352/365: National I Love Honey Day*

If you’re not fond of today’s sweet food, buzz off! December 18 is National I Love Honey Day.

And while I have nothing against honey, it’s not the holiday I wanted to celebrate. Today is also National Roast Suckling Pig Day. How fun would that have been?! There’s only one problem: try finding roast suckling pig on a dinner menu in Portland. I scoured Yelp for suggestions, but the handful of restaurants where it was listed all serve the dish seasonally, or as a special. Sadly, it wasn’t on any of the menus in town. We could have ordered a roast suckling pig from the butcher and cooked it ourselves, but the few leads I found indicated we could expect the smallest one to weigh between 40-50 lbs. and cost in the neighborhood of $130. Gulp. Sorry, but there is no way we can swing that! I’m just thankful there are other options on the calendar today.

So, honey. Wonderful product. As most people know, honey is produced by bees, who collect nectar from flowers and regurgitate it inside the honeycombs of their beehives. Unsavory though this sounds, honey has long been a valued human food source. Cave paintings indicate humans have been seeking out honey for at least 8000 years. Greeks and Romans believed it was a food fit for the gods, and in ancient Georgia, it was packed in tombs for an individual’s journey to the afterlife. Egyptians took things one step further and actually embalmed their dead with honey. Man alive, early humans must have had one hell of a sweet tooth to go to all this trouble collecting bee vomit.

To celebrate, we made tea after dinner, and drizzled some honey into it. Yum!

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