MMWS: Day 2 – Honey and Fruit

There are two things that I can’t quite decide about: fruit and honey.  Do they really count as sweeteners?  I mean, I can walk out in my yard, right now, and pick a handful of grapes.  On the way back to the house, I can stop off at one of the bee hives and tear out as much honey as I’d care to eat (assuming that I’ve donned my bee suit for this hypothetical little walk).

So, are those sweeteners or just sweet food?

Now, I can also buy any number of snacks that are “fruit juice sweetened.”  If fruit’s not really a sweetener, then those things don’t really have “added sweeteners,” right?

The answer to this little dilemma, I think, is the processing.  In either case, the added sweetener idea has to do with the concentration of sugars from their natural form.  “But honey’s not processed?  It’s super-sweet right out of the hive!  It’s not a sweetener!  QED!”  Oh, you think you’re so smart, imaginary counter-argument person, but let us do a little review of the sweet, delicious goodness that is honey.

HONEY 101:

Honey is, essentially, flower nectar, slurped up miniscule drop by miniscule drop by foraging worker bees, taken back to the hive, barfed up into the mouths of waiting workers, and spit into a cup wherein it is dried a bit and then capped off with waxy bee exudate. Along the way, secret bee sauce from their saliva mixes with the nectar to convert it into honey.

Somehow, it doesn’t sound quite so tempting in those terms.

But that’s how it works.  The foraging bees have two stomachs: one for their own personal “food digestion” use and one that exists as an internal bota bag for picking up and dropping off nectar on their (up to 3-mile) foraging trips.  Upon their return to the hive, they are met by worker bees that haven’t graduated to that last, great, fatal occupation of foraging bee.  They transfer the nectar to these workers– the house bees actually slurp it out, to be accurate– who swish it around for a while then deposit it into a cell of the comb.  The moisture level is then reduced to 17% by the bees fanning their wings over it, and finally, it’s capped.  Contrary to what you may have learned in Bee Movie:

• All worker bees are females.  The males do little more than eat, make a mess, and get in the way– oh, and mate with queens from other colonies.  Everything else, and I mean everything, is done by the females.  Allow me to interject here that this is not, in fact, an analog for anything in the human world.  So, Jerry Seinfeld’s character would actually have been acting appropriately in his lack of desire to do any useful work and instead hang out with a strange woman.
• All workers do all of the jobs.  They start out taking care of babies and the hive and graduate to foraging.  There is no job selection desk.  For that matter, there isn’t a factory.  Or cars.  You probably knew that.
• The queen is everyone’s mother.  One mom.  Tens of thousands of kids.  She “decides” their gender by fertilizing her egg or not.  Fertilized eggs are female; unfertilized are male.
• Workers can sting once.  Drones can not sting at all.  The queen can sting all she wants.  The worker’s stinger is barbed and rips out her guts when she uses it.  The drones stinger is also barbed but serves only as his sperm deposit unit (which, incidentally, also rips out his guts after use).  The queen’s stinger is not barbed, and she almost exclusively uses it to sting other queens developing in her hive.  She’s not into sharing.  You cannot repair a ripped out stinger with one of those plastic olive skewers.
• The smoke is not generally tobacco, nor does it make them all pass out.  The theory is that the smoke triggers an instinctual reaction (to a forest fire) that causes the workers to drop everything and start gorging themselves on honey in case the colony has to relocate in a hurry.  Similarly, the inside of the comb does not look like a New York apartment.  Again, you probably figured that out.
• Bees do not talk.  That I am aware of.

So, given that what the bees picked up at the plant source was mostly water and contained a mix of complex sugars, and what they eventually cap off is mostly fructose and glucose (thanks to their special sauce), I’d say that honey is not too different than high-fructose corn syrup in terms of its sweetenerness.  It’s very different in lots of other ways, but it’s essentially concentrated simple sugars with some other good stuff mixed in.

FRUIT:

This one gets tricky.  If I eat a fig off my tree, which I did tonight, I am getting sugar, to be sure.  But that sugar comes to me in non-processed proportions.  The sugars necessarily come with a heaping helping of fiber, some vitamins, a whole bunch of water, etc.  I would be hard-pressed to eat more than three of those things.

On the other hand, if I juice an apple (I have not tried juicing a fig), I get most of the sugar and none of the fiber.  Boil that down to use as a sweetener, as in so many “health” foods, and I’m just eating fructose, possibly with some traces of the original components of the fruit’s juice.  So, on one end of that chain, I see a perfectly natural food that is sweet.  On the other, I see pure sweetener.  It’s the middle ground that I have a little trouble categorizing.  Luckily, I don’t have to.  Or, rather, I can do so with impunity.  Thus, fruit is OK, and anything after that, isn’t.

I should point out, again, that this isn’t about damning sweeteners.  My interest is in our need to sweeten things.  How hard-wired is it?  Can I be happy just eating food with its natural sweetness, or do I now need to add additional sweetness to feel satisfied.  It also forces me to think about it with everything I eat.  It forces me to read every label and to consciously decide if I want to eat what they’ve added to whatever is ostensibly in that sack, box, bottle, or vacuum-packed pouch.

For, you see, this all boils down to packaged food.  I split hairs on honey and fruit, but the vast majority of these added sweeteners are already in anything I buy in a package.  By day two, I am coming to the realization that this becomes an easy mental exercise if I just eat actual food items from the outside of the grocery store.  Avocado?  OK.  Chunk of meat?  No added sugar.  Piece of broccoli?  No research necessary.

As for the packaged stuff, thus far, it’s a game of trading salt and fat for sugar.  I can eat smoked cheese, pistachios, and crackers.  Fat and salt, salt and fat, just salt.

Luckily, this isn’t some crazed effort to eliminate everything bad from my diet, or I’d be staring into a corner, munching sheets of cabbage all day.

I am beginning to see, at this early stage, the emergence of the superior me at the grocery store.  I examine other shoppers’ carts and think, smugly, ‘you chumps… you poor sweetener-addicted chumps…’.  Then I remember that about four days ago, I ate about half a pint of Ben and Jerry’s for dessert and, the next day, barely got home from  Trader Joe’s with any cookies left in the Druid Circles bag.