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

[Abstrackt]

I just make mead for my local apiary and get honey by the bucket in exchange. That obviously won't work for everybody but it's worth a shot if you're feeling adventurous.

Re:Buy local honey

[eksith]

Don't know about your local market, but in our market, yes, it is twice as good... and then some. Plus if you're talking about produce, it hasn't been on a truck half way across the country before getting to the display shelf, so you can be sure it's fresh. You do taste a difference.

Re:Buy local honey

[cyn1c77]

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

Supporting local businesses is good if you want small business to remain alive.

But that's not going to stop a "local" merchant from buying Chinese fake honey, pouring it in smaller bottles, and then selling it at twice the price.

So buying local isn't really a fix for smuggling and fraud.

Re:Buy local honey

[Ol Biscuitbarrel]

The farmers I buy from charge perhaps 15% more; the product tastes a fair bit better. There's my frickin' anecdote.

I was surprised by the 1/3+ figure in TFS too. That's a huge amount of honey to be slipping under the FDA radar, way too high to not become a major scandal, you'd think.

Re:Buy local honey

[StormShaman]

Fresh? I thought honey lasted for years. It certainly has to in my house; I don't use it very fast.

Re:Buy local honey

[fermion]

This advice cannot be overstated. The benefits cannot be overstated. When I travel, and am going to be there a week, I try to get a bit of local honey. It really helps with my allergies. It also provides an unique local flavor. Yes it does cost more and many will complain that the flavor is inconsistent, but do we really want to live in a world where everything is made to minimize cost and maximize consistency. I am sure that many do. For those who don't, local honey is one way to make the world a less banal place.

Re:Buy local honey

[Penguinisto]

Honey is one of the few foods to have a shelf life that approaches the half-life of uranium. There's honey dug up out of ancient Egyptian tombs that is/was still considered edible.

OTOH, the taste apparently degrades with time, which may explain GP's assertion.

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

[Zemran]

" just skip a $6 coffee on the one day"???

Are you crazy? The neighbours would be wearing the honey... A day without coffee is far too dangerous.

Re:Buy local honey

[ColdWetDog]

Wait a minute. 'Honey bucket' means something dramatically different where I come from.

Re:Buy local honey

[davester666]

Yes, you do not want to mix up the honey buckets when you want an additive for your tea.

Re:Buy local honey

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe my pallet just isn't refined.

If you bring in honey by the pallet, it's no wonder your palate has no sensitivity. Maybe you should cut down, so you can experience the whole palette of flavours that nature intended.

Re:Buy local honey

[ebonum]

I live in China. It is the same here. You can buy the crap from Carrefour ( think Walmart, but run by the French ), or you can buy from the local growers. Once you get out of the cities, you can find beekeepers that setup stands next to the highways. Most of them have boxes and boxes of hives with them. They move from farm to farm in the area, helping to pollinate the local crops. The honey they have on hand tends to be what they were last pollinating. If you ever get the chance to try some, do. It's really good stuff. Plus, it is always good to directly support the local farmers ( And Yes. They will try to up the price if you look like a city dweller. Just get back in the car. Start the engine and the price will drop 50%. )

Re:Buy local honey

[retchdog]

The varieties of honey (determined by the predominant flora which the bees gather pollen from) have noticeable differences. Some are subtle; orange blossom honey does taste a little bit like oranges. Tupelo honey costs 2-3x as much and is considered the superior honey, but honestly I can't tell the difference between it and clover. However, I've gotta say any honey labeled as a specific variety is manyfold better than the stuff in the plastic bear. So what if it costs more? A jar of honey lasts me a year. I'll optimize somewhere else.

Now buckwheat honey, if you have a chance to try it, is almost nothing like `normal' honey; you might hate it, but it's worth trying. It is extremely dark and has an odd almost savory/umami taste. It's a bit weird on its own, but if you mix it with an acid (I use apple cider vinegar) and deglaze a steak pan, you get an amazing sauce... it's hard to believe it's only two ingredients (plus the fond and drippings from the steak of course).

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

[mcgrew]

You know, for an extra two bucks you can get almost a pound of Folgers or Maxwell House which perks pots and pots of coffee. His point is, if you're spending six bucks for a cup of something that costs pennies to make, bitching about an extra buck for quality honey is just stupid. Especially since that jar of honey will do you for months instead of hours.

If I were moderating you'd get a "funny".

It just struck me why people drive so stupid when I'm on my way to work -- they're racing to Starbucks, while I'm already well caffenated.

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.

Not mentioned in the article...

[larry bagina]

Ok, fake honey is bad. But even legitimate Chinese honey is crap. Honey is honey, right? Bees fly around, collect nectar, then spit out honey. (Yeah, yeah, the types of flowers affects the taste. I'm getting to that.) But a lot of Chinese honey doesn't involve flowers at all -- the bees drink sugar water. For all I know, that happens in the US, too. As mentioned above, go to a farmer's market and buy some local honey.

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.

The actual producer?

[davidwr]

They guy with all the bees is just the slave-driving middleman.

If you really want to buy from the actual producers, buy from the bees themselves. :)

Re:The actual producer?

[jones_supa]

Yep, even I have only "Insightful" and "Interesting" mod points left.

Re:Space Industry Technology

[ridgecritter]

I think reality disagrees with you. The tech you listed was pushed into being by military, cost-is-no-object requirements. GPS happened because the US military needed a precision location system, and a space-based system was the only way to make it happen. Integrated circuits, which led to microprocessors and all the rest, happened because the US military had to miniaturize guidance and control electronics for ballistic missile systems. All of the decades of aerospace R&D which SpaceX is building upon to such good effect in reducing launch costs were undertaken by noncommercial, mostly cost-insensitive nation/state participants.

Basically, the $0.75 GPS chip in your iPhone happened in response to the prior existence of the GPS system. I doubt that Steve Jobs at his best would have been successful in persuading the US DoD to put up GPS. But with GPS already in the sky, he had a firm base on which to monetize the mass-market potential of the system (as did others - just using Jobs/iPhone as one example).

This is how it's worked over the centuries: human conflict drives development of "stuff" that ordinary consumers/businesses could never get funded through their own economic models. Then people think of wider uses for the "stuff", and (manufacturing volume + tech advance) make the capabilities cheap.

So while you may think it more efficient to have space technology develop as a consequence of everyday advancements, it seems that in fact, everyday advancements more often proceed from the incredibly expensive cutting-edge wacko development work undertaken for reasons completely outside the purview of everyday economics. I think efficiency is a complicated and subtle thing.