The Disappointing Radius of Honey

I've kept the world waiting for this blog post, but it's worth it for the very useful devastating news that will come later.

Although it's been my goal to stock up on food just in case the grid goes down tonight, I'll do a good job of making a bulk purchase and then...eating it. I've been wasting less food, and I'll cite my carrot-raisin salad and tonight's dinner of a nearly-rotten squashed banana with cashew butter and mesquite honey as evidence. I'm still trying to create a balanced pantry. 

My quest has taken me on a $3.29 (according to RoadTripAmerica) trip to the Las Vegas Farmer's Market at Garden Park.  The market takes place at a park so bougie that you're sorely tempted to steal the TP they so boldly leave lying around. The market consisted of a small number of vendors, maybe seven or eight, hocking anemic-looking produce that I didn't buy. Instead, I came home from the farmer's market with a 1/2 pound of raw natural pistachios and some sun-dried tomato and asiago artisan bread that lasted me for a week and inspired me to rotate my soups. There are a couple of other options in town that I'll look into in the near future and report on. 

This past weekend, I took a trip to Joshua Tree National Park with you-know-who (Miss Gokey). If memory serves, and I'll trust Gokey to correct me if I'm wrong, we got caught by the (merciful) end of the longest Burlington-Northern-Santa-Fe train I have ever seen in my natural life, and I come from the Crossroads of America! And then, we sped past a honey stand and got to talking about how it was a shame that it looked closed and how we would stop there if we were taking the same route home, which at that point we were not. But then, as it turned out...we did!

So, on Sunday, I screeched my car into the honey stand. The woman hocking her honey looked positively scraggly, but I thought to myself, "Well, I've already stopped, so..." We got out and tasted the mesquite honey, the wild honey, and some bee pollen. Miss Gokey had been talking about how local honey is supposed to help with allergies. We asked the honey lady, and she was enthusiastic in her support of the idea, which the New York Times unfortunately says is false. Discovery Health, however, supports the idea that local honey can help ease allergy symptoms. Miss Gokey and I then broached the topic of what constitutes "local." 

This post is dedicated to the answer to that very question, and the answer is (according to the same article from Discovery Health)...

...within a few miles of where the allergy sufferer lives. 

For a glorious minute there, I was considering buying local honey wherever I went, and then using it as a bartering tool to allergy sufferers after the apocalypse. Helas, the best laid plans...

At any rate, here are two photos of the honey stand. 

Needless to say, I carried some honey and some natural raw pistachios (gotta love California) over the state line and into the Vega.