Say No To Imported Honey

Say No To Imported Honey

I read a very interesting article this morning courtesy of Metafilter.  Titled "Honey laundering: The sour side of nature's golden sweetener," this article ran in the Toronto's newspaper "The Globe and Mail."  Funny what a different perspective you get on U.S. food politics when you read it from another country.

Over the summer someone gave me a little jar of local raw honey, and I was astonished.  It tasted so much better than the store-bought stuff!  The difference was comparable to that between store-bought tomatoes and garden fresh heirloom tomatoes.  It was that marked.

After I polished off the jar and went shopping for more, I was surprised at the price differential between "real honey" and the store-bought stuff.  You can buy a 16 ounce plastic bear full of honey for about $3, or a 4 ounce jar of local raw honey for about $8.  That's 18 cents per ounce for the store-brand stuff, versus $2 an ounce for the real stuff.  (Later I discovered that the local food co-op has raw local honey in bulk for $4 a pound!  But I digress.)

I boggled at the price differential.  Having read this article, now I understand: that super-cheap store bought honey was probably made in China, shipped to the U.S. via a series of other countries which put their name on the shipment fraudulently.  It may contain a banned antibiotic which Chinese beekeepers use on their hives, and it has probably been adulterated with water, filtered to remove impurities that can fingerprint the honey's origin, and most likely has been cut with corn syrup or other sweeteners.

The Globe and Mail calls honey laundering "the largest food fraud in U.S. history."  It's an excellent example of how bureaucratic indifference and incompetence combine with the worst parts of capitalism to give us one of the worst food safety systems in the world.

Reading about the honey situation I was reminded of Brooklyn's "swill milk" scandal of the early 1900s, when the FDA was still in its infancy.  The milk - which came from diseased and sickened cows weak from eating a byproduct of distilleries - was diluted with water to stretch it, and then colored with chalk to make it white.  Untold numbers of children died from drinking swill milk.

Free market enthusiasts claim that this is the sort of thing that won't happen under a truly free market.  The problem being (as always) one of transparency.  If people knew that their bottle of honey or milk had poison in it, they wouldn't buy it.  But swill milk was just labeled "milk" and honey with chloramphenicol in it is just labeled "honey."

The solution here is obvious, at least for you and I.  Seek out a actual local honey from a source that you trust, whether it's at a farmer's market, online, or at a local food co-op.  Not only will you be supporting local family agriculture, but you'll be feeding your family something good for them - and without any harmful chemicals or corner-cutting additives.

Photo credit: Flickr/NCReedplayer