Beekeepers halt honey awards over fraud in global supply chain | Hacker News Reader

Beekeepers halt honey awards over fraud in global supply chain

theguardian.com

203 pointsa_w232 comments

Here's a very straightforward guide to buying honey. If you see honey at a supermarket, no you don't, that's sugar syrup. If you see honey online, no you don't, that's sugar syrup. If you find an old dude with a small stand and a bunch of (most likely unlabelled) jars who only accepts cash, that's where you get real honey.

How do you know this? Is there actual reporting on what percentage of honey in supermarkets is adulterated, rather than just anecdotal reports that at least some is?

From the article:

An EU investigation published last year found 46% of imported sampled products were suspected to be fraudulent, including all 10 from the UK. Samples used in October by the UK branch of the Honey Authenticity Network for a novel form of DNA testing found that 24 out of 25 jars from big UK retailers were suspicious.

Some part of the verbiage here is unscientific. We're in need of a percentage of suspicion that applies to a percentage of jars and whether that percentage of suspicion is based on the presence or absence of certain adulterants.

Otherwise these percentages give more ambiguity than insight about the products.

Also:

> Regulators in the UK have not published detailed results of official tests, but rejected claims of significant fraud.

If I remember correctly this was already the situation in Germany already decades ago. At least half of the honey on the German market was (to use the term from the present article) adulterated as EU investigations at the time showed. The investigators was even hidden camera footage with importers admitting they knew this was the case. Then a lot of lobbying money moved around between importers, distributors, and local authorities, and the honey kept flowing.

The labs that did the testing were good for far more delicate work so it wasn't a matter of precision and accuracy, more a matter of Germans loving their honey. Stopping the flow of cheap, even if adulterated honey from China and at the time I think also Ukraine would be a big hit to the industry's wallet. I bet all those involved just told themselves "sweet is sweet" and went about their profit making business.

It's extremely common for honey sold in the UK to be labelled as a 'blend of EU and non-EU honey', or similar. There's no doubt in my mind that what this really means is that they've no real idea where the honey comes from.

On the rare occasion I do buy honey it's usually Scottish Heather Honey, which is as delicious as it is expensive.

Yeah as soon as I see 'blend of EU and non-EU honey' then I'm noping out of there as it just means disguised sugar syrup.

Actual location authenticated honey costs actual real money.

Honey supply chains are opaque and global, plus the incentives to cheat are clearly there and it's hard to definitively prove a batch was not adulterated. I'd say it's fair to be suspicious.

That said, this old article seems to think its not as common a problem as you would expect: https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2011/11/25/142659547/re...

> "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!'"

Anecdotal but everything in that NPR article rings true to me. American consumers are used to the bear shaped bottles with purified honey that’s barely distinguishable from sugar syrup and could easily be adulterated but the raw honey I usually buy is so obviously honey from the taste and texture that I have a hard time believing any of it is adulterated. If honey producers were really that good at artificially replicating flavor profiles, they’d be far ahead of the rest of the food science industry.

Are you sure what you believe is unadulterated honey because you are familiar with the taste, is not just adulterated and you are just so accustomed to fake honey that you confuse the two?

I say that because basically all the honey I’ve ever bought in a store has always tasted flat and lacked flavor depth that has long made me wonder about its authority compared to known hive honey.

I’ve had raw honey straight from both domesticated and wild hives as it was collected so unless the bees themselves are adulterating it, I think I’ve got an accurate baseline for how honey is supposed to taste.

Go out and buy a good manuka or wild Himalayan honey and you’ll quickly learn how to spot the real stuff. The honey I buy isn’t meant to look like filtered golden sugar syrup so adulterating it is practically impossible. That said I buy it from ethnic grocery stores so unless you’re getting the good stuff at Trader Joes YMMV (I like their manuka)

I remember an episode of Dirty Jobs where there was an old candy plant or something that bees had gotten into, and they made blue honey from the syrup that was left over in the plant.

Rare, but possibly the bees were doing a swindle.

From my limited understanding almost all beekeepers give their bees sugar syrup to help them overwinter anyway so nothing stops them from supplementing their diets in the spring. It’s obviously not ideal since a lot of the other aromatics from pollen will be missing but it’s still a step up from mixing the end product with sugar syrup.

Blue honey sounds cool though.

Thicker 'fondant' is for winter. Thinner syrup is for spring before the nectar flow gets going. Typically over winter the colony reduces in size, and the hive is reduced down to a single "brood box".

Supers (extra boxes) are placed on the hive when the colony is producing enough honey to harvest.

In theory the supplemental sugar shouldn't get into the supers.

My Grandpa is a beekeeper, i help him take care of his hives. The honey i get out of that crystallises quickly to a relatively rough texture, and has a deep taste. It is a completely different thing than what you get in the store.

I don’t know if that one is adulterated, or just processed so much that it is all flat and smooth.

I’m so confused by people not liking crystallized honey. It’s so much more convenient to use, it doesn’t drip anywhere it’s practically like thick peanut butter consistency. Great for yogurt, toast or tea. Why would anyone want it to be runny?

We buy from Costco and most/all of it crystallizes after some time.

Not sure if that makes it good honey, but there’s that.

The first thing that popped into my head after reading this was the large container of Kirkland honey I have.

I thought: “Costco wouldn’t lie to me? Would they?”

Now I must go and find out.

Just because they're not lying doesn't mean they've done the work of finding out whether the honey is pure.

Costco apparently sells one of the few olive oils that aren't adulterated. So their honey might also be real.

You can heat it in a microwave to reverse the crystallization.

Do not do this ifs the honey is in a squeezable bear container. The honey will boil, make a hole in the bear and spray honey all over the inside of your microwave (the turntable helps this). This will make a huge mess and will make opening the microwave more challenging.

I think the general recommendation is to put the bottle in warm/hot water. I don’t believe microwaving is a good idea, unless done at low power for longer.

Sous-vide at 110F. It will take hours, but it won't affect the flavor.

Warm water is sufficient, though with recent cautions about heating plastics and leaching of chemicals, I'd prefer transferring the honey to a glass jar if it's not packaged in such already.

You can double-boil if you want, where the jar sits in a shallow water bath which you boil for 10--20 minutes or so to decrystalise the honey.

Crystallization isn’t an indicator of fake or low quality honey.

We have had wildflower honey crystallize in the honeycomb when we left it in the garage over winter.

It can be decrystallized easily with gentle heat. I put our jars in a water bath in a pot and leave it over a low setting for about an hour until it is good. The water never gets over 125 or so, which should be fine.

I had meant the other way, that it crystallizes so if it means that it’s a good honey.

There are a number of things that can affect crystallization; Storage conditions, filtering, what the bees foraged, etc.

There are some genuine honeys which rarely crystalize.

Afaik (as an amateur beekeeper), it is not a good indicator of anything in particular, there are even reports of adulterated honey crystallizing. This make sense, since honey and fake honey are both a supersaturated solution of sugars that will gladly crystalize if given an opportunity.

There are many studies into this, but this Forbes article [0] is a good example:

> Of 123 honey exporters to Europe, 70 are suspected of having adulterated their products, and out of 95 European importers checked, two-thirds are affected by at least one suspect batch.

This is only one example, similar stings elsewhere have likewise found bleak results.

As the son of a beekeeper I can attest to this, the honey you find at a grocery store and what actually comes out of a hive are very different things. Even if you boil natural honey you still don't get the texture and consistency they have at the store.

