The Halacha & Kashrus of ‘Forest Honey’

Lengthy/In-depth Post

April, 2015

Since Rosh Hashanah, and through Shemeni Atzeres, many Jews worldwide have been dipping their Challah in Honey.

Aside for the risk of attracting bees inside our Sukkos, there are other, halachic, factors to consider when enjoying this sweet nector.

The following is a short monograph regarding a new ‘hot topic’ in the world of kashrus that concerns this sweet dew.

The following was not written with psak Halacha in mind, rather for the reader to gain some insight and appreciation for all of the Torah study that goes into kashrus.

I

Meet ‘Forest Honey’

“They (the Torah and her Laws) …are sweeter than honey and the drippings of honeycombs”

Tehillim 19:11

Rav Yosef Shlomo Kahanaman, the famed Ponivzher rav was once asked what is the one common denominator that can be claimed from all of his travels on behalf of his yeshiva.

He is purported to have responded: “I can share with you two things that one can find anywhere in the world: Coca Cola and Chabad!”

This is no small matter in terms of the kosher food we put down on the table. Often, when a product is produced in a far-off country, the only mashgiach available to send is from a nearby Chabad House.

A few weeks ago I received a call from a distinguished head of a major kashrus organization. He asked me, “Do you certify ‘Forest Honey’?”

He knew the answer, as he was also holding in his hand a certification of mine from seven-years prior that listed ‘Forest Honey’ among other products under a proprietary name, and certified by us.

The story was that one of the plants that I certify has a side-room where they process and package honey. Several years ago-the time of this certification- they received a request from a new company, asking if they may pay this facility to process and package their raw honey in their plant.

The facility explained that this being a kosher plant they would need to first speak to the rabbi.

After some investigation, in turned out that their honey was being imported from the Congo.

At first, thinking I would have to send a mashgiach, I did what virtually every kashrus head would do: I Googled ‘Chabad Congo’. And what would you know? I got a result! The Chabad House is located in Kinshasa, Congo!

The kashrus administrator on the phone seemed uninterested when I responded by discussing how much oversight plain, raw honey may or may not need (although, customer beware: honey, especially local honey is often processed in non-dedicated plants).

Rather, he repeated, he was interested in the phrasing for one of the honeys processed in our plant that was listed on our certification- ‘Forest Honey’.

When we think of honey we tend to think of bees gathering nectar from flowers.

But that is not always the case. Like with alcohol, that can be produced from any sugar, honey too can be produced by the bee from any sugary substance it picks up.

For this reason, we find a variety of honeys on the market, from ‘clover’ honey to ‘orange blossom’ honey.

Connoisseurs can taste the difference. In fact, there are honey connoisseur clubs all over the country, as well as books on the subject, suggesting, like with wine, the best honey to go with which dish!

(There is also another type of honey, about which we will not be touching upon: ‘Royal Jelly’. This comes directly from the queen bee, and which is the source for its own halachik debate, see shu’t Tzitz Eliezar 21:59)

In fact, in lashon kadosh, Rashi explains that the term ‘devash’ is even more all-inclusive, referring to any rich, sweet nectar, mostly from fruits.

Now, none of these popular honeys on the market have any distinction in terms of their kashrus status, with some rabbanim even allowing such honeys to be purchased without any hashgacha (although, this is debatable; everyone should speak to their local rav).

However, as mentioned, this rav wanted to know specifically about about a more unique type of honey, the aforementioned ‘Forest’ honey.

This honey actually carries two names: Honeydew Honey and Forest Honey.

This type of honey is now part of a reinvigorated halachik debate, with various kashrus agencies setting differing policies on how to view it.

Because honey is a popular product and commonly used ingredient, it is important for the reader to be aware of this vociferous discussion now taking place in the world of kashrus.

At first blush, Forest Honey seems innocent. It gets its name for the obvious reason in that there are not enough flowers nearby from which the bee can gather its nectar, so instead it gathers it off of trees.

In fact, quite often, this darker, richer honey is sold using the name of the tree from which it likely originated, i.e. ‘Pine Honey’. Some honey experts claim that they can even taste from which type of tree the honey came!

The kosher customer, seeing such an item on the grocery store shelf, will likely not think much of this, as with ‘Clover’ honey.

But, alas, there is much to think about.

