I know that we are we are merely simple honey sellers but after the collective psychotic episode, utterly disastrous, public health car-crash, technocratic fronted, billionaire coup, of the last two years which has caused so much suffering to so many, it's hard to find anything particularly cheery to write about or to pretend in some Pollyanna fashion that things are OK in any way whatsoever. Still for those of us still in good health and work or business, we are still amongst the more fortunate. Let us hope we have reached an inflexion point and that sanity and perspective make a welcome return to all of our lives.
So with a sense of proportion firmly intact, I would like to humbly introduce our newest offering; Raw Laurissilva Cloud Forest honey from the Island of Madeira. A rare bit of good news, well for us at least.
Madeira for those who don't know is part of a tiny archipelago a few hundred miles west of Morocco and about twice that distance south of Portugal. The main island, Madeira, which means "wood", is a sub tropical island which is home to the last remaining Laurissilva Cloud forest which once covered prehistoric Europe (and now a UNESCO world heritage site). An old growth primary forest, much of it inaccessible filled with ancient Laurel trees and tropical flowers.
Sitting on the wild North shore of the Atlantic coast is the village of Sao Vicente, which reaches up to the very edges of the forest, and it is here that Mr. Viera has a modest number of hives which produce a most wonderful and rare honey. It is dark and rich, both malty and fruity and seems to lend itself to every kind of usage. I have no doubt that this extraordinary honey is not only delicious but probably has excellent healing properties.
Needless to say this honey is rare and made in small quantities and will not be found anywhere else in the UK. We have only about 600 kilos of two of the very best batches made this year. So despite all the Brexit hurdles, supply chain difficulties and all else, we really believe this Cloud Forest honey is worth the effort. It is unabashedly pricey, for any number of reasons, but for all that we bring it to you at a price as fair as every other honey we source.
We think it would make a beautiful gift for any lover of honey as it is unquestionably a bit special. We sincerely hope you enjoy it.
Facebook and Instagram are both owned by the most reprehensible, criminal, predatory and immoral people whose practices we simply can't condone, Regardless of how many times marketing experts tell us that they are vital to our survival in the crowded marketplace. I personally feel that Facebook has had the most corrosive effect on society and discourse, its practices are so predatory and even nihilistic that to even hold your nose and participate is no longer an option.
This is the standard bearer of Surveillance capitalism, Remember the maxim " if its free, you are the product". Their business model is the minute analysis of every aspect of your existence, and the monetization of it. They will sell your info ( and all their black box analytics of it) to anyone who pays them. They have been attempting to redefine the notion of privacy from day one. They have made your children insecure and neurotic dopamine addicts and are destroying their capacity for creativity, imagination and empathy. What could have been a great enterprise in human connection and discourse has turned into something monstrous.
Now, after nearly a year and half of the most appalling censorship where any debate or presentation of evidence about public health matters is effectively quashed, this disgusting corporation has now decided to be the arbiters and guardians of our "health".!!!! Words fail me. The hypocrisy is epic.
We are completely abandoning this Orwellian CIA funded enterprise.
(Google are certainly worse than facebook with regard to surveillance capitalism, but much harder to dispense with as their presence on the web is so ubiquitous.)
Owing to the fact that I deleted my personal account, they will no longer permit me to even login to our business page. So the historical record of our FB page will continue to exist on it's servers. In the meantime if you want some of the best honey money can buy from a company that still knows right from wrong and good from evil, who wont pester you with endless emails and whose only use for your info is to put an address label on your order, you have found the right place.
Goodbye FB and Instagram. A better world awaits.
A few years ago I was visiting a beekeeper in southern Portugal. As soon as I entered his office he said " i want to show you something", he reached down and pulled out a 260g jar of Aldi "Portuguese honey" ( Mel de Portugal), He then announced indignantly that this jar cost him 1 euro and 50 cents and his conclusion was "impossivel"! .
We both knew the cost of honey production, and there is no way on gods green earth that anyone in Portugal can produce honey for that kind of cost. It had to have cost about a euro a kilo to make it to supermarket shelf at that price. Needless to say it is a blend of honeys, mostly from China, ( which is probably not really honey ) and a little bit of a local honey to lend a flavour profile and some local pollens.
Cut to earlier this year, when I went into a sales meeting in a Cheltenham health food shop to be met by a hostile shop manager, who instantly declared we were way too expensive, couldn't be bothered to taste it and was quite frankly a prize idiot. What I did find on his shelves was a jar of "organic" Squeezy honey from a well known company, which was on sale for about £2. My reaction to that is the same as Pedro's. "Impossivel". I offered to test his honey for him, but he declined.
What is written about below is the following articles is honestly the tip of an iceberg of duplicitous and semi-legal practices rife in the honey industry, which is why I would welcome a testing regime. Bear in mind the Chinese will even provide you with honey samples to pass almost any test you like including one ready for NMR testing.
There are literally hundreds of tests for honey everything from pesticides, contaminants, heavy metals, antibiotics, sugar composition, markers of adulteration to glyphosate, hive residues etc etc. You have to be selective about testing, so you test for the things that you are likely to find. If its comes from a country with significant GMO usage like Argentina or Mexico, you would test from GMO's and Glyphosate. If its from India, you might test for antibiotics or heavy metals, If from China, the very least would be all the different adulteration tests possible etc. Conclusion is - you typically only find what you are looking for.
Honey supply chains can be so opaque that it can be impossible to know where honey has actually originated from and whether it has been altered, processed or adulterated in some way on its journey to your spoon.
Trust cannot be guaranteed by labels and standards and even testing regimes alone, real trust comes from honest people, fair and ethical practices, real provenance and transparency. We like to think that that is the way we operate.
So if you have stumbled upon this site, I would like to assure you that the honey we are selling you is at a fair and equitable price, which has come from a single independent source, which pays the beekeepers well and brings an honest and delicious product to your kitchen table.
A couple of links below just to show the nature of the honey business.
https://www.insider.com/fake-honey-problems-how-it-works-2020-9
