Food4 steps
Food that won't die
A rabbit hole is a short chain of facts where each one hands you to the next. Start at the top and see where it leaves you.
- Honey doesn't spoil. Chemistry won't allow it.
Honey is one of the only foods that essentially cannot spoil. At around 17% water it is dry enough to pull moisture out of any microbe that lands in it, and at roughly pH 3.9 it…
That shelf life is no accident — the bees build it in…
- Bees engineer honey's shelf life, enzyme included.
Honey keeps because bees manufacture it that way. They fan nectar with their wings until its water content drops from as high as 80% to under about 18%, and they add an enzyme…
Which is why honey never really left the hospital…
- Hospitals still put honey on wounds. It works.
Honey has been used on wounds since ancient Egypt, and it never fully left medicine: sterilised, medical-grade honey is used in modern hospitals on burns and stubborn ulcers. In…
And honey isn't the only food the deep past kept fresh…
- Irish bogs keep coughing up ancient, edible butter.
Peat bogs in Ireland and Scotland keep yielding buried lumps of 'bog butter', some of them thousands of years old. Cold, acidic and nearly oxygen-free, a bog is a natural…