dived M&M residue at a factory that reprocesses waste from a Mars chocolate factory. If these were clean candies and dyes that might be fine, but this is undefined waste and who knows why any particular batch was chucked. So the beekeepers can't sell the honey.

Different pollens give slightly different flavors, though it looks as though, contrary to popular myth, bees don't make intoxicating marijuana honey. Apparently the pollen doesn't have any THC, and bees allegedly don't pollinate it anyhow.

If the truth be known, I can't always easily distinguish one variety of honey from another. The note of sugar tends to overwhelm my palate. (Not that that's a bad thing...) There are subtle differences, but perhaps the fact that I don't have words or images for them makes it harder to recognize them and file them in memory.

But I think I could tell blue from red.

3 comments:

Texan99 said...

I like honey, and I can tell one from another if I taste them in quite succession. But I too would have difficulty explaining or remembering the difference.

james said...

But I gather one can be trained to do it. Wine tasters use a risible vocabulary, but it seems to work for them.

Texan99 said...

I haven't got much of a palate -- can't tell one beer from another, for instance. But I can see that learning words for specific flavors would help me remember and distinguish them.