India, April 4 -- Here's a hipness quiz for you. So, you are sitting in a bar with a dirty old man, when suddenly a look of lust comes over his face and he says 'hot honey'! Is he referring to the attractive waitress? To the gorgeous woman sitting at the next table? Or is he just looking for a condiment? Readers with filthy minds will be disappointed to know the last option is the right one. All that the old boor wants to do is to drizzle a condiment on his pizza. Hot honey? Yes, indeed. For several years now, hot honey has been a trendy condiment in the West. It is not, as foodies may fondly imagine, honey produced by bees who have been allowed to feast exclusively on the flowers of a chilli plant, with the capsaicin they thus ingest imparting a spicy tang to the honey they create. It's just normal, bog-standard honey to which a chilli flavour has been added. This sounds slightly boring, but America has been growing crazy about it. You find hot honey added as a condiment to everything, from fried chicken to pizza. And now, not only can you buy commercially produced bottles of hot honey, but many packaged foods (potato chips for instance) come in hot-honey flavours. There's even an origin story to go with the craze. Apparently a Brooklyn entrepreneur called Mike Kurtz went to Brazil and discovered that chillies were added to honey as a condiment to smear on pizza. Kurtz went back to Brooklyn and created a hot-honey empire by marketing the idea. Of course, he knew he was dealing with a nation nurtured on excess, so he upped the chilli content. Others copied him, and now most of the hot honey you get around the world caters to the wuss end of the market; to people who like aggressive chilli flavours but can't really handle them and so, are grateful for the calming effect of the honey that goes into the condiment. Like almost everything else that Americans mass-produce, they like to think that they were the first to get the idea and that they invented it. (Remember the saga of Huy Fong Sriracha sauce?) But the idea is hardly new. Forget about the Brazilians who inspired Kurtz, most East Asian cuisines contain some mixture of sweet and hot. One condiment that has been available around the world for decades is the Thai sweet chilli sauce, which is based on exactly the same idea. Except that Thai sauces usually have a measure of subtlety, while American condiments simply amp up the chilli. (Just compare any artisanal Thai Sriracha with the bestselling American Huy Fong version.) So the hot honey that has travelled around the world follows the American precept of iron fist in velvet glove. Just as the honey coats your palate, the chilli arrives to deal the knockout blow. And even Indian versions of the condiment can use bhoot jolokia and other deadly hot chillis. It would be unkind, if not entirely untrue, to suggest that one reason why hot-honey manufacturers use so much chilli is to ensure that you can't tell how good or bad the honey they use is. Because, while chilli is easy to come by, honey is nature's gift to us. It can have so many dimensions of flavour that, in a way, it seems a shame to kill its taste with mirchi. Good honey is so difficult to find that there is a very high probability that the stuff you buy in the shops or order on the net is, if not entirely bogus, then possibly adulterated. There are many simple ways to test the purity of the honey you have in your larder, but the results will usually make you unhappy so I don't suggest you rush off to try them. You can put some honey on your thumb. It should stay in one place. But if some of it starts spreading or drops off your thumb then it's probably adulterated. Or, put a spoonful of honey in a glass of water. It should head to the bottom and stay there in a clump. If any of it starts mingling with the water then it's not the real thing. So, be careful when you buy honey. Cheap honey is nearly always fake but price is no guarantee of authenticity either. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on purchasing manuka honey, a so-called superfood from New Zealand. Remember that global sales of manuka honey are four times the total production of the real thing. It's easy to be cheated. Why is honey the subject of so much fraud? Well, because contrary to public perception, honey is hard to come by. There are over 20,000 bee species in the world, but only 4% of them can make honey. Nor do they make a whole lot of honey. The average honeybee will produce only one-tenth of a teaspoon of honey in its entire life! And most of the honey that bees produce is for their own sustenance. It is the excess that we humans get to consume. The process of producing honey is laborious. To produce just one pound of honey, bees need to visit two million flowers. The bees take the nectar they find in the flowers in their stomachs (so-called pure vegetarians should look away now) and carry it to their hives. This thin nectar is turned into thick honey by the bees who take it in their mouths and chew it. This chewing process adds enzymes to the nectar, breaks down the complex plant sugars and creates honey. It is at this stage that the bees spit out the honey for storage in the honeycombs that characterise every hive. (Vegetarians: Why are you still reading this?) Our ancestors through the millennia had some idea of what a miracle the creation of honey was and respected the bees and their honey. There are references to honey in the Rig Veda and the ayurvedic tradition uses honey for medicinal purposes. Nearly every religion has the same reverence for honey and it became one of the world's most basic foods. (Sugar did not catch on until thousands of years later.) The phrase 'milk and honey' crops up in ancient texts from around the world (honey and dairy products are a natural combination) but while many civilisations (including ours) revere the cow, the poor bee is no longer accorded much respect. So do go ahead and try hot honey. I reckon the fad has about a couple of years to run. But never forget that the true hero of this story is the bee and the miles it flies through the air searching out nectar from millions of flowers to give us one of the world's greatest natural foods....