Home is Where the Honey Is
By Isabel Tadmiri ‘21, Keystone Foundation Fellow 2022-2024
Did you know that it takes 12 bees their entire lifetime to make one teaspoon of honey? I found this out recently. And maybe it’s because I imagined bees buzzing around for their whole lives together, or because I heard about Madurai fellow Phoebe’s new bottle full of honey shattering! Maybe it is because it seems like there is no end to my learning about new layers of the hard beautiful work behind drops of honey. Or maybe (as my co-fellow Reet makes fun of me lovingly and in familiar Obie fashion), it’s because my horoscope sign is Cancer—but when I learned about the 12 bees, I teared up.
Today marks exactly 6 months of me having moved to India, 4 months of living in Kotagiri, The Nilgiris. When you come visit us here in Kotagiri, at over 6,000 ft elevation in the Blue Mountains of Tamil Nadu, through the misty fog you will see that Keystone’s campus hosts a diverse ecosystem: of flora, of fauna, and of the types of work that grow in the midst of them.
I have spent most of these first four months in this Keystone ecosystem working with Last Forest, a group that supports the traditional livelihoods of forest-based Indigenous communities of the Nilgiris. Honey hunting (or ‘harvesting’) is an example of a traditional way Indigenous communities have sustained themselves for generations here in the forests. Kurumba honey hunters scale cliffs hundreds of feet high, with rope ladders made from forest vines, up to the wild hives of the lethal and giant Apis dorsata honeybees. In following sacred tradition, the bees, the hives, and the honey hunters remain unharmed and honey is collected. Keystone was founded in 1993 to work with the Nilgiris hunter gatherers, forest farmers, and these honey hunters. Although Keystone’s work now spans a wide range of socio-ecological sustainability interventions in multiple Indian states and fields, the Last Forest group continues this original work.
HONEY IS MAGIC
Last month, my colleague Miller was kind enough to bring me along with him on a honey trip. We were standing in the middle of the forest, and as Miller made bird calls I witnessed a sea of hives—some darkly colored and some glistening in the sun—seemingly appear to us in the tree tops. When I talk with my colleagues—whether it’s Mathew, Miller, Mala, or Madhu (lots of M names on our team!)—evidence of the magic of honey reveals itself casually. In the past four months I have learned that real raw unheated honey:
is anti-bacterial, anti-fungal, and medicinal;
has an assortment of vitamins and nutrients;
closes wounds without leaving scars;
never expires, safe and edible even after thousands of years in ancient tombs; and
will vary in hue and color based on bees’ nectars and pollens.
I have now tasted fresh honeys that were sweet, smoky, bitter, metallic, fruity, SOUR, berry-like, and even toffee-like. Out of Bisleri bottles and swanky jars, ones that made me exclaim, ones that made me pucker, and ones that made me confused. Honey is magic.
My colleagues pour 1 tonne of raw, freshly collected, wild bee honey. The shimmer is pollen — honey and its diversity reminding me that our universe is full of so many universes within it.
My favorite Last Forest honey is the jamun honey. The first time I tasted jamun honey, my jaw dropped. The fact that it could taste so strongly like the jamun berry–just from the bees hanging out with, eating from, working with those trees–is magical to me. Let alone that people collected it and figured out that the honey carries implications of jamun’s therapeutic benefits! Being around people that embrace so many ingenious and resilient uses of ecosystem resources has pushed me to wonder how to nurture ingenuity and creativity more in my own life. Bees, people, the community between them are genius and creative–that is the magic that is all there for me in that jamun honey.
