Laser Intended For Mars Used To Detect "Honey Laundering"

A laser tool funded by the European Space Agency to measure carbon on Mars is now being used to help detect fake honey. By burning a few milligrams of honey the laser isotope ratio-meter can help determine its composition and origin. From the article: "According to a Food Safety News investigation, more than a third of honey consumed in the U.S. has been smuggled from China and may be tainted with illegal antibiotics and heavy metals. To make matters worse, some honey brokers create counterfeit honey using a small amount of real honey, bulked up with sugar, malt sweeteners, corn or rice syrup, jaggery (a type of unrefined sugar) and other additives—known as honey laundering. This honey is often mislabeled and sold on as legitimate, unadulterated honey in places such as Europe and the U.S."

Comments

Buy local honey

[HotNeedleOfInquiry]

Most places in the US have a small local honey industry. Support it.

Re:Buy local honey

[Myopic]

The shelf life of honey is measured in centuries. Freshness is a canard. There may be good reasons to buy local honey, but that isn't one of them.

Re:Buy local honey

[Izuzan]

no they just get it cheap from china and Argentina. Billy Bee honey in Canada is about 90% foreign honey that they buy dirt cheap. they are also getting what is called Honey Analog which is what this test is there to detect. gathering honey is FAR from an easy job. it is heavy hot and hard work for little pay out. (my parents are one of the bigger honey producers in Ontario) you dont make any money through the winter months. (other than what you can sell from the door) and you are going all balls to the wall during the summer. honey boxes on average weigh about 80lbs each, each yard my parents have has 20 hives, each with an average of 2-3 of these boxes coming off at any one time. then you have to exact it. to do 2 skids of boxes which is 12-16 boxes per skid is an entire days work. when they do sell their honey to packers (billy bee) they want to pay about half what the from the door price is. they make a not to bad living doing it. about 75k a year in a good year. but that is generally all at once when they sell to a packer. so that has to last them the entire year. i would not wish it on anybody. i would not get into the family business unless i had to.

Re:Buy local honey

[retchdog]

This article says differently.

Specifically, a lot of the honey (75%+) in grocery stores doesn't have the expected amount of pollen that pure honey would have. This doesn't necessarily mean that it's adulterated, of course, but since pollen is completely harmless and does nothing to affect longevity of the product, maybe one should be a bit suspicious about why they're removing it (note: the filtration is a process which increases production cost), if not to cover up fraud.

By contrast, every honey they sampled at farmers markets had the expected pollen. Again, this isn't an exhaustive study, but in contrast I see absolutely no support for your claim.

Re:Buy local honey

[rockytopchip]

Place your bottle of crystallized honey in a warm water bath and it will be like it was when freshly bottled, without the crystallization.

Re:Buy local honey

[CowTipperGore]

Commercial tomato varieties are bred for tough red skin and blemish-free fruit. Flavor has no part in the equation. The commercial tomato industry was on the verge of collapse due to the increase in mechanization in farming but tomatoes were so fragile that there was no ability harvest them without destroying them. So the food scientists developed breeds that were firm, that were uniform in appearance, and that could be picked earlier. US producers pick their tomatoes while still completely green and subject them to 24 hours of ethylene gas to artificially ripen them. Many are refrigerated to further reduce spoilage but this also destroys nearly all of the flavor that may have accidentally remained.

Recent research has indicated that the same genes that cause the uniform coloration selected for in commercial tomatoes also cause the fruit to convert the sun's energy into sugars. It isn't just that the round, red tomato-like cardboard balls at the store lost their flavor because it wasn't a priority in the breeding program - it appears that the flavor and appearance may be mutually exclusive.

Re:Not mentioned in the article...

[ShanghaiBill]

Most honey farmers will take out so much honey of the hives that they have to feed the bees sugar water to survive the winter.

I have a beehive in my backyard. I always give them some sugar water during the winter. I don't know any other beekeepers that don't do the same. It helps lower the winter die-back, and helps the hive get a strong start in the spring.

This in turn leads to crappier honey next season.

I have never heard this before. The bees eat the sugar, and it is all consumed by the time they start making new honey. I give them their last feeding in February, and they don't start making new honey till April. The sugar is not mixed with honey harvested for human consumption.