

Why U.S. School Kids Are Flunking Lunch - thurgoodx
http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2011/04/10/why-american-school-kids-are-flunking-lunch/

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burgerbrain
_"I gave a high school social studies class a simple food quiz. One of the
questions asked, “Where does honey come from? A bear? A tree? Bees?” Almost
all of the students got it wrong."_

I'm not saying there was anything wrong with his testing methodology here or
anything, but if I was given such an elementary question like that as a
highschool student, I would have answered "bear" just for the shit of it.

~~~
ars
He got it wrong too, since honey doesn't come from any of his listed choices.
Honey comes from flowers - it's gathered and processed (slightly) by bees. But
it comes from flowers.

~~~
roel_v
No it doesn't, well at least not in the sense that 'car tires come from trees,
because the rubber comes from trees and is slightly processed in the factory'.
Bees gather nectar from flowers, and nectar is quite distinct from honey.

(my dad is a beekeeper, which doesn't make me an expert on honey and bees, but
even the first paragraph of <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey> states the
above).

~~~
ars
If I gave bees sugar water would they make honey? No. At it's core honey is
made by flowers, i.e. flowers do most of the work. Bees do some of the work,
but a lot less than the flower does.

I'm not saying there isn't a distinction between nectar and honey, of course
there is. But there is also a distinction between raw honey, and the filtered,
cooked, version you buy in a store. So should I say honey is made by
beekeepers?

~~~
roel_v
That doesn't make sense. If I gave a tire factory saw dust, would they make
tires? Of course not. The question here is: from what point on does processing
some material constitute 'making' the end product? One could debate endlessly
about this, because it's a boring definition question. Honey is widely
considered to be made by bees, and I guess you could make the point that
everybody else is wrong and that your definition of 'make' is the right one;
fine, but I'm not going into that discussion. The broad consensus is that
flowers produce nectar, which is then processed by bees into honey, and in
common usage of the word 'make', that means that bees 'make' honey.

The difference between store-bought honey and the honey straight from the hive
is minuscule, depending on the product in stores you compare it with. Here in
Europe, it's against the law to call honey with added sugar 'honey'; that
means that what you buy in a store in a jar labeled 'honey' is exactly what
comes out of the hive. In many other places it's not regulated and there you
can honey watered down with sugar (but that's usually all that's done to it,
not processed further). When you compare '100% pure honey' from a store and
the honey that comes out of the hive, the difference between the two is purely
mechanical; it's just filtered to take out lumps and honeycomb, and that's it.
The difference between nectar and honey is much greater - they are
fundamentally chemically different. So it's much more of a difference as you
make it out to be.

Also, honey is never 'cooked', because once it gets over (IIRC) 37 degrees
Celsius, it looses much of its healthy properties because the enzymes break
down after that.

~~~
ars
I guess you would hold that [wheat] flour comes from humans?

I don't, but we don't have to have the same opinions, as long as our
respective opinions are self consistent.

So if you hold that humans make flour there is nothing more to say. But if you
don't, you're going to have to explain the distinction to me.

~~~
burgerbrain
_"I guess you would hold that humans make [wheat] flour?"_

Yes, that generally is held to be the job of millers...

~~~
ars
I reworded it to say comes from humans.

Which actually clears things up:

    
    
      Honey comes from flowers.
      Honey is made by bees.
    
      Flour is made by millers.
      Flour comes from wheat.
    

Seems reasonable to me.

------
JacobAldridge
I think through his entire US campaign Jamie Oliver has come across as
arrogant and interfering. That doesn't mean he's wrong, of course.

~~~
roel_v
He came across the same way when he did a similar thing in the UK. He just
waltzes in and assumes he can run a school kitchen the same way he runs his
restaurants. In a way I can understand the reaction of the school board that
is described in the article - let him come with a complete plan to do things
better, including sourcing ingredients in large amounts, training staff,
financing etc, rather than walking into a kitchen, be condescending about
everything they do and then complain about the bad taste of students when it
turns out they don't like his recipes.

------
j2d2j2d2
"It doesn’t take much. But it takes more than nothing." - excellent way of
putting it.