HONEY IS SLOW
The past four months have been a lesson in slowness. I have learned that honey is a slow food; slow in production, collection, and even consumption. I have transitioned into my new home in the Nilgiris like honey, trying to focus on sweetness and not rushing. I was lucky to have what felt like a slow transition into living here, and I feel lucky that I get to be here for two years—it lets me tell myself and those around me that no, I am not in a rush. I have time to let myself make home here, to settle in in new ways each week, to be confused. There’s no rush for me to travel to this place or that place, to make sure I’m doing every personal project I envisioned immediately, because there’s time to—and for this I am so grateful to Shansi’s insight. There is a difference in pace about South India, of living in the mountains, that has affirmed my desire to not rush or pressure my time, and one that has also pushed me to learn about a slower type of patience. With myself, with others, with the mountains themselves and their magic mistiness that lured me here in the first place. I have found myself in sticky situations here like no other. But when I have faced issues, I’ve tried to take inspiration from the honey and imagine something like honey hunting, where people climb literal cliffs for hours to get something special. Living here has taught me that I can look at a problem and have a slow patience when I approach it, just as much and along with an angry or energetic approach. I am trying to take note from honey and South India's slowness at this time.
HONEY'S URGENCY - ON FORESTS and ECOLOGY
Of course, there is urgency that honey and bees tell us, too. Honey may never expire, yet is proving to be intensely vulnerable to pollutants and today’s changing climates.
I am writing to you from the tops of some of the oldest mountains (older than Mount Everest and the Himalayas!), and within India’s first ever Biosphere Reserve, sky islands full of rich and unique shola forests. There is a specific mesmerizing lushness to the green in the landscape here that I have never felt anywhere else. There are a number of Indigenous communities here—the Irula, Kurumba, Toda, Badaga, Kota, Soliga. As members of these groups, many of my colleagues live in and depend on forests. Last Forest works with Indigenous producers and collectives including Aadhimalai, a fully Indigenous member-owned cooperative which maintains decision-making power within the community. The Aadhimalai cooperative office is a 30-second walk from my desk, so I pop over when I have a question about our work or want a dose of nellikai candy or whiffs of coffee roasting.
Conversion of forest into vacation developments or non-native and/or profit crops such as tea plantations has had momentum in the Nilgiris since the British colonial period. Deforestation continues still—and rapidly. Legal forest-use restrictions marginalize forest-farmers further. The impacts are profound on both local (and migrant labor) communities, and the plant and animal ecosystems. Forest work for self-subsistence or barter and trade is less and less secure. Communities who have used and cared for their forests for generations and centuries now must place their traditional (and sustainable) existences and jobs within an increasingly globalized, increasingly capitalist, and increasingly climate-stressed market context. When maintaining culture and tradition is no longer viable enough to survive and thrive (despite the strength of centuries of knowledge), youth leave villages. They stop honey hunting.
No longer are seasons clear cut, especially here in South India. When I lived in Bangalore during my first month of Shansi in September, we were blocked into our apartment for a day due to flooding, with record rains and colds for the end of the monsoon. Here, my houseowner, a botanist and teacher, tells me often of her need to stay inside because the climate changes have been taking a toll on her health. This is not just about liking or not liking rain, it’s about growing and wet seasons changing in ways that people or bees might not be able to handle so easily; because we are all vulnerable. I have experienced climate change in new ways after living here. And I have been shown that people are already trying to be resilient.
A shot of Apis dorsata hives at the tops of trees in a Tamil Nadu forest.
I was welcomed into the Last Forest family with the prospect of the two best things, and the two best things that are even better when together: people and food. But I have come to see my Last Forest work as not only about rich honey or yummy millets that I’ve wanted to try since childhood, but also as a mode of climate resilience. Last Forest gets involved by maintaining steadfast support for any producers doing their foraging, gathering, and growing in the forest—and tries to create a more equitable and fair market so that modes of sovereignty remain. It aims to make it so that traditional livelihoods like forest caretaking, sacred honey hunting, and sustainable growing can still be viable. A mode of climate resilience is materially supporting those who are the caretakers of our environments and forests and investing in Indigenous communities—no matter the pressures of neoliberal markets, no matter the implications on those pure-dollar-profit measures of “success”. I am learning how to look at markets in new ways, to understand if there is any possibility to deal with the reality of an ecosystem through a ‘market’.
