ANCESTRAL EATING: Honey

Does Weston Price talk about honey? And if he doesn't, does that mean our ancestors didn't eat it?

Welcome back, friends, to another instalment of ANCESTRAL EATING. It’s been a while, but I’ve been thinking about honey, probably because I’ve been eating a lot of it. Anyway, here’s a piece about the consumption of honey by small-scale “traditional” societies.

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Does Weston Price talk about honey in his book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration?

I wasn’t actually sure, so I went back and had a look.

As it turns out, there’s just a single reference to honey in the whole book, towards the end of chapter 16, “Primitive Control of Dental Caries.” Here’s what Price says:

The excess of calories over body building minerals is exceedingly high in sweets of various kinds regardless of their special branding and the methods of manufacture and storage. There is very little of the body building minerals in maple syrup, cane syrup from sugar or honey. They can all defeat an otherwise efficient dietary. The problem is not so simple as merely cutting down or eliminating sugars and white flour though this is exceedingly important. It is also necessary that adequate mineral and vitamin carrying foods be made available. It is also necessary to realize that many of our important foods for providing vitamins are very low in body building material. For example, one would have to eat nearly a bushel of apples a day or half a bushel of oranges to obtain a liberal factor of safety for providing phosphorus; similarly one would be required to eat nine and one half pounds of carrots or eleven pounds of beets each day to get enough phosphorus for a liberal factor of safety, while this quantity would be provided in one pound of lentils or beans, wheat or oats. I have discussed elsewhere the availability of phosphorus depending upon its chemical form. Since the calories largely determine the satisfying of the appetite and since under ordinary circumstances we stop when we have obtained about two thousand to twenty-five hundred very little of the highly sweetened fruits defeats our nutritional program. We would have to consume daily the contents of thirty-two one pound jars of marmalade, jellies or jams to provide a two gram intake of phosphorus. This quantity would provide 32,500 calories; an amount impossible for the system to take care of.

So Price only mentions honey in the context of sweet foods that provide insufficient nutrition by comparison with “body building” foods, by which he means nutrient-dense animal foods like liver and organ meat and raw dairy.

There’s no mention of honey in the diets of the small-scale societies whose people Price found to be in perfect health, presumably because they either didn’t eat it or because Price didn’t consider their consumption of it to be important. In some cases, like that of the Inuit, we can be pretty sure they didn’t eat honey, but in others—the high alpine Swiss of the Loetschental Valley, or African pastoralists like the Nuer and Maasai—it’s possible or even probably that they did.

Certainly, if we’re talking about our ancestors more generally, we have every reason to believe they did eat honey. In certain situations or contexts, they might actually have relied upon it heavily.

I found a very interesting paper from 2011 on the role of honey in human evolution. It’s free to read if you want to read it in full (click here), but I thought I’d discuss what it says, in summary, for the rest of this essay.

As the paper notes, honey is “one of the most energy-dense foods in nature,” and yet it has received little attention in reconstructions of the diets of early hominins and our more recent ancestors.

The nutritional content of honey alone is reason to believe our ancestors would have eaten it if it was available. Although modern commercially produced (i.e. heated and filtered) honey is more or less entirely made up of carbohydrates, wild honey actually contains high-quality protein and fat in the form of bee larvae. Wild honey is also very rich in vitamins, minerals and enzymes. We’re clearly talking about a complete food—a nutrient-dense food.

So what does the actual evidence for honey consumption by our ancestors look like?