Food Safety, Fresh Corn, & Rosemary Honey

This weekend’s farmers market vibe was interesting and, again, a little unexpected.

It started with me noticing a woman making a steady bee-line toward my Backyard Bees table while cradling a bundle of fresh corn in her arms like a baby. I offered her a bag and suggested she put the corn down while she shopped. But she didn’t loosen her grip on that precious bundle even a bit. She looked at me, sighed with visible relief, and said she was just so incredibly grateful to find “safe food.”

As the day went on, my honey table unexpectedly turned into a stress-relief station for parasite-wary shoppers. The continued headlines about cyclosporiasis have clearly frightened people. One customer told me they hadn’t risked eating a salad in weeks. The thread continued through the morning, with several people repeating variations of the same thought:

“This market is the only place I feel safe getting my vegetables right now.”

Of all the conversations I expected to have behind the Backyard Bees table on the final day of National Farmers Market Week, cyclosporiasis wasn’t one of them.

As a registered dietitian and college professor, I taught entire courses on food safety.

But I thought I had left that behind when I started dealing with honey.

When You Add Something to Honey

While other foods worry about expiration dates, a jar of pure honey is naturally shelf stable. Its high sugar content, low water activity and natural acidity make it difficult for most microorganisms to grow.

But ironically, this week’s Backyard Bees Honey Month activity was all about tasting and learning how to make rosemary-infused honey. And once you start adding things to honey, food safety is definitely on the table.

There is a difference between rosemary honey and rosemary-infused honey. True rosemary honey starts with the bees, who collect nectar from rosemary flowers and transform it into honey. Producing it requires enough rosemary blooming in one area for the bees to forage predominantly on those flowers—which isn’t something we’re likely to find here on Long Island.

Rosemary-infused honey gives us another way to capture that flavor. We take our local raw honey and add rosemary ourselves.

And that’s where things get interesting from a food-safety perspective.

Fresh herbs contain water. Adding that water changes the environment that makes plain honey so shelf stable. So while infusing honey with herbs is remarkably simple, it’s also worth understanding how to do it safely.

For demonstration purposes, I used fresh, washed and wilted rosemary from my garden. But my take-home message was a little different.

If you want to experiment with infused honey at home, start with fully dried herbs rather than fresh ones. Use clean, completely dry jars and utensils, and remember that adding any other ingredients to honey changes the food you started with.

Tasting and Learning Together

More irony came with each demonstration. The star of the day was supposed to be rosemary, featured in my rosemary-infused honey.

Not everyone likes rosemary.

So the tasting part of “learn and taste”? Not everything I thought it would be.

But then, farmers market magic started. The rosemary sparked new ideas.

“Can I use mint?”

“What about lemon thyme?”

“I bet lavender would be divine!”

Suddenly, a very simple two-ingredient recipe that may not have been the superstar I thought it would be had done something better: it got people thinking about flavors they actually liked.

And I still got to talk about why I love rosemary-infused honey.

Rosemary-infused honey adds depth of flavor to both sweet and savory dishes. One of my favorite ways to use it is drizzled over roasted vegetables—the earthy sweetness of roasted carrots is a perfect pairing. You can also mix it into whipped ricotta cheese and spread it over toasted sourdough bread for an elegant but easy appetizer. Or, for something even simpler, stir a spoonful into a cup of hot or iced tea for an herbal zing.

The variations are endless, and infused honey lets you control the end result.

Farmers Market Magic Continues

Something else happened that day.

I bought a plant from Two Brothers Farm.

D’Ante called it Mexican mint. Jayson called it Cuban oregano.

I called it intriguing and placed it on my table for safekeeping.

Then the questions started.

“What is that?”

“Where did you get it?”

“Is it a perennial?”

“Do bees like it?”

Then came the stories.

“That’s Caribbean thyme. We use it in stews.”

“I make tea with that. I don’t know what it’s called, but it’s delicious.”

“I keep this plant in my kitchen in the sun all winter, and then I take cuttings to put outside in the spring.”

“I think it’s called French thyme.”

“That is NOT thyme,” said two customers at once.

Nobody had all the answers. And that was okay.

By the end of the day, at least five of my customers were planning to visit Two Brothers Farm the following week to get their own plant.

Yapping Away

I like to talk with people. I won’t deny it.

But I like to listen, learn and remember things from the farmers market as well.

So somewhere near the end of the market, Sarah patiently waited for me to finish talking about rosemary—another “not-a-rosemary” fan—and said, “I find it oddly entertaining to listen to you yap.”

I laughed out loud…and am chuckling as I type this.

Maybe Sarah was onto something.

Because there was a lot of yapping going on that day.

About a mysterious plant.
About rosemary.
About honey.
About foodborne illness.
About how our food is grown, made and used.

And about fresh corn from a farmer you know, grown close to home, carried against your chest like something precious.

Nobody had all the answers. But we could talk to each other. We could taste. We could ask. We could learn.

On the last day of National Farmers Market Week, that felt like a pretty good reminder that safe food is something worth being grateful for.

Looking Ahead

Next Saturday, August 15, we’ll celebrate National Honey Bee Day at the farmers market.

Stop by the Backyard Bees table to Ask a Beekeeper, grab a honey stick, and enter to win a special Honey Bee Day giveaway.

And while I won’t be bringing live bees to the market, I’m working on another way to give you a feel for what happens inside a hive.

How heavy is a box full of honey?

Come find out.

Continue Exploring

A Real Farmers Market at Eisenhower Park what makes the farmers market at Eisenhower park so special to me; find links to all the market reports here

National Farmers Market Begins last week’s market report