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/ceciliarodriguez/2023/03/24/hal...

> Of 123 honey exporters to Europe, 70 are suspected of having adulterated their products

That sounds better than the rates I saw of good/bad extra virgin olive oil, and you can most certainly find good EVOO at a grocery store; you just need to know what brands to look for. Is there any reason to believe it isn't the same with honey? If not, then that's a pretty far cry from "If you see honey at a supermarket, no you don't, that's sugar syrup".

And similar to olive oil. Once you taste the real deal, it's very easy to identify the fake/watered down stuff by taste alone.

> similar stings

Agreed that fresh honey and store honey are very different. You would think that, given how different they are, it would be easy to detect the fake honey. But apparent lyrics not.

And he is definitely globally wrong anyway.

Our local supermarket sells honey from a local beekeeper that we've also bought honey from directly before. Only that one local supermarket has their honey and it's closer to us than driving to the beekeeper. And yes it has a nice looking but plain label on the jar.

He is probably mostly right about large quantity, imported honey tho.

I think as a guide for buying honey his advice is valuable, although a bit dramatic, and it won’t apply to every country or region.

As someone who is a beekeeper and owns a farm, you can be much more certain what you’re getting is honey where I am from when it’s being purchased from the back of a van from some random person with some glass jars, than you can at any supermarket. Hi it’s me I am the random person with the glass jars :)

Are you talking about a specific country or anywhere (in the West, I assume)?

What I had heard was that anything that isn't "single source" likely has sugar syrup added. this includes all major brands. I wouldn't even trust the expensive "organic" versions of big brands. Apparently exported Chinese "honey" is the main offender which gets mixed with other sources.

Two of the supermarkets in the UK I shop in have their own brand "Spanish Forest Honey", that claims to be single source from Spain. I have no reason to not trust that it is yet. It is about x2-3 more expensive than the big mainstream brands, darker and tastes stronger.

The Spanish producers could be adding sugar syrup as well I suppose, but aside from hunting down honey from farmers markets it's the best option I have.

Sainburys has Scottish Heather Honey. According to the label it's 100% Scottish honey.

Interesting you appear to be getting downvoted for presumably accurately stating that China is the majority source of fake honey.

It was such a known problem that China had to start laundering its honey, I believe at one point Singapore suddenly became one of the world's latest exporters or "honey"

Better yet befriend a beekeeper. You gain a friend and honey.

Cut out the middleman. Become friend with the bees. You gain a hive mind as friend, and honey! :D

Bit to get honey would mean to rob your hive friend.

Na dude, they are chill. They produce more under your friendship so you can keep a little. If they think the relationship is going toxic they just leave. It's awesome

Yeah, it's basically this. Most wouldn't survive winter.

How do they survive winter? Do they hibernate, go south or stay?

They mostly enter a low activity state and cluster in the hive to stay warm and save energy/honey. If it gets warm enough outside on occasion you will see them leaving the hive to poop and push the dead bees out.

Yeah, one of my best friends is a beekeeper and we get our honey from him. This led to an uptick in honey consumption around here and perhaps not unrelatedly, I got my first ever cavity about six months ago.

Nope, he just bought from the store, repackaged, then resold with a markup as it is cheaper to do so

Buy from a bee keeper if you care that much. The "cash only old dude with a stand" filter will fail.

Now old dudes will buy supermarket honey and unlabeled jars.

Unverifiable provenance in both cases..

If you /really/ want to be sure, buy comb honey. Impossible to fake.

Can't fake honeycomb be made and placed in to jars of fake honey?

I think the market is probably too small to put the money into figuring out how to fake it convincingly. Also the market leans towards enthusiasts who detect fakes more readily than the average honey normie.

If it ever becomes mainstream this will definitely happen.

Cost/reward is likely sufficient disincentive.]

This is shades of "if you can fake sincerity you can fake anything":

<https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/12/05/fake-honesty/>

(Uncertain origin, though often attributed to Groucho Marx, George Burns, Jean Giraudoux, Celeste Holm, Ed Nelson, Samuel Goldwyn, Daniel Schorr, Joe Franklin, and/or Anonymous.)

I've seen it but never dared to buy. What do you do with the honey comb, eat it? Does it taste waxy?

The comb walls are basically like chewing gum. It does not have much taste.

Yes you can eat it and you spit out the wax. The wax is a bit flaky so I didn't find it that pleasant to chew on. Some people apparently spread it in toast like jam and eat it wax and all. It's not great for stirring into drinks.

This isn’t true at all in the United States at least.

Sugar syrup or even honey adulterated with sugar syrup behaves differently. I’ve had some cheap generic brand bottles that flowed too easily, dissolved too quickly, and never crystallized. Probably sugar syrup.

But I haven’t seen this once since over a decade ago in my college days when I shopped at some questionable neighborhood supermarkets.

Everything I’ve bought from local supermarkets and chains like Costco has felt, looked, flowed, tasted, and crystallized like real honey.

You should probably be more suspicious about those roadside shops, too. With the rise of “farmers’ markets” as a side hustle you can no longer tell what’s what just by the fact that they’re operating out of a stand and taking cash. Around here, a lot of the “farmers’ market” and even roadside stand operators are reselling products they get from other entrepreneurs who sell them the produce, honey, and other goods. There’s a group of people here who have roadside stands with signs spray painted by hand to look like mom and pop DIY operations, which tricks people until they realize those exact signs are in 100s of locations across the state. It’s just another business preying on people’s lack of trust in institutions but implicit trust in anything that feels mom and pop, just like your comment implies.

My brother in law owns bees and gifts us honey. One is strong, thick, crystallised easily. One is thin and flows very easily, very see through. These things aren’t good indicators of adulteration at all

Is it like a bloom filter? Crystallizes easily means real? Doesn’t crystallize easily means unknown?

Unfortunately not. The rate of crystallisation depends on the source of nectar for the honey, I know from experience that clover honey seems to crystallise a lot sooner than Manuka honey.

It also depends on the sort of processing done. Commercial honey is pasturised, but local suppliers might not.

Different blooms cause different types of honey, yeah.

No you can buy cheap “mix of non EU” honey in both styles from the supermarket for about the same price

The place I buy honey is run by an older woman in Vermont who owns a lovely apiary. I've visited and seen the process, she's fantastic, her product is delicious, and it's as real as it gets. They're 4th gen family owned, so they really know what they're doing and it's all about the bees, the honey and their reputation.

Plus the honey is so delicious. When I visited she gave me this little container of the foam that collects on top of the raw honey. It was delicious, I ate a little spoonful of it every day until it ran out.

I don't work for them, I don't get money from them, I'm just an enthusiastic long-term customer.

Champlain Valley Apiaries: https://www.champlainvalleyhoney.com/

I cannot recommend them enough.

My mom discovered Champlain Valley about 10 years ago, so now every time she visits (we’re in VA, she’s from CA), she sends an order with a two pound jar ahead so she has a honey she likes in our pantry. I don’t complain at all, because it means we have excellent honey to consume once she leaves :)

Your mother sounds great; it's funny too because I was also introduced to this by my mother! She's an avid tea drinker, and loves honey in her tea. Meanwhile I have Greek yogurt most mornings, and with addition of really good honey it becomes unbeatable.

I guess the point my mother would claim is, "Listen to your mother, she knows best." Heh

I regularly buy honey from the supermarket from a long established Greek brand and it’s as good as any honey I get from local markets, if not better.

