I don’t suppose you think much about where your honey comes from, other than from bees. There was a processor in the Onsted area for years, but I don’t if it’s still in existence. There’s a lot of honey coming from China and it’s coming with antibiotics. A story in the Toronto Globe and Mail presents an interesting tale of crime and contraband.
And even if you know the origin of the honey bear on your table, it doesn’t mean you’re avoiding the Chinese stuff. “Honey is baked into everything from breakfast cereals to cookies and mixed into sauces and cough drops.”
Most honey comes from China, where beekeepers are notorious for keeping their bees healthy with antibiotics banned in North America because they seep into honey and contaminate it; packers there learn to mask the acrid notes of poor quality product by mixing in sugar or corn-based syrups to fake good taste.
Rarely will a honey container indicate it came from China.
1/11/11 — The True Source Honey™ Initiative enthusiastically announces the launch of a Certified Honey Traceability Program beginning in January 2011. The program officially known as True Source Certified™ was unveiled at the 2011 North American Beekeeping Conference in Galveston this past week…
More details at http://www.truesourcehoney.com/
Wow- and I thought I had some free time on my hands.
@allendick
Were you at the Galveston conference?
Yup. Been a beekeeper for 40 years, in Canada, though.
In North America, the food handling standards are high, too high, maybe buton some of these supplier countries, they are non-existent, and where the food originates can be quite shocking, Many are just fine, but people should be able to decide for themselves.
Do you see big differences between American and Canadian regulations regarding honey production? Or is it just between China and North America where the issues come up?
The US is behind many developed countries in terms of standards, but far ahead of many undeveloped and developing countries where honey may often be produced and handled in unsanitary conditions and stored in unapproved containers. Large high-tech central plants then gather that product and filter and blend it to the point where it is no longer — in the opinion of knowledgeable beekeepers — really honey, but can pass as such for export and purchase by unscrupulous packers in other countries where it is further blended and its origin obscured or used in products that are labelled as having ‘honey’ (Usually even that ‘honey’ is a minority constituent after HFCS and sugar, although it features plarge on the label). It is, at that point, just a sweet syrup made from honey and lacking the health benefits claimed for honey since enzymes and other important constituents are gone.
Virtually all packing plants, anywhere in the world, degrade the honey a bit in the process of packaging it and stablizing it for mass distribution, but this is extreme. Additionally, some such offshore plants add cheap sugars to lower their cost, then obscure the origin by trans-shipping through various countries.
It would be a mistake to say that all Chinese exporters cheat and adulterate the product, since China is a huge country and there are many honest and hard-working people there. It is just that an opportunistic and unscrupulous group have given the rest a black eye.
For consumers, knowledge is power. Some buy honey for its heath benefits and some as medicine, so they need to know that it is pure, unheated, and unfiltered and the smart ones go direct to their local beekeeper and bypass all the processing to get the ‘raw’ product from a known source. Other than contaminants like the antibiotics mentioned, there are very few health risks in honey.
For those who just want something sweet, store shelf honey is fine, and increased scrutiny and improved technology have reduced the risks to virtually nil, but many want the best and to know the source. Some want to support the country’s beekeepers who also pollinate the agricultural crops. You can import honey, but you cannot import pollination.