Although sounding innocuous, a highly insignificant portion of the sap that the bees draw from these trees actually come from the tree itself. If so, where does the majority of the sap come from? It comes from something called Honeydew.

Not to be confused with the delicious fruit, this honeydew is something else entirely.

Are you sitting down?

I will quote directly from Wikipidia: “Honeydew is a sugar-rich sticky liquid, secreted by aphids and some scale insects as they feed on plant sap. When their mouthpart penetrates the phloem, the sugary, high-pressure liquid is forced out of the gut’s terminal opening. Honeydew is particularly common as a secretion in hemipteran insects and is often the basis for trophobiosis.”

As for the hemipteran insect –that includes the dreaded aphid and thrip, from which we clean our romaine lettuce!

And, although not the halachik focus, the ‘high-pressure liquid is forced out of the gut’s terminal opening’ means precisely what it sounds like.

The sweet honeydew nectar of aphid-like insects has long been known of, and has been the stuff of legends, medicinal claims and poems for centuries.

With this information the reader may walk away thinking that such honey is most certainly treif, and he may be right. But, he also may be wrong.

Indeed, why is even flower-nectar honey kosher? Does it not derive from the issue of a bee, a non-kosher creature?!

II

Lac(h) Nisht

“And the am went into the forest, and behold, there was a flow of honey…” Shmuel 1 14:26

For many centuries, for reasons of water retention as well as for appearing appealing, many fruits are layered with a wax before being sold.

In today’s wax market, because wax generally needs a protein, they either use soy or casein – a milk derivative.

Leaving aside the dairy and cholov stam issues, most wax also contains something called oleic acid, mainly used as an emulsifier, as well as stearic acid.

These ‘fatty acids’ can often come from animals.

Putting aside, as well, this potential treif issues, another common ingredient in wax is shellac.

Now, shellac is a term many are familiar with, yet few know from where it comes or how it got its name.

Instead of educating you in my own words, I will allow a large fruit growers association do the work for me:

“Fruit coatings used by the Pacific Northwest tree fruit industry are derived overwhelmingly from two natural sources, carnauba and shellac wax… Shellac wax is a resin secreted by the lac beetle, found in Asia, on trees to protect its eggs… No synthetic-based waxes are used on Pacific Northwest apples. Both carnauba and shellac are approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as food coatings and have been safely used on produce and other edible products for decades…Pacific Northwest fruit producers recognize that consumers have diverse dietary needs. No waxes are used that are derived from dairy or meat products…’

Not only do they admit to using shellac, and how it comes from the lac beetle, but they brag how they use this instead of synthetics!

The process of taking this secretion to an ingredient in a widely used food product is fascinating in and of itself. Collected from the trees into canvas sacks, one is left with a mix of tree-bark, female lac beetles and the shellac. The canvas bag is then heated over a fire where the shellac liquefies, separates from the bugs and bark and oozes out of the sack.

They then take that liquid and harden into sections to be sold on the market.

How do we get around this serious concern?

Rav Moshe Feinstein, some 50 years ago, dealt with wax, shellac and the lac beetle (Ig’m yoreh deah 1:24) and suggested a number of reasons for its permissibility.

This is where the question of shellac and forest honey collide.

To understand his response, we first have to go back to how chazal viewed honey.

The gemara teaches us the dictum that all food that comes from a non-kosher species is itself non-kosher. For this reason, for example, an egg of a non-kosher bird would automatically be deemed non-kosher.

Basing itself on this principle, the gemara wonders(Bechoros 7) that honey derived from bees (which are themselves, of course, non-kosher) should be non-kosher in turn!

So, leaving aside forest honey for a moment, it would now seem that all honey (and certainly shellac) should be forbidden!

How does the gemara gets out of this problem, at least for bee honey? It is important to first understand how all bee honey is made, not just forest honey.

A bee will venture as far as four miles to find nectar. Let us assume that she (all worker bees are female) finds sufficient nectar from flowers. It will then stick its long nose, suck up the nectar and temporally swallow it into one of its two stomachs.

Inside the stomach it will mix with special enzymes that will help thicken the nectar and will, eventually, turn it into honey.

But she is not nearly done yet. She will then fly back to the hive and vomit the nectar into the mouth of another bee, and that bee will do the same to another, and so on, all adding more and more enzymes to the recently received nectar.

It is finally evacuated from the last bee inside the honeycomb where it will be covered and slowly thicken into the honey we know and love.

