Sugar, pie, honey-punch

It’s like the other vegetables aren’t even trying.

I find it more than interesting that in the colder European regions, where potatoes thrive, vodka evolved.

Where grain grew well, whisky evolved; rice to sake; sugar molasses to rum; mescal and pulque from the agave plant; and lillypillies into whatever the hell it was I conjured up in Year 10 that I then vomited on to my galoshes and short pants.

Hardly surprising with any of these; and as one of my dinner party conversations usually starts: do you know what the first alcoholic drink was?

I’ll cut to the chase, given that with me, guests start clearing plates and hosts ask, “Horlicks anyone?” while they wind their clocks, all while I drone on.

The answer is mead.

Picture the fallen tree with an internal beehive, filled with rain and a Neanderthal with cupped hand, singing Khe Sanh off-key and possibly posting something on socials they’d regret by morning.

When I was a backyard beekeeper, I once brewed the most cracker mead imaginable that turned heads and palates and made me long for more.

I could never repeat the quality on the next two batches so gave up.

I later taught beekeeping to some rowdy Year 8s that same year, and the college hives had not been touched for 10 years so we filled a 50-gallon plastic drum with shards of old honey-filled comb that had glued the hive lids on, and then we left the drum outside where it filled with rain.

It was a few weeks before we returned.

As we emptied the liquid out, one boy took a taste of this ‘honey-punch’ and before long we were all cupping hands and it was becoming a recess-o’clock swill before I realised I was risking possibly the shortest teaching career in history.

I kicked the drum over and swore them all to secrecy as they staggered up to the campus, some arm-in-arm, lots of “no, I really do love you” and some inappropriate touching.

The paleo diet, veganism, the raw meat thing and even those who drink raw milk deserve scrutiny because they are as encumbering on us as is refined sugar, white bread, white rice, processed food and spitting in the air and catching it again in one’s mouth (even if it is a warm meal).

I once tried a vegan diet, and I confess I managed to eat only two vegans before police caught up with me (I got a warning on the proviso I apologised and did a behaviour course).

Vitamin supplements don’t cut it (deficiencies aside, of course), with Erikka Loftfield et al. only this June publishing from a 20-year study involving 390,000 people that life is not extended by this gimmick.

I believe hers is the second mega-study to find this, and given that the word ‘vitamin’ comes from ‘vital amine’ then I also believe the Poms have got the pronunciation quite wrong.

Thankfully in all of this dietary debate, balance is often sought (but how vegans get an inflamed indignity gland is beyond me) and farming has evolved alongside us to feed us and add nutrition where it counts; so let’s use it.

Most importantly, we are advised by our GPs that if we continue with a well-balanced diet (allergies aside) then we can’t go wrong; find me a GP who doesn’t.

But raw milk I won’t mess with — don’t. Louis Pasteur was no mug so let’s not waste his science: a flora of bacteria containing the usual suspects gives you a one-in-a-thousand chance of getting ill, but by crikey, you will sure know it if you hit the odds.

Let the French do what they want with raw dairy — I mean, a quarter of them smoke, after all (in fact, when Hitler asked: “Is Paris burning?”, von Choltitz probably had to check twice).

Next week: Andy Wilson gets deeper into the evolution of all this nonsense.