Fancy honey might not actually be honey
vice.com
vice.com
To normalize the playing field, investments are needed to fund port-of-entry enforcement, quality control, and authenticity, among other things. Tariffs are the most sensible tax to fund these kinds of expenditures, which brings us back to square one. In fact, I think tariffs are probably a good quantitative measure of how egregiously another country violates it's trading partner's standards at the margins.
This should be straight up regulated, the FDA apparently has no source origin or testing requirements for honey, unless someone actually is sickened by a batch it's all caveat emptor and this stuff is all labeled "raw", "pure" or even "organic" and it takes an NMR machine to know differently.
I do find it surprising that the one sample out of four that wasn't obviously adulterated was the brand from Wal-Mart.
The Balsamico you see in the supermarket is red wine vinegar with added sugar and flavourings. The real stuff it fermented, it's closer to whisky than vinegar.
Cider should be made from pulped apples, sadly it is all too common for it to be made from commercial apple syrups. These are ultra-processed mixes of sugar from various apples. The production process removes the aromatics, so those have to be re-added.
Chinese pine-nuts are far more common than the real Italian pine nuts. They taste nothing like the real thing because they come from a different species of tree.
I've come to the conclusion that anything you buy at a supermarket or chain store is basically fake rubbish. If you want the real thing you need to go visit farm shops at the source.
And come up with a good estimate for their production capacity vs sales...
Because the genuine article isn't always cheap to make, but it shouldn't have to compete with imitation products that are disguising themselves as it with no way for consumers to know the difference.
The problem is US-based companies fraudulently representing sugar syrup as honey. Would it make a difference if they called locally produced sugar syrup “Tennessee Honey”?
The use of Vietnamese syrup over domestic syrup is irrelevant to the overall fraud.
Come again?[1][2]
> it takes an NMR machine to know differently
Does it really?[3]
[1] https://www.fda.gov/files/food/published/PDF---Guidance-for-...
[2] https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/cms_ia/importalert_108.html
[3] http://www.aoacofficialmethod.org/index.php?main_page=produc...
"Divisions may detain, without physical examination, the specified products from the firms listed in the Red List of this import alert."
Presumably they're not detaining every batch?
The fact that the import alert has been in place for 7 years suggests -- unless there's further clarifying data about numbers of stops and such -- that it's still a problem, that fake "honey" is being imported?
Per [3], https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17386484 "Study and validity of 13C stable carbon isotopic ratio analysis by mass spectrometry and 2H site-specific natural isotopic fractionation by nuclear magnetic resonance isotopic measurements to characterize and control the authenticity of honey." it looks like they use SNIF-NMR and SCIRA-MS (magnetic resonance and mass-spectroscopy) in determining authenticity of honey?
This, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328029044_Authentic..., is quite intersting on the topic.
I wasn't prepared to spend $15 to buy AOAC Official Method 991.41 but the above ResearchGate linked study suggested "honey" could have up to 7% corn syrup and still pass that test. Later (p.8) they summarise:
>"While the study showed that some 73% of commercial honeys analysed were classified as pure according to AOAC criteria10,11,16 and previous studies8,12,13,15,17–20 it is entirely possible this overestimated the actual number of pure honeys. This is because honey is sometimes adulterated using C-3 sugars, such as those from sugar beet7. It is unfortunate that the methods used here cannot detect this form of adulteration61. Consequently, detection of adulteration of this nature remains a challenge7.In addition to C-3 sugars, other adulterants in honey are difficult to detect due to the development of new and more sophisticated practices and lack of officially accepted analytical techniques. The use of EA-IRMS (Elemental Analysis - Isotope Ratio Mass Spectrometry) is the only official detection method for addition of C-4 sugar in honey42. This study also relied on a number of AOAC criteria10,11,16 to determine if honey samples were pure. As shown in Table 1, 65% (17 of 26) of samples classified as adulterated did not meet the δ13Ch-p and the C-4 sugar criteria; 9 samples also failed to meet the relevant criterion for δ13Choney<−23.5‰10. While the C-4 sugar criterion is considered robust and has broad application, the AOAC 998.1211 method does identify that a small percentage of genuine pure honeys fall outside of the accepted criterion for non-adulterated honey (≤7%)." (ibid)
Or the "Christmas markets". Hahaha. What a scam.