With this is mind, the gemara brings two reasons why honey would be allowed.

These two reasons will give us insight into not just the allowance of bee honey, but shellac as well, and perhaps, according to some rabbanim, the newly popular forest honey.

III

From Bee or Not From Bee

“Out of the eater comes sweet food and out of the strong came forth sweetness” Shoftim 14

This pasuk is the famous ‘chidah (riddle) of Shimshon with which he challenged to the pelishtim. While we do know that Shimshon was referencing a swarm of bees and their honey that he discovered inside the notorious lion he had earlier slain, untangling the riddle’s deeper mysteries has been a challenge for centuries.

We are in the midst of a honey riddle of our own, and there could not be a more apropos pasuk with whichto open this the culmination of our own mystery.

We mentioned above the rule: “kol hayotzei min hatemei, tamei –all that is derived from a non-kosher species is itself non-kosher”

So we went from questioning the kashrus of forest honey, to showing the kashrus concerns of shellac, only to find ourselves back at plant-derived honey and the gemara questioning even that!

Let us now tie it all together:

The gemara (Bechoros 7) offers two explanations as to how bee honey, although excreted from a forbidden insect, is indeed kosher.

The first justification comes from the unique production of honey. The Tana Kama explains that since honey is not part of the bee itself per se, rather a secretion that it first ingests from an outside source, the final product of honey is not deemed a yotzei (a secretion) of a tamei (non-kosher species).

This is true although a bee does indeed add its own enzymes into the nectar which helps transform the sugars, in time, into recognizable honey, as these bug-additives would not be enough to make it forbidden (see Tur siman 81 and Madenei Yom Tov, Bechoros #90)

If we accept the Tana Kama’s view as normative, an amazing heter emerges: all bugs, or any forbidden species, that secrete matter once injected, even should small quantities of natural additives from the forbidden species be tacked on inside of it, would be permissible for consumptions once secreted. This would seem to allow for not just plain, industrial honey, but honey sourced from honeydew (aphids) as well. For, the aphids’ ‘honeydew’ is also created through a secretion of an insect of a once kosher matter (the sap from the tree drawn out by the aphid) and would therefore itslef be permissible!

This would also be true regarding the secretion of the lac beetle-which we turn into shellac –which is derived in a similar manner from the sap of trees. Although both the aphid and the lac beetle add a little of their own acids and enzymes to the final product, this, like with plain honey, would not be enough to make it assur.

Putting it all together: when a honeybee draws nectar from ‘honeydew’ it would be drawing permissible matter, according to the Tana Kama. And, when it is finally secreted into the honeycomb from the forbidden bee, we would simply be relying on the general sevara (logic) of honey’s allowance.

However, it is not so simple. After quoting the Tana Kama’s reason for allowing honey, the gemara then offers Rav Yaakov’s alternative justification for its permissibility.  Seemingly rejecting the logic of the Tana Kama, Rav Yaakov would ban honey if basing himself solely on halachik reasoning.Rather, explains Rav Yaakov, the reason plain honey may be eaten is based on solely on a pasuk.

Although one may guess that the allusion in the Torah to honey’s acceptability is the fact that eretz yisroel is praised as ‘…zavas cholev u’devash’ – the honey referenced there is actually date honey (refer to Madenei Yom Tov, ibid.).

Rather Rav Yaakov draws his inference of allowance from a pasuk in vayikra (11:21) that discusses the kosher types of insects, that are now largely lost to history (save for some Yemenite and Moroccan traditions). The pasuk states, “Only this (‘zeh’) you may eat from among all flying teeming creatures…” The pasuk, and the word ‘zeh’, is alluding to the fact that only the creatures themselves were made assur, but not what it produces from its body. The gemara concludes the lesson of the pasuk with the following: “…and what is ‘this’ referring to? The honey of bees”

Now, all of us are aware that because Rav Yaakov, as opposed to the first view, derives his allowance from a pasuk, he is limited in its application, as we do not conjecture when dealing with the mesorah of pesukim.. Indeed the gemara states that based on Rav Yaakov’s view honey derived from other insects, like wasps, which bear the name of the forbidden species (e.g. ‘wasp honey’) would not be allowed, although according to the Tana Kama they would.

Conversely, according to the first view, any insect which secretes a matter largely from an outside source would be, most often, permissible.

