Happy new Jewish year! Shana tovah! Finding a honey replacement is simple, There are plenty of vegan alternatives:
Maple syrup - Usually made from the xylem sap of sugar maple, red maple, or black maple trees.
Date syrup - A thick dark brown, very sweet fruit syrup extracted from dates. It is widely used in North African and Middle Eastern cooking.
Molasses - A viscous product resulting from refining sugarcane or sugar beets into sugar.
Coconut nectar - Made from the sweet sap produced by the coconut palm blossom.
Agave nectar - Produced from several species of agave, including Agave tequilana and Agave salmiana.
Brown rice syrup - Derived by culturing cooked rice starch with saccharifying enzymes to break down the starches, followed by straining off the liquid and reducing it by evaporative heating until the desired consistency is reached.
Barley malt syrup - An unrefined sweetener processed by extraction from sprouted malted barley.
But what's wrong with the regular honey? 75% of honey samples taken worldwide were contaminated with insecticides. During honey harvesting, some bees are inevitably crushed or injured. Queen bees often have their wings clipped by beekeepers to prevent them leaving the hive to produce a new colony elsewhere. Beekeepers often respond to disease outbreaks by burning their hives, killing all bees inside. It's a raw deal to the bees to steal their honey and replace it with high fructose corn syrup, which is what most commercial beekeepers do. Each bee produces just a twelfth of a teaspoon of honey in its lifetime.