Our daughter is allergic to sunflower oil which is commonly used to adulterate the olive oil. Chips supposedly made with olive oil will sometimes give her a rash.
For bottled olive oil we try to buy local California olive oil...,
Luckily I live close to a real olive mill, but there really is no way to know. Plus you have people arguing the vast majority of olive oil sold in the USA is "authentic" for some measure of authentic, which is really hard to discern: https://www.aboutoliveoil.org/the-facts-about-uc-davis-olive...
This feels like another one of those areas where as a consumer following the research and knowing what products are good to buy is almost a full time job.
Obviously make sure you practice responsible laser safety, even for a cheap low-wattage laser.
https://www.physicscentral.com/experiment/physicsathome/fluo...
I was looking around with a 532nm green laser pointer the other day, and found that it was almost totally attenuated when aimed at the red (cheap/fake) nectar in my hummingbird feeder. Further experimentation revealed that orange Gatorade was similarly super-absorbent, while beer was pretty transparent to the green light.
Just bought some Tonda Iblea DOP-certified oil and will be interested to try this! It's subjectively delicious, curious if it's objectively flourescent (and if my everyday supermarket olive oil is not).
Might be something to look into if you have Costco nearby.
One of the interesting things I learned from the honey article was that fraudsters have figured out how to work their way around tests, at least for honey. I wouldn't be surprised if they could do the same for olive oil and other food products. It seems like a cat and mouse game.
Something not mentioned in the article is that testing labs themselves need to be tested, certified, and audited. There have been some scandals in forensic labs where techs have repeatedly falsified test results for decades. This is probably especially a problem when organized crime is involved.
If you are at all interested in food safety, I highly recommend "The Poison Squad", about the foundation of the FDA.[1][2]
Also, just because they fool the particular testing tools that labs use doesn't mean you as a consumer won't have an adverse reaction to whatever it was they put in to the honey.
The problem with adulteration isn't exclusively limited to harmful health effects either. Even if your health would not be adversely affected by the adulterants, you might still want to be certain you're getting is genuine.
Let's say you bought corn syrup while under the impression that it was honey. It might not harm your health any more than any other corn syrup would, but you've still been defrauded, and what you got might not have the same health benefits that honey has (assuming honey has such benefits).
Your purchasing decisions could have an ecological impact too. Effectively subsidizing the growing of corn by mistakenly buying corn syrup will have different ecological consequences than subsidizing the establishment of more bee colonies by buying genuine honey.
That's not to mention the ethical issues of being conned in to giving money to fraudsters versus giving it to honest business people.
We should be able to do the same with modern technology and severely penalize individuals who commit fraud.
With the industrialization of food we (as a society) forgot the real taste of raw aliments and artisanal intermediate products.
We're all stuffing our face with sugar, dairy, fatty red meat and processed food and nobody really seems to care. Most of the so-called healthy alternatives aren't healthy at all. Just look at what are called "protein bars" at your local market and check how much sugar those have, to name one example.
Something to bear in mind here is that products designed for athletes won't be healthy for people who aren't training at high volume. The metabolic pathway for sugar is very different when taken during or after training.
In a macro sense, Americans have bad diets, don't exercise enough, and are easy to market to, but in a micro sense, food bought here is extremely safe.
I.e. Won't kill you directly
This is similar with maple syrup, which comes from sugar maple trees. We sought it out for the sugar. Now that it is a really, really expensive way to get sugar, we still love it. Nevermind that other trees produce very similar flavors. Ever try birch tablets? They taste a lot like maple, probably just as complex a flavor, but of course they need regular sugar to sweeten them because birch trees make plenty of flavor, but not much in the way of sugar. Still, we seek out pure maple syrup because of tradition.