But all the honey labels say the only ingredient is honey. We've always been able to assume that with things like jams, or any other food, when manufacturers adulterate it with things like corn syrup, or even mild poisons, they proudly say so on the label. To not do so is fraud. How can people just claim that an entire industry is committing fraud??? Even this article doesn't mention anything about proof, just suspicions. Why can't they prove it? To make these kind of claims without proof is arguably worse than fraud. This would all be outrageous if it's true, since it becomes impossible to make any rational choices as consumers if the food system has gone fraudulent.

That’s because honey is sugar syrup with a liberal sprinkling of marketing. The sugar syrup they are blending it with doesn’t have the right marketing and is therefore not honey.

No, it's not. Honey is defined by the USDA as being flower nectar that's been processed by bees[1]. Artificial honey can not be called honey[2]. If they're mixing it with high fructose corn syrup, then there should be a way to scientifically determine that.

[1] https://www.ams.usda.gov/sites/default/files/media/Extracted...

[2] https://www.ams.usda.gov/sites/default/files/media/Extracted...

Oh, the USDA publishes a rule! Surely everyone will follow that and the problem is solved.

Unfortunately we get the behavior that we let people get away with. Regulators are asleep, courts let companies weasel their way around everything, and reality doesn't care about published rules and standards.

Regulations like these are onerous. Have you ever watched a bee filling out a Dept of Ag or FDA form? Dept of Govt Efficiency will fix it.

A 90s percent of honey is fructose, glucose, and water. A very high 90s percent of corn syrup is fructose, glucose, and water. Getting the ratios the same is trivial. There is nothing magical about fructose or glucose from different sources, they’re exactly the same simple molecule.

If you had very clean corn syrup, you could undetectably dilute honey and it would be quite the same. Lab tests being what they are these days, someone could probably make a part per billion analysis that would be very hard to evade, but the difference is emotional not practical.

People have wrong ideas that honey is so much healthier than corn syrup when it is indeed very similar. Not that i support selling corn syrup as honey, but it wouldn’t make any actual difference other than diluted flavor.

The remaining 10 percent is very significant to flavor. You can definitely detect it with your tongue and nose.

But as you say it is utterly irrelevant to nutrition or health. Even the antibacterial elements are real but negligible.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10346535/

Numerous studies have concluded that honey does have a better effect on health than the same amount of simple syrup, at least.

> It has been demonstrated that honey consumption can influence plasma lipid, glucose, and insulin levels through different biochemical mechanisms. The decrease in blood glucose may be due to the fact that honey has a stimulatory effect on insulin secretion and improves insulin sensitivity

An uncited statement in a review article!

If I'm rich in time and money enough to routinely take the time to wander down to my friendly beekeeper and buy their small-batch artisanal honey, for so many reasons I will live longer than someone who isn't.

Someone should randomize people to honey vs fake-honey-sugar-mix and settle the issue.

You mean, something like this?

> Forty-eight articles published in 42 different journals were analyzed, with a total of 3655 subjects with 29.51 ± 21.51 years of age, of whom 1990 consumed or were treated with honey. Of the 3655 subjects, at least 1803 were women (two studies did not specify). The studies included different population groups (healthy subjects, overweight or obese subjects, diabetic subjects, subjects with cancer, children, etc.) and included more than 30 different types of honey. Although it is not a systematic review, the results of the PEDro scale regarding the quality of the articles were in the range of 6–10, with articles scoring 6 or higher being considered of good methodological quality.

How do they know the study participants consumed honey and not corn syrup?

How do they know 1803 study participants were women?

There is no assertion that those individuals were randomized, simply "treated".

Honey and sugar syrups have other various constituents, and it's trivially possible to tell them apart via GC/MS at far higher levels than ppb.

https://zenodo.org/records/438103

We share more than 90% of our DNA with rats. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I’d like to suggest there are some qualitative differences between myself and a literal rat.

In most politicians, the percentage is even higher.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=v5sc2F0oQvw

Orange juice is more than 90% water, but you would need to get your sense of taste checked if you confused it with sugar water.

By the same token if you can’t taste the difference between sugar syrup and honey, then you need to get your taste checked, or perhaps you’ve never had real honey.

The flavors in honey are also deeply affected by what the bees eat. Buckwheat honey is a totally different thing than Tupelo honey, and neither are anything like clover honey.

Even if you ignore all of the health claims, saying honey is just sugars and water, you are ignoring the fact that humans want more than nutrient paste.

Hoboy, don't get started on orange juice. The commercially-prepared stuff is also rather distantly-related to fresh-squeezed:

Once the juice is squeezed and stored in gigantic vats, they start removing oxygen. Why? Because removing oxygen from the juice allows the liquid to keep for up to a year without spoiling. But! Removing that oxygen also removes the natural flavors of oranges. Yeah, it’s all backwards. So in order to have OJ actually taste like oranges, drink companies hire flavor and fragrance companies, the same ones that make perfumes for Dior, to create these “flavor packs” to make juice taste like, well, juice again.

<https://gizmodo.com/dirty-little-secret-orange-juice-is-arti...>

And that's for product actually marketed as orange juice, rather than, say, a sweetened citrus-flavoured beverage, for which the first ingredient often is sugar and/or corn syrup, e.g., "True Orange Mango Orangeade":

Ingredients: Cane sugar, crystallized orange (ctiric acid, orange juice, orange oil), natural flavor, stevia leaf extract, beet juice and beta-carotene.

(Beet juice and stevia are both sweeteners, the first is effectively liquid sugar, the second is a non-caloric / low-caloric non-sugar sweetener.)

<https://www.truecitrus.com/products/true-orange-mango-orange>

The fact that you're better off either squeezing your own or better yet eating whole fruit is a whole 'nother matter.

A more detailed production process:

"How products are made: Orange juice":

<https://www.madehow.com/Volume-4/Orange-Juice.html>

This is the truth about most types of oil too. All oil is bad and it’s all almost the same.

We share 98.8% of our DNA with chimpanzees, doesn’t make us chimpanzees.

Take a holiday to New Zealand and try honey here. It’s definitely not adulterated because we don’t allow any honey imports. Try clover, Rewarewa, Manuka, and multiflora, you can taste a clear difference between each.

Of course they’ll likely be creamed honey rather than pourable, but that’s just a preference.

Oh absolutely, real honey has flavor differences en masse!

The worst we ever tried was pure Buckwheat honey. Very distinct. Sorta "refreshingly different" the first time you try it. For us personally, after that: toss.

That’s like saying humans are the same as chimps because they are both 60% water - the difference is not emotional

This particularly americanised brand of nihilism is so bloody tiring.

I'm sorry you're just hearing this only right now, but unfortunately it's been happening for a while, and we've also known it for a while.

I.e. https://food.ec.europa.eu/food-safety/eu-agri-food-fraud-net... found widespread fraud and put measures in place to prevent it, but it continues to be challenging.

Note this also happens with olive oil

https://www.europol.europa.eu/media-press/newsroom/news/11-o...

https://www.oliveoiltimes.com/business/europe/top-italian-po...

To a first approximation it's accurate to assume any imported olive oil on a grocery store shelf in the US is fraudulent. The only kind I buy now is 100% grown in California and certified by the California Olive Oil Council. And it is very expensive.

Absolutely. Avoid any blends outside the U.S.

