As local as it gets.
Posted on 10/19/2012 5:01:39 PM PDT by Dallas59
First we find out that we're getting ripped off in the fish department. Now, a new study commissioned by Food Safety News shows that most of the honey on supermarket shelves isn't really honey.
More than 60 types of honey from several major supermarkets, drug stores, and shopping clubs--including Stop and Shop, Safeway, Wegman's,A&P, Kroger, CVS, Walgreens, Sam's Club, and Walmart--were tested by Vaughn Bryant, a professor at Texas A&M University. He found that most of them had all of the pollen filtered out. Without any pollen, it's impossible to figure out whether the honey came from a safe source, or whether it's even actual honey at all; much of the ultra-filtered honey may come from China, may be contaminated, or may be diluted with High Fructose Corn Syrup.
(Excerpt) Read more at shine.yahoo.com ...
So the next step in fraudulent honey is to add in pollen to make it look real...
I wish I lived in the NC mountains - sourwood honey. Tupelo honey is real good too, as is tulip poplar. Thyme honey = cough syrup.
We have a honey wagon that comes around weekly.”
In the olden days it was the milkman who came once a week to visit the lady next door.
Mine too ~ so I never eat anything with honey in it, on it, around it, or underneath it unless I bought the honey from a reliable, known vendor ~ e.g. Safeway or Giant ~ and you know exactly how I came to understand their reliability.
I’ve read that Trader Joe’s was one of the few places that could be counted on to have pollen in its honey. Our local TJ doesn’t carry clover honey, only Mexican mesquite.
Think they used to call them the "honey buckets".
There was a president who allowed Chinese honey into the USA for $.50, when US wholesale average was $1.15. The Commerce Department also eased up on inspections, so you wouldn’t know if the “honey” was real or if it had pesticide residue in it. Eventually the shenanigans got to be too eggregious and a special tax was put on honey sourced from China (about 12 years ago iirc), so China switched tactics.
Chinese processors hyperfilter the pollen out, so you can’t determine the source, then add HFCS, color, and sometimes flavor. Then they unload a lot of “honey” in, say, Chile, where it will sit in a warehouse for a year then be relabeled as Chilean or Paraguayan, then into the USA. Even if we inspect it, we can’t discover the origin, and since HFCS has almost the same sugar profile as honey, they often can’t see the adulteration.
Meanwhile US beekeepers are plagued with new bee diseases and parasites.
Without live bees, we’ll take a productivity drop of at least 50% due to lack of proper pollination.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2531925/posts
Not surprising at all, since Honey is natures HFCS.
HFCS gives me a sore throat. Some honeys do and some don’t. I can believe they’re diluted.
I’m even suspicious of venders selling honey at farmers markets, probably most of it you can tell whether it is the real thing by the taste but you never really know, they might of bought an imported 50 gallon drum of honey from China and filled their own jars up with it with their own phony labels.
Would be nice to know what manufacturers brand they are.
LOL!
We have a bee hive in our back yard. They took over a large squirrel house.
It’s hanging from a limb about 25 ft up so it’s going to be hard to do anything with it. It’s getting very very heavy and it might fall anytime. They swarm 2 or 3 times a year. I’d like to think we have a good reproducing hive of healthy bees. My husband wants the honey.
Few people remember ‘HONEY WEST’ and even fewer know who Ann Francis was. For you, a true connoisseur, I offer this treat:
Raw, strained, but unfiltered honey will last a long time too, but it will crystallize. I have half a 5 gallon pail of crystallized wildflower honey that’s ten years old, and I scoop out some, decrystalize it, and it’s still good. Honey co-ops like the ubiquitous Sue Bee will hot-filter honey to keep it from crystallizing on the shelf, because grocery store consumers won’t buy crystallized honey. But they don’t usually take the step of removing ALL the pollen.
Most of the article is true, unfortunately. I was a beekeeper for years and kept up with the trade magazines and government actions, and saw this develop.
My customers loved the raw strained honey, sometimes with a little bee leg or wing in it, because they felt it was superior to the filtered, pasteurized supermarket stuff. I used to love the irony of getting more per pound for a less-processed product (though I could not deliver 10,000 pounds per year). I even had customers who would not buy UNLESS it was fully crystallized because they thought it would keep better.
The bears you bought at Kroeger are USA real honey. I checked a local “club store” and their honey said, product of the USA, Argentina, Chile, or France, which is a major clue.
Buy American! Buy from a local beekeeper!
I get the local wildflower honey and I don’t have the alergy problems I used too. Gonna start keeping my own bees soon.
Don’t use honey. Maple syrup from a family friend in my home town http://www.ishamfamilyfarm.com/
I get my honey from Cox’s Honey in Shelley, ID. It’s made 30 miles from my house. Local beehives and clover fields. Thanks for the Safeway pointer.
As local as it gets.
Thanks Peter! From the link:
“Consumers don’t tend to like crystallized honey,” says Jill Clark, vice president for sales and marketing at Dutch Gold. “It’s very funny. In Canada, there’s a lot of creamed honey sold, and people are very accustomed to honey crystallizing. Same in Europe. But the U.S. consumer is very used to a liquid product, and as soon as they see those first granules of crystallization, we get the phone calls: ‘Something’s wrong with my honey!’”
There’s an exception to this filtration process. Dutch Gold also packs organic honey from Brazil, and organic honey doesn’t go through nearly as fine a filter. Clark says that this is because organic rules prohibit the use of diatomaceous earth in the filtering process.
Of course, the raw honey that Dutch Gold gets in 50-gallon drums does contain pollen. As part of a recent auditing process, the company sent samples of imported honey that it received from India and Vietnam to a laboratory in Germany. There, scientists analyzed the pollen in that raw honey, and came to the conclusion that it was, in fact, from flowers that grow in the countries that claimed to be producing that honey.
Bottom line: Supermarket honey doesn’t have pollen, but you can still call it honey. Call it filtered honey. And the lack of pollen says nothing about where it may have come from.
Now, could there still be fraud going on, involving ultrafiltration and Chinese honey? Yes, but not in the way described by the Food Safety News article.
Some people suspect that Chinese exporters are ultrafiltering some of their honey and sending it to, say, India. There, it could be mixed into raw Indian honey and exported to the US. Pollen analysis would show that this honey was from India, although at least one expert, Vaughn Bryant at Texas A&M University, says that he’s seeing imported honey with an unnaturally low concentration of pollen. This, he says, could be evidence of ultrafiltration. Or it could be the kind of filtration done in the U.S., which also removes pollen.
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So NPR does not rule out the possibility of Chinese honey shenanigans, but tries to downplay the issue.
I buy dark local honey from a local market. Never a grocery store.
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