Now that we have far cheaper and purer sources of sugar, we still want honey, but again, more for traditional reasons than anything else. We try to convince ourselves of the benefits, because we really want to keep these traditional foods in our lives. And while we don't want it to be fake, we also can't actually tell the difference if it is.
This just lends itself to fraud.
I'm not suggesting honey flavors have no benefit, but it just seems odd that we have chosen those specific flavors as being tasty (honey and maple), when their primary attraction was that they came with sugar which was otherwise scarce (but no longer is).
Anyway, people buy fake honey simply because they think it is honey. So I don't think it is the specific taste that you can only get from actual honey.
Most people these days buy fake maple syrup (since real is so expensive), and tests have shown most can't tell the difference from real, and many prefer the fake.
Even without that usage, harvesting honey can be harmless to bees and benefit surrounding plant life. That makes it one of the best (if not the best) sources of concentrated sugar from an environmental perspective.
That's great if they can sell it and make money to subsidize the other part of their business (pollination). But if the economics aren't there, that's unrealistic.
Remember, honey bees harvest honey as food for themselves during winter. If you take away their honey, then you need to feed them sugar. The most practical thing is to leave the honey for the bees, and make sugar for humans from other sources that are cheaper (can, beats etc). If honey has some amazing benefit for humans that can't be replicated (whether flavor or health), fine, but the fact that so many can't tell the difference tells me that that isn't sustainable.
This is only in some parts of the world. My bees have never known winter.
I think you're missing my point but I don't have time to elaborate.
https://www.amazon.de/Dovgan-Birkensaft-mit-Minzgeschmack-Pa...
Probably not the "real" thing like the locals who produce it have, but as a city dweller i'm happy to be able to put it in my shopping cart. Once exotic and only to be had in russian speciality markets, it popped up in larger supermarkets with a full sortiment in the russian isles, and in the last few weeks even Lidl had it.
if you have access to a lot of raw birch sap you can have birch honey which is dark and robust, and quite dear unless you have acreage of birch trees and a ^lot^ of bees in spring.
It comes in a wide-mouth jar so it's at least easy to scoop out.
A honey lacking maltose will crystallize into large hard crystals that have to be melted .
You can buy 10lbs-50lbs at a time and eat it over the course of years. So pay attention to your local classifieds (craigslist, nextdoor, facebook) in late summer and early fall, and buy honey as local as you can get.
It seems likely the whole article was a part of the strategy of the class action lawsuits mentioned near the end. Extremely exaggerated rhetoric, little in the way of verifiable claims.
This testing organization claims 70% of honey they tested was adulterated in some way after talking about the most egregious offenders, making you assume it’s all just imported sugar filtered with hydrocarbons with a little honey mixed in. But they also claim just heating up raw honey to make it easier to work with is an offense according to their rules.
While I’m all for more transparency or standardization this feels a bit submarine like.
Guess I’ll have to start finding local honey.
Nutritionally, honey isn't that different from sucrose, so no. It's like the HFCS vs sucrose argument; they're basically the same, and you're still eating sugar.
I do actually buy local farm honey, though. It's incredible how you can see and taste difference in monofloral honey.
Consistency, smell, flavor varies a lot, same for the honey depending on what the bees "ate".
Sucrose is a very minor component of honey.
Oh, and not as something exotic but massproduced and cheap, so that everyone can afford it, use it casually on a daily basis and make a wide berth around all the fraud that is always out there even before putting it into the shopping cart.
https://www.spectro.com/products/xrf-spectrometer/xsort-xrf-...
I got these when i did that with a borrowed gammascout maybe 10 to 15 years ago, even with the beeping disabled.
Panic, Panic! Don't do that here! What do you think the customers think? Don't come back here! Go, go, out, away!
Well, what do I as customer think if that's forbidden?
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/10/121011-blue-...
While searching that i learned about another kind of "blue honey", which is also very interesting.
I'm interested to see where that goes, as I can see that actually being a selling point rather than something to hide.
I'm adding that to my food safety/purification/sterilisation methods list.
They do a lot of testing if it's actual honey and most of the fake honey comes from China.
What the heck is "fancy" honey? Did not read the article.