[2022] Medical Benefits of Honey

Thanks for splitting this into a separate topic; I appreciate it.

Originally posted by Ren: Honey has been used for thousands of years as a topical antibiotic and wound ointment. 7d2d is a silly game, but it's not that silly for it to include honey as something a zombie attack survivor might slap on a minor wound to help prevent/cure infection, being as it's a broad-spectrum antibacterial. Eating it? Not so much. It's FDA-approved for various minor wound and burn treatment uses in the US, though.

A lot of real, legitimate treatments for injuries and burns can seem strange. For example, xenografts of fish skin for severe burns are fairly common in some countries and in veterinary medicine.

This is just my own hypothesis, but I think the origin of honey in this game could have been its use as a survival food.

I watch a good number of survival shows, where people are (voluntarily) out in the wild, basically starving, constantly on the lookout for any food source they can find. Obviously there’s a lot of hunting, gathering, trapping, fishing, and so on. But whenever someone spots some potential honey, it’s a big deal, worth taking some risk given the food’s relatively high caloric energy. My hunch is the devs saw honey, along with wild mushrooms, as things you could live off of in a post-apocalyptic survival scenario, when other methods (hunting, farming, looting, bartering) may not be available.

Honey’s use as medicine might have come later in the design process, after they invented this fictional infection and wanted multiple avenues to counter it. That’s not to support or refute the claims about honey’s medicinal value, but one has to admit, its food value isn’t really in dispute.