Manuka Honey.

Although it is three months since I took this photograph, I remember it as though it was yesterday though, with my memory being what it is, my recollections are probably deeply flawed. There had been a recent posting on the Blipfoto Friends page on Facebook about a Blipper being ejected from a supermarket for taking photographs of the goods on offer possibly, at least in part, because they were ostentatiously wielding a Nikon. Now I regularly use a compact if I wish to take a note of something, it’s so much easier than pen and paper. However, on this occasion it was my phone and I was taking a significant amount of care over the exposure and composition, even to the extent of re-arranging the goods, when what the PA system refers to as a “colleague” saw me and appeared to be taking an interest; I beat a retreat and a little later stopped to check the images. Since I wasn’t satisfied, I returned to the scene of my crime to improve on my previous effort only to realise that I was being stalked by said colleague. If my photo is not up to scratch, it's her fault.
 
Any road up, as they say in the Midlands, I was interested in two anomalies, the first was the good Scottish heather honey (a premium product) being sold under the name of an English manufacturer, just about as far away from the Scottish heather moors as is possible without crossing the sea. I know a lot of Scottish beekeepers, both amateurs like myself, and professionals who run upwards of a hundred colonies including one who has more than a thousand. They are all fiercely proud of their produce and ensure that their names are conspicuously placed on the jar labels.
 
The second anomaly is the Manuka honey. Now I have no issues with individual New Zealanders but, I’m not happy with some of the marketing ploys used by that county’s farming community. First it was the sheep; here in Britain, we have excellent conditions for producing lamb and mutton and do produce first class meat; yet, our supermarkets are persuaded to sell an inferior product that has travelled half way around the globe in preference to the local Welsh and Scottish equivalents.
Tea Tree honey, apparently (my Scottish inclination means I’m not prepared to spend fourteen pounds on three quarters of a pound of honey when my own retails at six pounds a pound) tastes so bad it is unmarketable. The New Zealand ploy was to put the honey through a barrage of tests to prove that it had some apparently magical medicinal powers; they rebranded it as Manuka honey, charged an exorbitant price for it and it is now a popular commodity that sells around the world. It really does have the wonderful properties claimed, the Egyptians knew of them four thousand years ago and so ensured that Tutankhamun had a plentiful supply of their local honey to take with him into the afterlife and, for many years now, persistent ulcerated wounds have been treated with honey impregnated dressings in British hospitals.
A couple of years ago, a Portobello beefarmer put his honey through a similar set of tests to those used New Zealand and, lo and behold, those tests yielded similar results; however, nothing special was claimed in this case, it’s just the normal properties of the stuff and those results were expected. Now it is true that honey contains a few interesting enzymes that show mildly antiseptic benefits, but the main ingredients of honey are sugars, which exert osmotic pressures on living tissues and prevent bacteria and similar microscopic life forms from functioning, hence the reason why  jam only deteriorates very slowly when it is stored correctly. Shortly before the Portobello tests, I was at a lecture on the medicinal uses of honey and asked the speaker if a simple sucrose solution would work as well as honey; his response was that, while no research had been done, it was highly likely that it would.
 

Moving slightly off topic, many of you will be aware that I am keen on statistics, one that I heard recently is that twice as much Manuka honey is sold as is produced; but as I have already said, there is nothing exceptional about that particular brand – the same is true of all honeys.