HOME IS WHERE THE HONEY IS
I grew up hearing from my dad about ragi mudde or banana flower, foods that were once important to my family’s cultural lives and also literal survival. Historically, such foods have been pushed aside, regarded deragatorily as traditional or 'poor' foods. I grew up so far away from and without access to these foods living in New York. It always would scare me to think that my own family's practices were ‘lost’ or ‘gone’ to me—scary due to the colonial implications but also just a bit selfishly: I also wanted to enjoy the yummy things, and get to appreciate them even if they were 'disappearing' or under-appreciated. But now, I have gained a new mode of agency over my relationship with these foods by working at Last Forest. I literally get to expand access to traditional ingredients, to their use for myself and others. It is important to me that I engage with my traditional foods not as lost but as alive, in the world and for myself, and hopefully with intention and without contributing towards their appropriations or exploitations.
My Shansi fellowship has me working halfway across the world from Oberlin, but working with honey is actually bringing me just straight back to Oberlin.
I actually really despised honey for a very long time. I found honey to be too achingly sweet, monotonous, and overpowering. That is, until I tried local honey for the first time–in Oberlin, actually. It was COVID quarantine times, everyone was baking bread and finding themselves new pet projects, and so I decided mine was to eat a spoonful of honey every day. Oberlin’s beloved community Facebook page connected me to someone selling jars out of their backyard. At first I ate my honey begrudgingly, but after a while I realized that the honey had forced my guard down…it had so much flavor: of clover, of Oberlin?! and a rawness that I actually looked forward to each day. It was the first time I pushed myself intentionally to like something that I didn’t like before, and it actually worked—my tastebuds and my personhood was flexible, fluid. While I was taking on this experiment, I coincidentally lived in a historic honey-colored village house known endearingly by the student community as ‘Honey House’ with Reet, who would also coincidentally later become my senior co-fellow here. Honey was where home was, literally, in Oberlin. And now, a couple of years later, honey is where home is again. This was recently the title of a feature I wrote with The Locavore on Last Forest, and it just fits. Finding challenge, mystery, wonder, deliciousness, and home in honey. It feels like such a lucky luxury to make home where the honey is, to get to see where honey takes me.
It is scary that six months is already here. I am hoping that I can let the magic of honey and freedoms of Shansi continue to shape my time here, and something tells me it will do so on its own without me trying. What I will ensure is that I keep eating spoonfuls of honey as I wait and see!
Jamun berries
Purple pits of eaten jamun
Unlabeled bottle of raw Apis dorsata Jamun (bitter) Honey from Last Forest
References
Anderson, C. (2023, January 25). How much honey does a bee make? Carolina Honeybees. Retrieved January 29, 2023, https://carolinahoneybees.com/how-much-honey-does-a-bee-make/
Albaridi NA. Antibacterial Potency of Honey. Int J Microbiol. 2019 Jun 2;2019:2464507. doi:10.1155/2019/2464507. PMID: 31281362; PMCID: PMC6589292. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6589292/#:~:text=Honey%20exhibits%20a%20broad%2Dspectrum,both%20media%20and%20in%20culture.
Almasaudi S. The antibacterial activities of honey. Saudi J Biol Sci. 2021 Apr;28(4):2188-2196. doi: 10.1016/j.sjbs.2020.10.017. Epub 2020 Oct 16. PMID: 33911935; PMCID: PMC8071826. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8071826/
Auerbach, S. MD, MS, FACEP, MFAWM, FAAEM, in Auerbach's Wilderness Medicine, 2017
The Locavore. Home is Where the Honey Is. 2023. Online Article. https://thelocavore.in/2023/01/31/home-is-where-the-honey-is/
Honey (Apis dorsata) has been shown to reduce oxidative stress in animals (Bashkaran, Zunaina, Bakiah, Sulaiman, & Sirajudeen, 2011; From Trends in Food Science and Technology, 2020 https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/biochemistry-genetics-and-molecular-biology/apis-dorsata