Exclusive Book Excerpt:
Honey Is World's
Third Most Faked Food
by Larry Omsted, from Forbes.com
The very
notion of what “honey” is seems obvious. It is not.
Four years
ago I wrote about one of the food world’s priciest scams, Kobe Beef. Consumers
were outraged over the blatant restaurant rip-off, and that became the
most read story out of hundreds that have appeared here, with over 1.5 million
readers to date. But as it turned out, Faux-be beef was just the tip of a vast
Fake Food iceberg.
My new
book Real Food, Fake Food (Algonquin) covers the gamut of food frauds and scams
American consumers face today. It also celebrates the greatness of the world’s
best Real Foods and explains how to get them.
For my
new book Real Food, Fake Food, I have spent the last
few years crisscrossing the country and the globe, visiting food producers and
counterfeiters, restaurants of every ilk, and meeting with experts in all sorts
of related fields. What I came to realize was that just as designer handbags
and high priced Swiss watches are targeted by counterfeits, so are the world’s
greatest Real Foods, from champagne to caviar to lobster. In many cases,
Americans consumers, even food lovers, have simply never tasted the Real
things. I want readers to avoid rip-offs, but even more, I want them to
celebrate how delicious and wholesome the world’s Real Foods can be.
Unfortunately,
it’s not just luxury foodstuffs that get knocked off. Many household staples,
from juice to honey to coffee, are routinely faked. The following never before
published excerpt from my new book Real Food, Fake Food (Algonquin)
explains how the golden honey bear in your cabinet may be deceiving you.
EXCERPT: Foods that can’t be differentiated by sight will often be faked, and
honey fills the bill. But honey has other problems as well, with the pirates on
one side and regulators on the other. For starters, while we know for sure
there is plenty of obviously fake honey, no one agrees on what the real thing
is.
The
American Beekeeping Federation is the industry group representing U.S.
producers of non-ultrafiltered honey. They petitioned the FDA to create a
“standard of identity” for honey (basically, a detailed definition that sets legal
standards). As with similar appeals for an olive oil standard, the FDA
summarily denied this request. While it told the federation that it shared
their “concerns about adulterated and misbranded honey,” regulators chose to
defer to Webster’s, literally, citing the dictionary’s definition as adequate:
“a thick, sweet, syrupy substance that bees make as food from the nectar of
flowers and store in honeycombs.”
That
sounds like honey to me, which is part of the problem. Like most consumers, I don’t know a whole lot
about the intricacies of honey. The position of the American Beekeeping
Federation is that real honey must have pollen, but lots of other domestic
honey producers disagree and ultrafilter theirs to remove the pollen, which
helps keeps the product from crystallizing. In Europe, most consumers are used
to honey is this original state, but Americans vote with their dollars for the
more liquid filtered version, sans pollen but with nothing necessarily added. I
say “necessarily” because pollen is a fingerprint for honey that can be tested
to show where the plants the bees visited lived and prove country of origin.
One
legitimate fear is that countries like China use the ultra-filtration or
ultra-purification processes to mask the origin of the honey, which is then
trans-shipped [sent to an intermediate country and re-labelled as a product
of that country to disguise its real origin] and sometimes mixed with a
small amount of pollinated honey, from say India, to throw off testers.
Sometimes Chinese honey is cut with much cheaper corn syrup or fructose syrup
to enhance profit margins, and sometimes Chinese producers even feed corn syrup
to the bees to get it into the honey more “naturally.” The importation of
Chinese honey was specifically banned because it is so often adulterated.
Unlike
the FDA, the USDA has chosen to get more precise about what honey is—sort of.
They created a voluntary grading system that lets producers slap Grade A, Grade
B, or Grade C on their labels, with zero enforcement. Sound familiar? The USDA
did the same thing with olive oil grades, leading pretty much every producer to
choose the highest extra-virgin grade designation, regardless of what was in
the bottle. In this case, the USDA created very detailed honey grading
rules—and lets them all be ignored. The formula scores five specific elements
like moisture content and “absence of defects,” but the grading rules skip
vitally important factors, such as whether non-honey ingredients (such as corn
syrup) can be added. Additionally, honey and maple syrup are in a special
category, and unlike almost every other product it regulates, the USDA allows
the use of its grading marks without any inspections, ever (oil is
theoretically subject to inspection, though it almost never is). As the Federal
Register reads, “Honey does not require official inspection in order to carry
official USDA grade marks and . . . there are no existing programs that require
the official inspection and certification of honey.” Enforcement is based
solely on responding to complaints.