Honestly, I don't care about "olive oil fraud" from/within the EU. As long as the final country that bottles it is responsible for food safety, then I am OK with it. Seriously, if you told me that tomatoes were mislabelled from Portugal instead of Spain, I would not care. What are the tangible drawbacks for consumers of mislabelled olive oil from EU?

There was an article about the word enshitification, what you describe the real life example: you are paying a premium price for a product with a lowering quality every year that goes by. Fighting labelling fraud is the correct answer.

If it is written extra virgin olive oil that means a certain oil quality expected in terms of taste. For me that means I can enjoy a non rancid oil on my tasteful tomatoes with real mozzarella di buffalo, and that is a world of difference with making the same salad with tasteless but "tested on rats safe" products

You’re overpaying for poor quality products. Quite simple.

So, if olive oil from Portugal is imported to Italy and bottled and mislabelled as from Italy, this makes it automatically lower quality? This is the kind of virtue signalling bullshit that I reject on HN.

It sounds like you're trying to be angry. I don't see any virtue signaling here except some "holier than thou" from the tone in your comment.

Nobody is claiming that a label magically changes the quality. The comments above are claiming that olive oil from some regions fetch a higher price in the market, ostensibly for good reasons, and that taking something else and claiming it is from that region is fraud. I'm surprised that feels controversial.

    > ostensibly for good reasons

Can you name some of these reasons?

I have no expertise in regional honey or olive oil or any of the other often-counterfeited things but I assume it is something like wine where the region implies terroir, relevant policies/regulations, and long histories of expertise/techniques. For example, I have heard honey is majorly impacted by the regional flowers around where it is produced.

I personally wouldn't know Italian olive oil from Greek from rancid American garbage but if people think they do and they are trying to buy something in particular then ideally they aren't mislead about that.

If something like this is done it’s done to save cost, which almost always correlates with quality.

If you find this hard to believe, I recommend reading this Forbes article [0] which gives some pretty stark numbers. I've included a few select quotes below:

> According to the sampling and monitoring work carried out by the Brussels-based body, almost 50% of the honey from non-European countries is cut with sugar syrups made from rice, wheat or sugar beet.

> All the 10 honeys entered via the United Kingdom were marked “non-compliant” and mixed with imports from Mexico, Ukraine and Brazil.

> Apart from the main fraudulent addition of sugar syrups, the report also alerts of the presence of additives and colorings and the falsification of traceable information.

So yeah, a considerable part of honey contains more than what's on the label and often isn't of the origin written on the label. As for outrageous, it is — beekeepers have been sounding the alarm on this issue for years — but nothing has been done to stop this on the policy side.

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/ceciliarodriguez/2023/03/24/hal...

It makes total sense for European farmers to cry foul if cheaper imports get to masquerade as the real thing. This has been a big sticking point for the EU-Mercosur deal that recently concluded.

fyi, "forbes.com/sites" is just some blogging platform.

In this case, it's mostly right, but the original source is https://food.ec.europa.eu/food-safety/eu-agri-food-fraud-net...

You’re too generous.It runs paid influence campaigns.

Why do consumers think honey is a special food deserving to spend so much money upon it? I never understand it. Also, I am no doubting this specific Forbes-hosted blog (as I call them), but reader beware. I don't think there is any editorial guidance from the main publishing house. You see all kinds of dubious crap posted on that platform! In the last year or so, HN front page now specifically distinguished blog posts from these subsites, versus the main publisher's website.

Honey is a special food and one of the key ingredients for modern civilisation

   > one of the key ingredients for modern civilisation

I tried to Google about this but I could not find anything scientific. Lots of of pseudo-science, however. Can you explain more? Essentially, honey is sugar, an inessential part of the human diet. What am I missing?

Without bees agriculture is not possible. Without agriculture modern civilisation would not exist.

The phrasing in the article about "suspected to be fraudulent" is over-cautious, probably because of Britain's very generous libel laws covering newspapers.

Wait til you hear about maple syrup...

That aside, yeah, this is a real problem with honey (and maple syrup) in the US. Food manufacturers will go to insane lengths to get around any laws that protect product purity and honest labeling because the profits are far greater than the fine for breaking the rules.

As we all know, if the punishment is a fine, it's only illegal for companies that cannot afford to pay...like the guy at the farmer's market with the mason jars.

I have never heard of maple syrup fraud in the US nor can I find any articles on it.

Unless one is talking about imitation maple syrups, but those are labeled properly.

It's also a thing, unfortunately.

https://news.uoguelph.ca/2023/04/maple-syrup-fraud-undermine...

That "article" appears to be a promotion for a test to detect maple syrup fraud in Canada.

It doesn't say maple syrup fraud is common in the US. It does cite an article about someone who bought fake syrup from a random "trucker" on the internet, but that article explicitly says it's not a big issue.

I assume that the notion of adulterated honey is new to you and that you’re not in the industry. This has been an issue for decades, it’s nothing new. There are commercial honey producers and packers that are clean but the easiest and surest way to avoid fake honey is to buy local.

All of the honey I buy at grocery stores crystalizes almost immediately… sugar syrup won’t do that. I usually buy something that appears to be directly from a local farm with a name and address I recognize, and is in a regular mason jar with no fancy branding.

So I’ve never had real honey? Why doesn’t someone just sell the stuff the small dude sells in a store?

They do, parent is full of shit. Too much Instagram probably.

There seems to be a lot of gatekeeping where if people buy something too easily it’s made clear they are not getting the “real” thing. Why?

They do sell it in stores, but there is no clear way you can know if you are getting the real stuff or fake - the labels look the same.

If you see honey at a supermarket, no you don't, that's sugar syrup.

I get my honey from a local beekeeper who delivers to my door. He welcomes people to tour his farm to see how it's produced.

He also sells his honey in the local chain supermarkets. Your broad generalization is false.

His point is that there is no reliable way to differentiate between real honey and adulterated product for the average consumer in store.

If 1/3 of the honey in the store is fake, but you don’t know which 1/3 is fake, then what is the point of buying any honey at that store? If you need advice about where to buy pure honey because you don’t personally know the farmer then, “treat everything at the grocery store as suspect” is fine advice.

If you have personally toured an apiary, know the keeper, and happen to know that he sells at a few grocery stores as well, you don’t need the advice, and your addition isn’t helpful since the end result is the same: the average person can’t trust the honey at their large grocery store, and they should find a local beekeeper.

The "down to earth local grower" is a form of marketing that appeals to you. It's not a guarantee of quality, and probably more variable. Many vendors at farmer's markets just buy and relabel stuff, because producing goods efficiently enough to make a profit is actually hard.

I'm pretty sure my own father is not masquerading as a beekeeper to market his honey to me. You're right though that it alone doesn't pay the bills, but it does definitely help.

same experience. Bee keeping is a fairly accessible hobby, actually, and the honey is very good, although you wind up with far too much of it

I do prefer my dad's to buying "local" stuff at the supermarket but I'm not sure I believe all the uncited claims in this thread about everything on the shelf there being fake

This is true but there are varying degrees of “buying and relabeling” stuff. At its worst yes they could be going to a wholesaler or supermarket or restaurant supply store and just reselling those goods.

What I suspect is more common and isn’t as bad is that someone operates as a consumer brand/storefront for several small scale local farms. Given the variety of produce sold at so many of the farmers’ markets stalls in CA, and that most of it does indeed seem artisanal (ie not the kind you’d see in a grocery store), locally growable, and in-season I’m pretty sure this is commonplace.

