http://www.getcalhoun.com/news/ccgazette/ccgissue1/HoneyGoodForAllergies!.htm

Last week I had the opportunity to taste three different local Sonoma County honeys. I was amazed at the differences between them. One even tasted strongly of butterscotch! Apparently honey is powerfully influenced by the nectar bees use in its production, far more powerfully so than the watered down varieties corporate America provides us in the supermarket would suggest.

Being Sonoma County, this honey was from organically raised and maintained hives. Perhaps that is why the taste was so unusual, and unusually good: organic honey is to honey what organic vegetables are to vegetables and wild salmon is to farmed salmon. The taste is better and the food is harvested sustainably.
Also interesting to me, the local organic beekeepers tell me that they are having no problem with the sudden hive death syndrome that has devastated most commercial beekeepers across the country.

More and more I see a pattern, and it is a disturbing one. When corporations enter agriculture, quality crumbles and death increases. Because corporations are only interested in money return, taking care of the land or its inhabitants is only justified when it maximizes money returns. And that seems almost never to happen. Corporate agriculture has given is a growing dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, once an enormously productive fishing ares. Corporate salmon farms destroyed wild salmon runs be serving as parasite and disease reservoirs along wild salmon migration routes. And they are intrinsically incapable of taking care of forests they log.

Sonoma’s wild honey is just one more reason why people should buy from local producers wherever possible, and why public corporations should be barred from ever owning land, growing food, harvesting fish, or cutting trees.