Out of the strong...

Lyle's Golden Syrup may go a long way to explaining British teeth. It's liquid sugar (technically, inverted sugar, a byproduct of the process of converting sugar cane juice into granular sugar) and once you've had it on steel-cut oatmeal, the kind that takes thirty minutes to make, you'll know it makes a strong run for maple syrup's lead in the non-honey sweetsstakes. The reason it's here is that it's label still sports the same dead lion and bees trademark that Abram Lyle cribbed from the Old Testament back in 1904. Crack it open to Judges 14:14 -- Samson slays a lion, and then later notices that bees have made a comb in the corpse. He says, at least according to various translators, "Out of the eater came forth meat and out of the strong came forth sweetness." I'm wondering if the translators didn't confuse the "white man's fly," as Native Americans called the honeybee, for a real fly. Anyway, you can easily imagine an American company re-branding away from such weirdness a while back, but Lyle's keeps the faith.