There’s just no way a “down to earth local grower” could farm 15+ different kinds of crops at the scale required to operate one or more farmer’s market stalls multiple days a week, and operate the stalls. You’d need a big operation for that to not be a logistical nightmare. That said, if a vendor is just selling one or two things that keep well (like honey) it seems totally feasible that they’re truly a “down to earth local grower” although that also means they’re “possibly a complete amateur/fraud”

agree, a lot of honey growers feed sugar syrup to the bees to maximize honey production.

it is sort of cheating

Or to keep hives alive when nectar is scarce but colonies have not started to hibernate. Adulteration of produced honey with syrup would be 10x easier than feeding bee with syrup and then doing extraction from comb.

In some climates if there's been a bad year, or an inexperienced beekeeper harvested too much honey, it is sometimes necessary and normal to feed bees with sugar in autumn/winter to prevent starvation. This shouldn't make it into the honey harvested on spring and summer.

https://www.honeybeesuite.com/winter-feed-q-a-liquid-vs-soli...

Not to say there aren't some frauds out there. But the well known "honey stall dude" in my area happens to be my friend's father and I've been lucky enough to be able to go around with him to see the many many beehives he has stashed around the local countryside. For most of these people, it's a passion, and their honey is legit.

On the complete opposite end, if you go to a supermassive grocery store and buy their store brand then you'll be getting real honey simply because they have deep pockets and a massive target on their backs if they're committing fraud.

The supermarkets around here sell local honey. Same product as at the farmers' market, but more convenient.

I have a Flow Hive in an urban environment, and to me, my honey - it’s harvested by a clever cell, and it isn’t harvested by scraping comb, so it is very clean and homogenous - is indistinguishable from most industrially distributed honey. So I feel like your criteria would mean I’d be accused of adulteration.

Can people see and taste the differences between (a) sugar syrup and (b) dehydrated flower nectar and liquid sugars? Certainly in the case of small scale harvesting in a traditional hive: it will be have ground up comb, dead bee parts and gas that, in my opinion, adds little.

Sometimes bees get into stuff like a cherry syrup factory and they barf out blue food coloring into the cells which dehydrate and become blue honey, which you can also see.

Do people physiologically interact with something in the honey other than its sugar? Like is there something missing from sugar syrup? One clinically proven difference is that honey is an effective antibiotic on wounds whereas sugar syrup is not. Of course besides antibiotics in the honey, the bee barfs out other stuff that gets in there that can affect the development of bees, and trace amounts of pollen and bee poop get in it too, but I don’t think any of that interacts with us.

It’s a complex problem. You can easily read more about it, bees are well studied animals. For most culinary purposes you don’t want weird solids, moisture, gas and contaminants like that, so industrial honey suits people better anyway. But if you are applying it to a wound you want bee produced honey without comb, which readily exists in the medical supply chain. It is not accurate to say that the small town seller is the only source, or even the best source, of “real honey.”

I buy my honey from an old man, who parks off of Beach street, off of I-30, most saturdays. He drives a 30 year old van, falling apart, and places his goods on a plywood table.

Most of the honey is in canning jars, with a home printed label. The claim is it is sourced locally, and there are significant variations in color and taste over the year.

Is he scamming me and buying fake honey on Amazon and re-packaging it to look artisinal? Maybe. But I am convinced it is the real deal.

I would easily say that the old dude with a small stand in the market is the most suspicious. Most of them are frauds tricking tourists and co by the "local artisanal" aspect. In the same way that it is now very hard to find a Christmas market selling authentic artisanal products.

And in 2024, if he does not accept cash, it might probably because he is happy to not declare all his incomes. That is a bad sign if you expect such a guy to be honest to not mess with his honey!

in america yes that is a good rule of thumb

>said the UK should require importers to label the country of origin on all honey, including blends

It actually does require that, it must specify country of origin and whether it is a blend, if it's a blend then it contains syrup and possibly antibiotics.

Buy single origin which in europe is certainly available, in the UK avoid anything that has the line "a blend of EU and non-EU honey", you should be buying UK honey anyway if you're UK-based, it is better and not blended (except where fraud has been committed as in the article).

I think the FDA should build towards mass food analysis. To sell something en masse you should have to put down a deposit, and the FDA should do an annual analysis of your food (via mass spectometry) from samples from the food store. They should mix dozens of samples from different states to get good coverage.

Should you fail (illegal pesticides, ingredients differ than label, too much lead, whatever) then you lose your deposit, all profits made that year on that product, and go through a process of re-earning the right to sell that product.

For small local brands I'd exempt them until the economics became viable.

> To sell something en masse you should have to put down a deposit, and the FDA should do an annual analysis of your food (via mass spectometry) from samples from the food store

Why don't we see more private enforcement? Class action lawsuits against fraudulent producers and distributors?

According to the article, the switch is occurring somewhere in the supply chain. So in your proposal, what part of the supply chain would bee on the hook for this deposit and profit reaping?

we already have this in the FDA. it’s just isolated to nutrient labels for most foods. the deposit is your business. failing a random annual FDA inspection is already extremely financially impactful

what you’re looking for is deeper analysis than nutrition labels. this is actually something small local brands start with. they pay for private “certifications” like organic, non gmo, etc.

> failing a random annual FDA inspection

What is involved in that inspection and what does it take to actually fully fail it? Is it like most government tests where the first failure means you just have to fix the problems and schedule your retest?

> they pay for private “certifications” like organic, non gmo, etc.

As a consumer these have the _least_ value out of anything on the label to me.

If we had what I described then we wouldn't have fake honey on shelves.

> For small local brands I'd exempt them until the economics became viable.

Why would they suddenly become viable? The only way that would happen is if the price of the product is increased to cover the costs of what you're proposing. This will destroy small suppliers and increase the cost of everything to cover a set of risks that you haven't even fully characterized yet.

Feels like wherever you turn, you see a high-trust society disintegrating into a low-trust one.

To my untrained eye, this is a natural consequence of focusing on profit above all. So a natural consequence in cultures where such focus exists.

Yeah, and maybe also a focus on grabbing all you can now, without regard for the future.

And yet, this has happened since we've been around.

One of the most ancient examples of the written words we have is from a copper merchant complaining about the quality of the ingots he received[1]. The tablet could just as easily have been a complaint about the quality of honey purchased.

This is a reversion to the mean.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nāṣir

I'd argue there is much more fraud with product coming from china than what is locally produced. Fraud always existed but now it's more prevalent than before, simply because some countries don't really try to enforce simple rules.

For instance, Chinese mother refuse to buy powder milk in china since there has been so much fraud. Manufacturer put melamine (a plastic chemical) in powder milk for years to make them appear with more protein than reality, inducing kidney damage to newborn.

That kind of thing doesn't happen in civilized society, this require a complete lack of morality and wide corruption.

Maybe Ea-nāṣir was also too focused on profits, thinking more about shareholder value than the customer.

I'm increasingly convinced this switches cause and effect. Focusing on profit above all is a capitalist manifestation of an authoritarian zero-sum society; in state socialism it manifests as top-down anti-worker state focused on metrics and productivity. (In both cases a major problem is an absence of labor unions and formally independent oversight. People forget that Lenin killed workers who went on strike.)

I get annoyed at "capitalism is bad for the environment" because it ignores the Soviets' environmental devastation, which was done in the name of improving society. The truth is that environmentalism is a distinct ideology from purely economic concerns, and it wasn't until the 60s that environmentalism became a left-liberal agenda item. I think it is similar with authoritarianism versus democracy. Democratic capitalists work for their workers; authoritarian capitalists work for their investors.