Honey-obsessed
website Honey Traveller concluded, “Two honeys could be legally graded as Grade
A honey and be identically labelled as, ‘100% Organic Clover Honey from
Arizona—USDA Grade A’ yet be entirely different honeys. They could be a blend
of honeys from all over the world, some heated to 180 degrees to make it easy
to filter, contain antibiotics, chemicals, and corn syrup, not made from Clover
at all nor actually be from plants in Arizona!” While this is often the case,
the site’s claim is not entirely accurate, because there is a legal standard
for the term organic in agricultural products, including honey. However, actual
organic production of honey is almost impossible for producers to control
because bees roam freely and choose plants that may or may not have been
organically farmed. Also, “100%” is a widely misused food label term that often
means a particular ingredient, not the entire produce, is 100 percent
something.
But the
bottom line is that legal or not, “you may be paying more for honey labelled
‘certified organic’ or feel reassured by the ‘USDA Grade A’ seal, but the truth
is, there are few federal standards for honey, no government certification and
no consequences for making false claims. For American-made honey, the ‘organic’
boast, experts say, is highly suspect,” noted the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
“Major supermarkets offer dozens of different brands, sizes, types and flavours
of honey for sale. Consumers might walk away with the finest-tasting,
highest-quality honey there is. Or they could end up with an unlabelled blend,
adulterated with impossible-to-detect cheap sweeteners or illegal antibiotics.”
Suddenly that innocent plastic bear on your table sounds like lots of other
Fake Foods.
There are
debates over whether or not pollen makes the honey healthier and/or tastier, so
your definition of real honey depends on which side of this divide you are on.
But in either case, most consumers expect real honey to contain just honey,
whether filtered or not. But when the FDA opened a comment phase in 2014 on
proposed draft guidelines that may someday exist, one question was whether to
bar honey cut with other sweeteners from calling itself honey. If such
regulation passed, it still might not stem the tide, since honey is an easily faked
and expensive product that’s mostly sugar. Reports of widespread counterfeit
honey, made with glucose and just enough actual honey to give it flavour, plus
the occasional body parts of bees to make it look authentic, date to at least
1881.
The rare
and prized manuka honey, about the priciest kind, comes from bees visiting the
manuka bush, found only in New Zealand and a small part of Australia, an
excellent example of terroir. Fans believe it is both healthier and better
tasting than all other honeys. It certainly costs a lot more. A 2014
investigation in the United Kingdom, where manuka honey is especially popular,
found that just one of seven brands in supermarkets labelled as such was the
real thing. According to a comprehensive overview of Fake Foods published in
the Journal of Food Science and co-authored by Dr. John Spink, director
of the Michigan State University Food Fraud Initiative, honey is the third most
faked food in the world. And Americans buy and eat more honey than anyone,
nearly four hundred million pounds every year. Much of the fake stuff ends up
in processed “honey” flavoured foods.
The FDA’s
honey guy, Martin Stutsman, who also “monitors” olive oil, told USA Today
that cane sugar or high-fructose corn syrup used to be most commonly used to
thin honey. But an isotope test easily spotted this adulteration, so savvy
counterfeiters switched to beet sugar, with a chemical profile much more
similar to honey. The FDA, in turn, switched to a much more complicated,
multistep test. “But once we started catching people, they create a moving
target. They’ll switch to something more difficult (to detect),” said Stutsman.
At least
honeys cut with sugar substitutes like corn syrup and beet sugar aren’t
poisonous. That’s not the case with chloramphenicol, a powerful antibiotic that
can lead to a potentially fatal bone marrow disorder, the reason the drug is
not is not approved for food use in the United States. But it is a common
contaminant in adulterated Chinese honey. While the import of Chinese honey is
banned, its price difference is big enough to make it worthwhile for smugglers
to relabel and trans-ship. This can
be big business for organized criminals, not just a few jars in the lining of a
suitcase. One German honey distributor did this kind of illegal trans-shipment
for seven years, obscuring and importing some eighty million dollars’ worth of
banned and sometimes adulterated Chinese honey into the United States be- fore
getting caught. “Chinese honey was often harvested early and dried by machine
rather than bees,” reported Businessweek. “This allowed the bees to
produce more honey, but the honey often had an odour and taste similar to
sauerkraut. Fan [a worker] was told to mix sugar and syrup into the honey in
Taiwan to dull the pungent flavour.” Just as with the trans-shipped banned
Chinese shrimp that went via Indonesia—also contaminated with dangerous and
for- bidden drugs—investigators noticed a sudden spike in honey imports from
Indonesia, Malaysia, and India after banning Chinese honey. The scam was so
large that honey exports suddenly totalled more than those three countries
produce annually, combined. Ac- cording to Businessweek, this operation
was the single largest incident of food fraud in our country’s history. More
accurately, it is the largest case where someone actually got caught.
What’s
especially sad is that it is easy to buy real honey, made by small producers
all around the country, and widely available at farmers’ markets and gourmet
stores. By simply avoiding big supermarket brands and buying it from someone
who makes it locally, you should be safe.
Excerpted
from Real Food, Fake Food by Larry Olmsted, published
by Algonquin Books.
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