Infused with Moral Outrage

[aggienaut]

   I've had a similar conversation about this with several people lately:

   You can infuse honey with things like ginger, cinnamon, garlic, chocolate, whatever, and it tastes pretty good and moreover sells very well at farmer's markets and such, and in fact I often see it at farmers markets.

   "Well, why don't you do that then?" my friend asks with their eyes gleaming.

   "Well it's unethical." I say with a grin like I'm joking, but then when I don't retract the statement they look at me a bit confused.


   You see, here's the thing. It's not really, inherently unethical, but it runs up against two complaints for me. First of all, as a beekeeper I have an absolute horror of adulturating honey. Adulturated honey IS unethical -- in many countries with less strict food testing people cut honey with sugar syrup or high fructose corn syrup. You can hardly find pure honey in a big city market in Africa, and China is flooding the rest of the world with exported adulterated honey, and they keep finding new ways to do it to continually fool even high tech testing. If you can't tell the difference, you might ask does it matter? And I would say, yes, it does, because adulteration is inherently unethical ::glare::

   Now infusing honey with ginger for example, well, on the face of it is literal adulturation. That in of itself makes it distasteful to me. But if it's clearly labelled as such what's the harm right, I mean pretty much most of making food products is combining things. But that's where it butts up against my second objection -- even knowing what I'm looking for, even knowing when I see "ginger honey!" in a farmer's market it is almost certainly an infused product (does ginger even HAVE flowers?), it often takes some careful examination of the bottle or talking to the sales person to determine with certainty that it is. Your average person by and large isn't going to do these things. They're going to buy a product and say oh look at this delicious chocolate honey yeah I guess the bees visited chocolate flowers or something (which, I guess cocoa plants do probably flower?), or more insidious is infused honeys that plausibly could the actual honey, peach, apricot, and most often orange. When people are buying an infused product, even if it is good and tasty and tehy're happy with it, and even if it says its infused in the small print on the back, but they don't realize it is, my professional pride in high quality unadulterated honey is deeply offended.

   Obviously I could make the product and just very very clearly label it as what it is, maybe even use it as an opportunity to inform the consumer about what it is, but it's just I guess professional pride gives me such a very very strong aversion to adulteration I just really couldn't bring myself to do it.


   A sort of related thing is infused spirits. It's a commonly known "life hack" to put skittles in vodka to make a flavored liquor. I've heard countless stories of people in Eastern Europe putting various fruits in vodka over winter, a practice that no doubt has replaced traditional liquor making techniques with the advant of generally available cheap vodka. I don't really have an objection if you want to do that on your own time, by all means have fun with alcohol and experiment. I was recently at a corner store near here though and saw some gin on the shelf with the name of one of the local berry farms (there's several in the area!). Having a strong interest in distilling, I was excited. Do they do distilling there??? I carefully examined the bottle. It was by no means self evident but eventually I found some small print noting that they created their product by infusing berries into grain alcohol they had acquired from such and such distillery. FOR THE RECORD proper gin or any other true commercial liquor* fit to be marketed with a straight face by an artisan food maker is made by combining the products during the fermentation phase prior to distillation. Infusing after distillation is... cheating! A cheap trick!

*not to be confused with liqueur which IS generally traditionally flavored post-distillation.


   Much more alarming to me, there's a guy around here producing "honey mead liquor," as the label says, and its a very professional looking label. I haven't seen it for sale but I've encountered it being bandied about several places within the beekeeping community. Its really quite good. I was actually wondering what his secret was. And then I heard, through the bee grapevine, APPARENTLY he is, you guessed it, making up some kind of honey juice concoction thing and... then combining it with grain alcohol he has purchased from some commercial distillery. Which I guess is why he can't actually label it merely as "mead." But, as you can imagine, despite that its a very nice tasting thing, I am morally outraged.


   Now, I realize I may sound like a crotchety old man about all this, but, I don't know, professional pride is a thing. I believe in pure products made the proper way, and not intentionally or unintentionally misleading consumers.


Only Vaguely Related Picture of the Day

And here's Cato looking gruff and disapproving


   I'm curious to hear if any of the rest of you have professional pride related moral high horses such as mine but as pertain to your own industries?

Comments

[lookfar.livejournal.com]

Ah hah, the grumpy old man icon!

I agree with you about misrepresenting a product - or perhaps I mean "I feel as you do" - and I remember the Chinese baby apple juice scandal. Not sure I agree with you about flavoring honey. Surely no one thinks that ginger honey is made by letting the bees gather nectar in the ginger fields, any more than chocolate milk comes from chocolate cows.