Just beware that plenty of people are pretending to be "Democratic capitalists" and saying they work for you and even do things that look very good - but the end result is not good for you. Even in the case someone is honestly trying to work for you uintended consequences of their actions can be worse for you.

My thought would be that it's as much the fact that society is growing. It used to be we'd buy our food from the producers of it. If it was bad, word would get around and the 10-50 people that were buying from them would stop; and they'd be out of business. Then society grew and we got local stores. And, while the same _idea_ was true, there was a lot more people and word didn't get around as much; so the impact was smaller. Then big stores, major chains, and you and your 100 friends that know something is bad... don't matter to them very much. Then online retailers and now nobody matters to them. If word they they're cheating people gets out, they change the name of their business and they're fine again.

So sure, the pursuit of profits is impactful; but the lack of repercussions (when making choices that hurt others) is a pretty major player, too.

The phrase "a sucker born every minute" is not near as old as "caveat emptor" or "cui bono", but the constancy of viewpoint should have told you something

Rose colored glasses looking at the past. Nostalgia for something that never was.

Exactly. Food purity and safety has probably never been higher. 100 years ago there was widespread adulteration and contamination of food, in addition to pure snake oil sold as beneficial medication.

i don’t buy the low trust society model. i see improved awareness

I could imagine more adulteration happening as globalization goes up, because traceability gets so much more difficult. Food safety has probably gone up over the past 30 years. But I suspect adulteration has too.

Do you have evidence of that? Things do change, and sometimes for the worse.

PE squeezing hospitals, nursing homes, and rent is a new thing. Look at rents - the inflation of them is not something that happened in the past.

The exact thing in question might be slightly different, but nothing is new.

In the case of rents, the evil landlord raising rents and kicking people out is a trope you see in 1910s fiction. (probably before that, but I haven't personally read much fiction older than about 1910)

> The exact thing in question might be slightly different, but nothing is new.

I just don't see a reason to believe that. I've seen things change dramatically in my lifetime.

The original claim that Michelangelo11 made is that society in the past was higher trust. That's the claim that needs evidence. The person who disagrees with the initial claim is not the one who needs to initially provide evidence.

I generally agree, but someone making another claim in response also needs evidence. If the response was, 'what is the evidence?', that would be different.

How do you reconcile this with the narrative that life was unlivable 100 years ago and everyone was miserable and died of disease young?

How do I reconcile my claim that Michelangelo11 is looking at the past with rose colored glasses against your observation that things were much worse 100 years ago? These views are the same. There is nothing for me to reconcile.

I did not express my idea clearly. The narrative is that the past was awful, and to a degree that it sounds cartoonish. I personally think it's smelling like propaganda: "You think it's bad now? Well you should be grateful. Before we came around life was unlivable, etc."

So I'm asking why you think nostalgia is more powerful than: 1. the dominant narrative 2. The possibility of that narrative being true and living it.

Old people are not easily scammed because they are inherently stupid. It's because they grew up in a time when fewer people were trying to scam them, and are not on guard. I don't think seniors from the Soviet Union have this problem.

or better examinations revealing the ongoing challenges of societal co-operation to a wider audience

Actually I think the opposite is true in many cases. Food quality and safety standards are higher than ever.

This stuff sticks out because it’s getting caught and called out. There was a time when information spread slowly, tracking supply chains was basically impossible, and many businesses would do shady things because they knew they were unlikely to get caught.

Now we can sample things like honey with lab equipment that is basically magic compared to technology 50 years ago, so these things are getting caught. We also have the internet to share stories, so they’re getting seen.

So while people are becoming more aware, I think these things are actually better than in the past.

Actually I think the opposite is true in many cases. Food quality and safety standards are higher than ever.

You are correct. At least in the United States.

There was a university agronomist on the radio a couple of weeks ago talking about how people get all worked up about food recalls. They act like there are more of them than ever before.

She said the amazing thing is that there aren't more recalls, since we produce and consume so much food than ever with so much involved in the process.

She says the system isn't perfect (no system ever is), but it's far better than what we've had in the past and the results are remarkable.

It’s high trust in very specific ways. Walk into a supermarket and a box of X name brand whatever and it’s 99.99% guaranteed to be manufactured by the company it says on the box and be safe to consume no need for holographic stickers or whatnot.

However, pick up a high value product and it’s likely to be some effectively identical fake while still being sold by the company it says on the box. An expensive restaurant is quite likely to be selling you fish when it says it’s fish but it may not be the correct species of fish etc etc.

Eating at a random food truck is safe because we care a lot about safety, but let the buyer beware around just about anything else.

> However, pick up a high value product and it’s likely to be some effectively identical fake while still being sold by the company it says on the box.

What is this supposed to mean? Every high value product I purchase is definitely unique to the company that makes it. My laptop, GPU, car, and phone are definitely not some rebranded items.

It’s hard to sell a counterfeit car or GPU without someone noticing a difference.

Clothes, chargers, cables, etc are counterfeit because it isn’t nearly as obvious.

Name brand foods often come with significant markups and would be fairly easy to counterfeit premium bottled water etc. Except as the article mentions food substitutes generally happen earlier in the supply chain not at the grocery store.

The reverse also happens, knock-offs being as high quality as the name-brand because it's cheaper on the production side to use existing factories/machinery.

I just realized it wasn’t clear, but I meant high value for a grocery store.

To your point I’m reminded of the meat packing factories in The Jungle which were based on real conditions at that time and place.

Very true.

I lived in a developing country in Asia and the number of food safety concerns that popped up was far, far lower than what you see in the West.

When another foreigner mentioned how "safe" the food was, I said "yeah, concerns don't pop up because nobody is looking for them".

It’s fascinating how the 24/7 news cycle and social media have convinced so many people that everything is awful.

I still hear younger coworkers snidely remark that the US is an “third world country with cellphones” while they live a lifestyle with safety, comfort, and luxury that puts them in the top 1% of people in the world. It’s wild.

> I still hear younger coworkers snidely remark that the US is an “third world country with cellphones”

Given how things have been going in the US the past few years, I am frankly inclined to agree with them.

Healthcare aside, here is but one example: https://www.atlantanewsfirst.com/2024/08/14/new-video-shows-...

We used to sell _literal_ "snake oil" as a curative.

What you may actually be witnessing is a low awareness society turn into a high awareness one. What is being highlighted is you never should have had that trust in the first place.

And the funny thing is that the actual (or of you prefer, literal) snake oil, from Chinese water snakes, likely had at least some therapeutic properties. But much of what was sold as snake oil was itself adulterated (other animal oils, vegetable oils, or quite often, petroleum-based oil).

Actual snake oil in the 1800s came from Chinese water snakes, and Chinese laborers who immigrated to the U.S. shared it with fellow workers as they helped build the transcontinental railroad. This type of snake oil, Pedersen says, was indeed an effective anti-inflammatory.... Enter the mysterious Clark Stanley in 1893.... Standing on stage in front of a growing crowd, Stanley pulled a rattlesnake out of a sack resting near his feet. In dramatic fashion, he slit the rattlesnake open with a knife, placed the snake in a vat of boiling water, and watched as its fat rose to the surface. Stanley sold his product, dubbed “Clark Stanley’s Snake Oil Liniment,” in liniment jars, boasting about its healing powers. Of course, Stanley’s snake oil was a marketing gimmick from the very start.

