As previously cited in this thread, breast milk contains quite a number of living cells, enough so, in fact that, “Considering its composition, function, rich biological ingredients and cellular contents, breast milk can be considered a living tissue.”
Not only that, but, while honey is not made from pollen, a small amount of pollen contaminates the honey in the process of it being harvested.
I posted this as a curiosity. This is fascinating.
Where would coconut water fit into this? Suppose you carefully drain the water doing as little damage to the nut as possible. Is this better/worse than maple tree tapping?
Note that people eat honey ants for the sweet juice. On the one hand, this isn’t the same “honey” as from bees so not the same food. On the other hand you’d need a way to figure out how to provoke the ants to dump their honey like they do for other ants if you want to avoid killing them.
Wanted: 1,000 ant ticklers. No experience necessary.
Coconut “water” isn’t water. It’s liquid endosperm, the food provided to the plant embryo. The green coconut contains this in liquid form. As the nut matures, the “water” solidifies into white coconut meat. If you removed the water, the coconut seedling wouldn’t be able to grow.
It’s no worse than harvesting the coconut itself. Tapping maple syrup deprives the tree of nutrients it was going to put into producing leaves, so it is more detrimental.
Got a cite for that? Latest research I’ve been looking at seems to show that tapping maples for the syrup is not detrimental to the tree’s health or growth. In fact, new discoveries show that most trees are incredibly tied together underground with a complex web that links them to virtually every growing plant within miles and miles of it. And this results in quite a give and take of resources between all the interconnected plants. And a lot of reserves to call on when sap loss happens.
Mycorrhizal networks, or the “wood wide web” are getting a lot of study these days. 
In order to make fruit juice, it is necessary to take fruits composed of living cells and crush them - the fact that the end result no longer contains any living cells is pretty irrelevant, IMO - since the OP says “originally alive”.
Got a cite for that? 
That would seem to contravene the First Law of Thermodynamics. On search, I’m seeing a lot of statements that maple tapping is “sustainable,” along with articles saying that the long term effect on growth has not been established. As an ecologist, it’s hard for me to imagine that removing large amounts of sugar from a tree has zero effect on its growth or reproduction.
Then how do we conclude that tapping trees for syrup is more detrimental than harvesting coconuts? That was the assertion you made that I was hoping for clarification on. I’m not saying you’re wrong, I would just like to understand it better. I was quite surprised to learn that maple syruping seemed to have so little measurable impact on the trees, and fascinated by the whole new concept of the Wood Wide Web, as perhaps an explanation for that. But my grasp of botany and the intricate interdependent web is quite rudimentary and outdated.
The best article I can find on the sustainability of Maple syrup harvesting is this one: Growth Rates of Sugar Maple Trees Tapped for Maple Syrup Production Using High-Yield Sap Collection Practices.
It does say it’s not without effects, but seems sustainable by best practices.
Coconuts are produced by the tree for reproduction. The tree is going to produce them whether we harvest them or not. In nature, it would be detrimental to the tree for us to harvest them since the tree would then be expected to produce fewer seedlings in the long run. This does not apply to cultivated coconuts since their reproduction depends on how many of a tree’s nuts we plant.
In contrast, in removing maple sugar we are taking away resources that the tree could put into growth or producing flowers and seeds. We are taking away resources from the tree at a step before that of harvesting coconuts. It’s hard for me to imagine that this has zero impact on the tree.
My impression from a quick search is that there is little obvious effect on tapped trees. However, it also appears to me that there has been little if any controlled research on more subtle effects, such as the impact on reproduction.
Even if trees are passing around resources through the mycorrhizae, removing resources from the system is likely to impact it in some way.
I’m very familiar with this research, since much of the work cited in the article is being carried out at my research institute in Panama. I don’t recall having met Sheldrake, but several of the other researchers mentioned in the article are colleagues or friends.
Thanks for the info, Colibri. I’d love to hear your thoughts on these new discoveries of how different species of vegetation interact with each other, but I think that’s probably outside the scope of this thread.
There has been an enormous increase in interest in and research on the microbial world in the past decade, spurred by the ability to identify different kinds of fungi and microbes genetically. It’s been discovered that most green plants actually have various kinds of fungi living throughout their tissues, including roots, leaves, and stems, so that they are in some ways composite organisms. And the microbial soil community appears to have critical impacts on the plant communities that develop.
I think we need to distinguish between different levels of non-living food. There are foods or ingredients that have no organic origin at all, such as salt. There are foods that have organic origins, but that contain no cells and whose collection didn’t harm any living thing, such as honey. There are foods that contain no cells but whose collection harmed (or potentially harmed) living things, such as maple syrup.
There are also foods that contain cells but are “intended” by nature to be eaten, such as fruits. I don’t think these satisfy the original category as not having originally been alive. Anything with cells and a metabolism is a living thing in my book, regardless of whether it benefits the whole organism for it to be eaten.
Speaking as a beekeeper, I’m afraid honey collection (as well as containing some pollen, as mentioned above) generally does involve harming a few bees. Theoretically it doesn’t need to, but in practice some bees pretty well always get squished or provoked into stinging during honey harvest. Bees defend their stores; those that don’t don’t tend to have stores.
Commercial practice also often involves removing all honey stores and giving the bees a sugar syrup replacement, which evidence suggests does increase colony loss as well.
Fun fact; the cutesy bee hives illustrated in Winnie the Pooh and other cartoons, which were in use before the modern movable frame hives, were normally harvested by killing all the bees then extracting the honey.
…???
Oh, you mean the mycorrhizae research, not the syrup-tapping research. I was rather confused about the range of A. saccharum there for a minute. And wondering if I should be asking around to see if any of my boys on the street have a source for some sweet Panamanian Amber…