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.
[1] https://www.ams.usda.gov/sites/default/files/media/Extracted...
[2] https://www.ams.usda.gov/sites/default/files/media/Extracted...
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.
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.
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.
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":
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
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.
> 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.
But as you say it is utterly irrelevant to nutrition or health. Even the antibacterial elements are real but negligible.
Of course they’ll likely be creamed honey rather than pourable, but that’s just a preference.
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.
https://www.europol.europa.eu/media-press/newsroom/news/11-o...
https://www.oliveoiltimes.com/business/europe/top-italian-po...
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
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
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.
> 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...
In this case, it's mostly right, but the original source is https://food.ec.europa.eu/food-safety/eu-agri-food-fraud-net...
> one of the key ingredients for modern civilisation
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.
Unless one is talking about imitation maple syrups, but those are labeled properly.
https://news.uoguelph.ca/2023/04/maple-syrup-fraud-undermine...
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.
> 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...
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".
:)
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.
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 :)
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...
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.
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.
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)
Rare, but possibly the bees were doing a swindle.
Blue honey sounds cool though.
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.
I don’t know if that one is adulterated, or just processed so much that it is all flat and smooth.
Not sure if that makes it good honey, but there’s that.
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.
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.
I thought: “Costco wouldn’t lie to me? Would they?”
Now I must go and find out.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Otherwise these percentages give more ambiguity than insight about the products.
On the rare occasion I do buy honey it's usually Scottish Heather Honey, which is as delicious as it is expensive.
Actual location authenticated honey costs actual real money.
Unverifiable provenance in both cases..
If it ever becomes mainstream this will definitely happen.
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.)
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.
It also depends on the sort of processing done. Commercial honey is pasturised, but local suppliers might not.
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.
I guess the point my mother would claim is, "Listen to your mother, she knows best." Heh
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.
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"
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.
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.
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”
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
it is sort of cheating
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.”
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.
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!
>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).