Stanley's oil's actual ingredients: "mineral oil, beef fat, red pepper and turpentine". (Above article).

His and others' deceptive practices lead to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906.

<https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/how-snake-oil-beca...>

Wikpedia has more: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_oil>

How would you distinguish that from a society that is slowly discovering long lasting frauds that have been going on for decades?

> Feels like wherever you turn, you’re presented with negative narratives designed to maximize engagement

Fixed that for you.

Why call it fraud when you can call it honey laundering?

The association with money laundering doesn’t sound good and this is already a bad buzz.

It's a sticky situation!

Or embuzzling.

ouch! (and thank you!)

Only solution: sting operation

Call it “rarefied honey”, that makes it sound premium.

wow, it's almost like cutting taxes and disassembling the regulatory state creates bad outcomes anywhere it's profitable.

you mean interfering with the free market

Regulation is necessary to a free market. Otherwise powerful forces in the market will make it non-free for everyone else or make it non-free for honest business by forcing them to do illicit things to be competitive.

Of course. Free markets in the sense of being completely unregulated, are logically incompatible with regulated ones.

As a consumer, I want a regulated market. I want product safety and a lack of fraud.

If you want to put your local beekeeper out of the business of selling honey, then by all means, complain about an inadequate regulatory state. Because that's who the bureaucrats will go after.

What Buraeucrats are actually administering for anyone wondering:

Insurance Programs

Market-based risk management tools to strengthen the economic stability of agricultural producers and rural communities. Apiculture

Rainfall Index

The Apiculture Pilot Insurance Program (RI-API) provides a safety net for beekeepers’ primary income sources – honey, pollen collection, wax, and breeding stock. Beekeepers can purchase RI-API through a crop insurance agent that works for an Approved Insurance Provider.

Whole-Farm Revenue Protection

Whole-Farm Revenue Protection provides a risk management safety net for all commodities, including honey, on the farm under one insurance policy. This insurance plan is tailored for any farm with up to $8.5 million in insured revenue.

Micro Farm Program

A new insurance option for small, diverse farms that sell locally. The policy offers revenue guarantees for beekeepers producing honey, bees, queens, and other products of the hive when facing unavoidable adverse events, such as drought and other weather-related events. It also simplifies recordkeeping and covers post-production costs and value-added products, such as bottled honey, to make crop insurance more useful to smaller beekeepers and agricultural producers.

Disaster Assistance Programs

Offers disaster assistance programs in instances where beekeepers have been hit hard by natural disaster events.

Emergency Livestock Assistance Program

The Emergency Assistance for Livestock, Honey Bees, and Farm-Raised Fish program provides financial assistance to eligible honey bee producers for eligible adverse weather events and losses. Drought is not an eligible cause of loss for honey bee colony losses.

Noninsured Crop Disaster Assistance Program (NAP)

Eligible beekeepers can quality for NAP financial assistance when losses incurred by natural disasters are not covered by other disaster assistance programs.

Loan Programs

USDA offers a variety of direct and guaranteed loan programs for eligible beekeepers. See guide for more information.

Farm Loan Program (FLP)

Beekeepers whose primary business is honey production, qualify as a family farm, and demonstrate security and eligibility can be considered for FLP guaranteed loans, which can assist in building overwintering colony storage facilities.

Farm Storage Facility Loan Program

This program provides low-interest financing so producers can build or upgrade facilities to store commodities, including honey.

Microloan Programs

Operating and ownership loans to better serve the unique financial operating needs of new, niche, and small to mid-sized family operations.

Emergency Loan Program

Emergency loans to help beekeepers recover from production and physical losses due to drought, flooding, other natural disasters, or quarantine.

Beginning Farmers and Ranchers Loans Direct and guaranteed loan programs, ownership loans, operating loans, and microloan programs for beginning farmers and ranchers, including beekeepers.

Nonresource Marketing Assistance Loans – Honey Program

Marketing assistance loans provide interim financing at harvest time to help beekeepers meet cash flow needs without having to sell their commodities when market prices are typically at harvest-time lows. Grants

Local Agriculture Market Program (LAMP)

Multiple grants and programs are available through LAMP to support development, coordination, and expansion of direct producer-to-consumer marketing; local and regional food markets and enterprises; and value-added agricultural products.

Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Program

This program is open to small businesses that support the bee keeping industry in technology development and transfer.

Sustainable Agriculture, Research, and Education (SARE) Program

Producers and professionals in the beekeeping industry may apply for competitive funding available through this program.

Diagnostic Testing Bee Disease Diagnosis Service

A free USDA beekeeper service to identify diseases, pests, and foulbrood resistance.

https://www.usda.gov/sites/default/files/documents/usda-prog...

Regulation can ensure that businesses doing things right can actually complete. How the hell is my local beekeeper supposed to compete against people selling jars of corn syrup?

> Regulation can ensure that businesses doing things right can actually complete

Regulation adds fixed costs. That always increases barriers to entry.

The aim is to make that barrier worth it. (You can also directly mitigate it, but this is less common.) But in the cases of food and medicine, regulation has absolutely forced consolidation. The pitch from Big Pharma and Big Ag when buying out biotech and food start-ups (or small producers) is they've mastered the global compliance network, and can thus scale and thus outcompete small producers.

What it does seem we need is liability by large distributors around selling fraudulent products. That still adds a barrier to entry, since those distributors will have a testing programme. But at least you get multiple programs that have an incentive to reduce costs.

It increases one barrier which can reduce others - the illicit market power and practices of unregulated competitors.

Word of mouth. Not the best option, but it's balanced against the cost of regulation. The cost of complying with regulation (not changes in the product, but proving you comply) can destroy any hope of profit from a smaller business; but the cost doesn't increase at the same rate as business size, so the big businesses have no issue.

Regulations are important, but they have a distinct cost.

What are you talking about? None of those things have happened in the EU where this fraud is being discussed, in fact it’s the opposite over there

This is why I buy my honey from a local beekeeper I trust.

Agreed, I always felt honey was one of the easiest and best products to buy locally.

I kept bees for about 15 years. Personally, I see 0 reasosn to have any kind of "award" anyway.

This is a purely subjective process. Different people like different things.

Honey is as varied as the forage that it's produced from.

This whole process of determining a "We're #1" is just a symptom of the autistic ape.

I agree, especially when you consider that apparently they have a hard time detecting mixed in sugar syrup. What are they basing the ratings on, if they can't ensure the baseline "it's honey"?

When you cheat, you are no longer playing the game. And if everyone wants to cheat then it doesn't make sense to play at all.

I never thought about it but I guess I am a honey snob. It’s strictly local buckwheat honey for me, accept no substitute.

Simplest approach is to make two categories blended and pure. With contestants only being allowed to enter one. This would incentivize otherwise would be cheaters yo enter the category they can legit compete in, reducing the amount pf testing required to only those in the pure category, which would keep costs down.

Not really; there'd still be a premium for the "pure" category and so incentive for people to continue to cheat.

Honey is one of the most counterfeited food products in the world. Olive oil is another.

the reason that adulterated honey is difficult to detect is that honey is just sugar syrup, and if you add more sugar syrup you'll get more sugar syrup than you started with.

the mistaken belief is that there is something special about natural honey. people: it's sugar syrup, it'll give you diabetes as fast as a truckload of mountain dew.