The application of these two views to modern times, and to our discussion, is enormous. For, only if we hold like the first view, would honeydew be kosher.

However, seemingly, according to the second view in the gemara, that of Rav Yaakov, we would not be able to apply the pasuk to anything other then to bee honey, no matter their similarity, This would make forest honey, and its cousin shellac, forbidden for consumption.

So, which view is followed in halacha? This too is not entirely clear. We find differing views among the rishonim. While, for example, the Rosh follows the more limiting view of Rav Yaakov, both the Rambam (hil. machalos assuros 3:3) and Shulchan Aruch (yoreh deah 81:8 -in his initial view) rule like the more permissive, first view, even extending the heter for honey beyond bees, to wasp honey!

Being that we are dealing with issurei deroiasa (Biblical concerns), it would seem that we need to rule strictly regarding forest honey, and indeed this is how Rav Wosner ruled in a teshuvah published in the Torah journal ‘Mesorah’.

The oserim assert that the first step in allowing honey must be that the initial source of nectar is kosher. Even though one may argue that honeydew itself should carry the same permissibility as honey, we can’t apply a pasuk beyond anything chazal inform us about. And even according to the more permissive view of the Tana Kama, it is possible that we may also only apply his allowance to the few items chazal spoke of, like wasp honey, but not to extend it to anything and everything similar.

As Rav Herschel Shechter, the posek for the Orthodox Union, is quoted as saying: “A bee is not a mikveh tehoirah for forbidden foodstuffs (thereby making anything that passes through kosher)”

In this complete article in Mesorah (ibid.) written by the rav of Lyon, France, there is little room left for allowance.

However, some argue, still, for its permissibility.

They base themselves on a teshuva of Rav Moshe Feinstein (Igros Moshe 1:24) where he discusses shellac and offers several reasons why it is of no concern.

Now, it is certainly true that some of Rav Moshe’s reasons for allowing shellac found in wax and in its own glaze do not apply to forest honey. For example, this that he writes how shellac is nullified into the wax and its glaze – whereas by forest honey there is no nullification as we eat the actual matter -, and, that he offers that shellac is not a ‘food’ item per se, or that it does not taste edible, but rather serves other purposes  -whereas forest honey is sweet and tasty and certainly a food –would be arguments of no consequence to forest honey.

However, one of Rav Moshe’s other arguments may indeed apply to forest honey. Explains Rav Moshe that even if we accept the more stringent view of Rav Yaakov, the Levush who explains this limiting view to be unique to items with the name of the forbidden species in them – and this is why ‘wasp honey’ was disallowed according to his view – otherwise the pasuk allows for all items produced in a similar manner to bee honey!

‘Forest honey’ would then almost certainly be included in the allowance, according to Rav Moshe.

So here is where we arrive: allowing forest honey would only be acceptable if:

1. we accept the view of the Shulchan Aruch and Rambam, who follow the Tana Kama, as normative. And even then, only if we then extend their view to all items created in a similar process to honey (which many do not to extend it).

 2- or, even according to the Rosh and the other poskim who are strict like the second, limiting, pasuk-basedview of Rav Yaakov, if we accept the Levush’s explanation that the limitation inherent in this view is only activated in substances that carry the name of the forbidden species in it (e.g. ‘wasp honey’).

At the end of the day, and certainly by the end of this year, one may simply find that forest honey sold in stores carries only certain hashgagos.

This brief monograph should be filed under ‘appreciating what goes into kashrus’. It is also a heavy reminder that just because a group of hashgachos are reliable does not mean that they agree on even matters touching upon Biblical law. For this reason, one must have a morah horah who can guide them in not just which hashgoachos are reliable, but when and on which items to be rely on them.

Let us end with an amazing insight that I heard in the name of the Brisker Rav. Rashi tells us (Devarim 1:44) that the Amorim were compared to bees because like bees that die upon stinging, so too the Amroites died after waging war on klal yisroel.

The pasuk tells us (Tehillim 118:12) “savavuni k’devorim -They will surround me like bees”. This, explained the Brisker Rav, is a reference to Yishmoel, that will commit suicide in order to bring us harm, just like a bee.

As this prophesy has been painfully borne out, let us hope for its ending (118:14), “vayehi li l’yeshuah”, when Hashem will provide our ultimate redemption.

May it be soon!

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[1] Much of this material was taken from this writer’s weekly column in Ami Magazine