Oh, sorry, I didn't mean to crush the last beautiful idea of your childhood.

I think anyone would know that something had been added to the honey but it's not really adulteration if the point is not to fool the consumer.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

You say that but don't they consistently do surveys and find like 30% of respondants DO think chocolate milk comes from brown cows? And I do realize my objection is a bit irrational but it's just a deeply held professional horror of putting anything at all in honey.

[lookfar.livejournal.com]

More personal than rational, then. Which is perfectly okay.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

oh and chinese baby apple juice?

[lookfar.livejournal.com]

There was a scandal probably 15 years ago about Gerber brand baby apple juice (for babies, not made from baby apples) which was made in China and turned out to be mostly corn syrup.

[wantedonvoyage.livejournal.com]

I don't have an example, really, but I do agree with you.

We drink a product called Spindrift which is basically seltzer with a minute amount of fruit juice in it. They are the only brand we've found that uses real juice and only juice. I got guilted into trying a competing product (LaCroix) which--upon investigation--contains seltzer and "natural flavors". It's not as good and I resent the notion that I don't know what "natural flavors" means. Anything that came from this planet can be marketed as "natural" but that doesn't mean I want to drink it.

Also, given the care that goes into your craft, I can totally see why you wouldn't want to introduce anything to it that wasn't made with the same effort. What good is "organic local honey" if you mix it with cheap chocolate that has 25 dubiously-sourced ingredients?

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Is LaCroix also the brand that has ridiculously overpriced bottled water?

[wantedonvoyage.livejournal.com]

Is LaCroix also the brand that has ridiculously overpriced bottled water?

LOL there's only one?

I don't know but this drink is not expensive... I think I got three cases (8 cans) for $10. Spindrift commands a little more at about $6 for a box of 8.

[pondhopper.livejournal.com]

How do you feel about someone buying pure honey and doing their own infusing at home?
I do agree with you about product purity but then I think people can do as they wish with whatever it is after they buy it. Here in Spain I read labels very carefully and buy honey from local beekeepers. Because here in the EU if you don't, you will often be buying "honey from EU and NON-EU sources" which means that EU produced honey has been mixed with Chinese "honey". Not good.

I can't think of a good example of other products except one: cured Spanish ham from 100% Iberian breed pigs that have free-ranged in the mountains on acorns. It has become common to produce hams from cross-breeds and grain-fed pigs in recent years and as long as there was a small percentage of Iberian breed pig in the mix it was still labeled as Iberian. Thankfully, there is now strict regulation of that and all products must be labeled with the percentage of the breed and whether they have been acorn-fed or not. We here in the south where that wonderful pig is raised feel VERY strongly about ham purity.
:)

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

There was a hubbub in the industry here because one of the biggest Australian honey companies is apparently buying Chinese honey and mixing it with Australian honey and same thing, putting it on the shelves in a manner where it appears to be australian honey unless you look very very carefully.

Hmm I guess I need to visit Spain and try your famous ham (:

[scripsi.livejournal.com]

And that is why I buy my honey from my friend the Beekeeper. :)

I Think putting fruits in alcohol was originally meant to preserve the fruit, not to flavour the alcohol.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Always the best way to get your honey!

Hmm and yes I suppose it would preserve the fruit, but then one wouldn't dry them out before using them for osmething would they? So one would later consume very alcoholic fruit?

[scripsi.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, very alcoholic fruit. To preserve fruit like this has gone out of style in Sweden, but when my Mum was a kid this kind of fruit was served as dessert with whipped cream. Obviously only for adults. :) And as it was considered food even my grandparent's, who didn't drink, ate it.

[wpadmirer.livejournal.com]

Oh, don't get me started about plays! I'm still being teased by Pat for my reaction to seeing a badly written play in NYC. (It is truly a terrible play!)

So I think we all have pride in our particular "thing" and are annoyed to enraged by people fucking it up with some half-assed go at it.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

I'm actually quite curious to hear your bad play rant :-D

[millysdaughter.livejournal.com]

Real honey - pure honey - will not spoil.
How long will the adulterated stuff last?

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Hmmm not sure! I suppose it depends on what and how they adulterated. I've seen some adulterated honey in Africa that got big granular sugar crystals in it instead of the usual just becoming uniformly more solid of honey.

[ellinou.livejournal.com]

Well, when I was sifting though the resumes sent to us to find my future colleague, I automatically put in the "reject" pile everybody who hadn't studies in translation, not matter how much experience they had or how good they said they were. Translation is an actual job that requires so much more than just bilingualism, and it pisses me off so much when people who haven't had any sort of formal training think they can do it as well as professional translators.