Now, I don't believe in homeopathy, perhaps you do. But that's what the honey cult is, homeopathic. What the govt should allow is the sale of labelled fake honeys, it would be dirt cheap and would taste indetectably different, i.e every bit as good, and no more unhealthy.

(if you don't like the viscosity of your sugar syrup, change the %age of water. if you want it to crystalize, dry it out. it's rock candy, not magic)

> honey is just sugar syrup

That's factually incorrect. First of all, obviously it has tons of extra flavor, which indicates a whole range of additional chemical compounds.

> But that's what the honey cult is, homeopathic.

Honey has scientifically proven antibiotic properties [1].

> adulterated honey is difficult to detect

I don't know what you mean by "difficult", but it can certainly be detected [2]. And it can be observed how the antimicrobial properties diminish as adulteration increases.

Now, does this mean honey has health benefits when you eat it? Not necessarily. The antibiotic properties have traditionally been utilized when applying honey on top of a wound to prevent infection -- not by eating it.

You may very well be right that consuming honey isn't any different from consuming HFCS. But it does have a lot of additional chemical compounds in it (as the antibiotic properties demonstrate), so the best answer is that we really don't know.

In any case, it is demonstrably not "just sugar syrup". But yes, you're probably correct that it will give you diabetes just as fast as Mountain Dew.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey#Antibiotic

[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37107465/

when people are sloppy with language, they're probably sloppy with the science too.

>But it does have a lot of additional chemical compounds in it

if a jar of honey had one sloughed off cell from the colon of a honeybee, it would have "a lot of additional chemical compounds in it" because there are a lot of chemical compounds in a single cell. As a percentage of a jar of honey it's trace amounts. Govt standards for selling grains specify the acceptable quantities of rodent feces and insect parts, because it's not practical to take those numbers to zero. Nobody talks about the benefits of eating grain because of trace chemicals from that. I'm not saying trace amounts don't matter, I'm saying evidence based or gtfo.

I'm not saying don't look at it, I'm saying be reasonable and don't draw conclusions without conclusive evidence. One piece of conclusive evidence we have is that it is extremely difficult for scientists to tell the difference between authentic and adulterated honey, and it requires extreme measures not generally taken for foodstuffs, measures never said to be indicative of nutritional value.

>(as the antibiotic properties demonstrate)

no, any antibiotic properties would not demonstrate "a lot of additional chemical compounds". A chemical antibiotic component might be found to be a single compound.

I'm not saying people are not allowed to establish a religious cult of honey and have kosher-honey rules; I'm saying that for people not in the cult, the difficulty of telling the differences makes you wonder what you're hoping to find out, or why you should pay high prices, and as a practical matter makes it very difficult to police the marketplace.

the honey market in terms of fraud is much much worse off than the olive oil market. Some people could take advantage of this in their personal lives by switching to fake honey.

> As a percentage of a jar of honey it's trace amounts.

Percentages don't matter -- vitamins and minerals are trace amounts but essential for our health. Literally everything beneficial for our nutrition that isn't a macronutrient (carb/fat/protein) or bulk (water/fiber/etc.) is present in "trace amounts" when expressed as percentages of mass.

Honey is very clearly not "just sugar syrup", because the rest of the stuff clearly has meaningful effects such as antibiotic properties. Turns out "trace amounts" can do that, so you shouldn't dismiss them out of hand.

You're simply taking way too extreme of a position. I don't know about "honey cults" as you call them, but you're being equally unscientific in denying any meaningful difference whatsoever from sugar syrup.

> One piece of conclusive evidence we have is that it is extremely difficult for scientists to tell the difference between authentic and adulterated honey, and it requires extreme measures not generally taken for foodstuffs, measures never said to be indicative of nutritional value.

It's hard to tell the difference because natural flavors vary so much.

If you give me two jars of honey and tell me one is the original and one has either 0% or 25% or 50% sugar water mixed in, I can run a taste test and figure out the answer. But if you only give me one jar, it's not easy to figure out if weak flavor means adulteration or a bad season.

In other words: Even if I can't figure out if a specific batch was adulterated, the adulteration is making a significant difference. There's a lot coming from the flowers other than raw sugar.

> Honey has scientifically proven antibiotic properties

Topical antibiotic properties. Eating honey won't cure anything.

Perhaps read the full comment I wrote, instead of stopping halfway...

This is false. I'd be willing to wager substantial amounts of money on my ability to differentiate good acacia honey from sugar syrup.

What about acacia flavoured sugar syrup?

you don't need to wager substantial amounts of money, just buy honey, eat it, and you'll be able to tell if it's the real thing, enjoy if it is; return it if you're dissatisfied.

Be sure to tell the authors of this article and the officials at these judging conventions that you don't know what they're on about.

Here is an article summarizing the composition of a variety of acacia honeys.

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s13197-019-035...

Its mostly sugar water (syrup), but there is more to it.

You've somehow overgeneralized it. This is of course fructose, but with much better properties. :)

Just facts [0]:

- honey contains antioxidants, amino acids (the building blocks of proteins) and vitamins and minerals, such as Thiamin, riboflavin, pyridoxin, vitamin A, niacin, panthothenic acid, phyllochinon, vitamin E, and vitamin C

- honey also has been successfully used for wound and burn healing. (If you grab a frying pan or burn your hand/skin, apply honey, there will be no blisters or peeling skin.)

- honey consumption reduces risk factors of cardiovascular diseases

[0] https://sugarscience.ucsf.edu/the-sweet-science-behind-honey...

If you think the taste of honey is indistinguishable from sugar syrup, you haven’t had real honey.

In addition to flavour compounds from the nectar, honey contains trace amino acids that cause it to slowly undergo the malliard reaction at room temperature, resulting in a caramel undertone that increases as the honey ages.

The flavour also strongly depends on the nectar, with some being very subtle and resulting in a very syrup-like honey, and others being extremely strong.

Other than flavour, and some anti-microbial properties, it has the same dietary properties as sugar syrup.

>If you think the taste of honey is indistinguishable from sugar syrup...

you have completely missed the plot, it's sad.

I'm not talking about what I think of the taste of honey. I'm simply reading (with comprehension) TFA (and many similar articles over the past 30 years) that say that the honey market is filled with adulteration and it's difficult to control because there are few ways to tell the difference. The world's biggest experts on honey say this, not me.

I'm just pointing out what they say to you because you can't read.

You seriously seem to believe that industry experts have to cancel international events because you can taste honey and they can't.

Blockchain could track honey from hive to jar, busting fraud with transparent supply chains & smart contracts.

Why do you need a blockchain? A regular database can do that as well, and they use a lot less energy.

Fwiw, the second-largest blockchain barely uses any energy. The real problem is that it's still not scalable enough for something like this, but it's improving pretty rapidly.

As for why blockchain: if you did this on a regular database, you'd be trusting a third party to run that database. Businesses tend not to like that, because sooner or later it gets hard to switch away and the third party starts charging a lot more money.

Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42286030

That's a link to this discussion.

Previous discussion of this discussion here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42351886

Gah - didn't spot that - this was originally posted 7 days ago, but seems to have been refreshed by dang - if you search 'honey' you'll see it was originally a thread 7 days ago , and note that some of the comments here are multidays old.

Various mod intercession can cause old submissions to be re-upped. Usually that's through the Second Chance Pool, though this submission doesn't seem to have gone that route.

<https://news.ycombinator.com/pool>

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