Drowning in Fake Honey

[aggienaut]

   First let me apologize for the poor quality of these graphs, they're photos of slides and my phone camera doesn't focus so well any more (there appears to be shmutz under the lense confusing the focus)



   But on any account, if you are in say, the United Kingdom, increasingly nearly all the commercial honey on grocery store shelves is coming from China.



   And/or you can see the Australian honey industry is being drowned in Chinese honey (I know it's really hard to read but blue line going down is Australian honey exports, red line going up is Chinese honey imported to Australia)




   And here's a funny graph, the blue line headed ever upward is Chinese honey production and that red line staying steady at the bottom is... Chinese numbers of hives!

   Sooooo either they are getting ever better and better and better at producing honey, in a manner that utterly eclipses everyone else, or they're, I don't know, adulterating honey with rice-derived sugar.


   The above slides from a presentation by Dr Norberto Garcia of Argentina about honey adulteration. I of course knew it was a huge issue but his presentation really convinced me that Chinese honey adulteration is absolutely drowning the honey industries in every other country. He had a lot more interesting slides but I don't think I got legible pictures of a lot of them. If you want to know who "the good guys" in honey exports are I do have this barely legible graph, with the outright cheaters or major transhippers of Chinese "honey" in red, countries strongly implicated in repackinging and re-exporting it in blue (really Belgium, really?), countries with major increases in exports that are due to legitimate reasons in green (New Zealand with manuka honey and Brazil is apparently doing major work in producing organic honey), and the countries with huge losses in exports, Argentina, Canada, and Australia are the ones who have strict testing to prevent adulterated honey transhipment but are getting hosed in terms o their own exports because they can't compete with the ridiculously low prices adulterated honey gets slung around at. So I'll add to my perennial advice of buy local honey! with also go ahead and buy honey from Canada, Argentina or Australia ... and American made honey too of course. But seriously in almost any country the honey in the major grocery stores is most likely mostly rice-syrup there's surely a farmer's market near you where you can get real honey and support a real beekeeper ;)

Comments

[wpadmirer.livejournal.com]

Wow. That's terrifying! I didn't know about adulterated honey, but now I do! EGADS!

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Barely legible slide about types of adulteration. The main thing seems to be that while lots of testing can detect the presence of "C4 sugars" that would come from say high fructose corn syrup and a lot of other traditional sources of sugar, rice makes "C3 sugar" which is much much harder to detect for some reason, so they either cut honey with sugar syrup from rice or feed the bees on it wihch isn't really any better, and then export it. Some countries, like the USA, have gotten wise to this and slapped stiff import controls on honey from China so that's where teh transhipment comes in, China sends honey to say Vietnam and they just say it's Vietnamese honey and export it on.

[lab-jazz.livejournal.com]

you can see the Australian honey industry is being drowned in Chinese honey (I know it's really hard to read but blue line going down is Australian honey exports, red line going up is Chinese honey imported to Australia)

What the hell are we doing importing honey from China. Importing it from anywhere really, but particularly China :(

Can't we produce enough honey of our own - are our bees all dying?

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Entirely market forces. The bees curiously enough were never dying in Australia. Well I mean they weren't really anywhere else but especially not in Australia. The number of hives anywhere is primarily determined by market forces, as is imports/exports. So we import honey here in Australia because it's cheaper and the big grocery store chains (and honey packers even!) just see the dollar signs. I belieeeve a lot of beekeepers are rather unhappy with the biggest packer, Capilano, because they're importing a LOT of chinese honey, and in many cases I believe mixing honey 49% from china 51% from Australia so they can label it as Australian. It's all shenanigans!

Chinese honey imports push our prices down (when he showed that graph someone in the room exclaimed "that exaclty corresponds with the prices we've been getting!"), and while people might not conciously think about it, low prices does push us beekeepers out of investing in hives and pushes some people right out of the business. It's really killing us ):

[cazzicles.livejournal.com]

I have heard a lot of chatter about Australian honey recently, and Capilano, especially, being mentioned in that discussion, but didn't understand why. Now I do. Thank you for bringing this to our collective attention - I will certainly be much more mindful from now on!

[lifeinroseland.livejournal.com]

I don’t like the honey that comes in the bear bottle, yuck. Now I’m like, Is this Made in China? But when I get honey from the Farmers’ Market or the orangey goodness from Florida, honey becomes my favorite thing.

[kitzune.livejournal.com]

If you're talking about Dutch Gold Honey, they're a company based in Lancaster, PA, and should be collected/made in the United States.

It's okay to be cautious, but I don't see why you would judge a company based on the packaging. Cute doesn't equal bad :(

[lifeinroseland.livejournal.com]

I am very fond of the bear. It’s a classic, so that’s what I keep in the pantry. But it tastes horrible (it’s for guests). Mine says it’s from Virginia. I guess what I really don’t like is the clover honey. Give me orangey goodness and it’s gone in one week.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

The bear shaped bottles are universally available from sources that sell honey containers so yeah the contents of said bear presumably run the quality gamut

[newwaytowrite.livejournal.com]

My god parents were bee keepers and while they had their bees we got honey from them. After that my mom got honey from another family about a mile away. She bought honey and distributed it to her sister and a brother that lived an hour north. My one brother is now back living in our hometown and he buys his honey at the place my mom did.

What makes this so interesting is my mom was and my brother is bargain hunter. However, never did they give the price of local honey a look. They liked the real thing.

We are fortunate where I currently live as local honey abounds. Oh and stores big and small sell it because buy local is a real thing.

[richaarde.livejournal.com]

Just one more reason why China as a nation creeps the bejezus out of me.

[nanila]

Top tips, thank you. Makes me feel justified in paying a bit more for the locally produced stuff!

[pondhopper.livejournal.com]

Yes...that is also a common problem here in Spain. I am a label reader and will only get honey produced entirely here in Spain and hopefully locally. We have a lot of bee keepers here so it's not hard to find. We are very aware of how much Chinese stuff gets into the market and at least the EU now has strict label laws about stating very clearly where stuff comes from.

[drcuriosity]

I am glad I live in a place with enough of its own honey. This does help to explain why honey is sometimes so weird and not-honey-like when I'm outside New Zealand, though :-\

[kitzune.livejournal.com]

I had no idea bootleg honey was a thing.

My grocery store sells locally collected honey; I never thought to double check.
The benefits of living in farm country?

[thismaz.livejournal.com]

That's fascinating. Thanks. I don't eat much honey, but I will keep this in mind when I buy my next jar.

[halfshellvenus.livejournal.com]

I thought China had lost so many bees that they had to resort to pollinating crops by hand! Or was that only in certain areas?

Bee local, I say. No need to import honey when you have your own.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Yes! It was only a particular area but yeah that's what happens when you basically have no EPA and your corporo-governo-commercial interests are run by pure greed -- they used too many pesticides and completely killed off their polinators in a large area. Presumably that wasn't the whole of China though, and I don't know if they've managed to actually impose some restraint in pesticide use and reintroduce bees to that area? It would be interesting to find out what happened

[kk1raven.livejournal.com]

This isn't the first time I've read about problems with fake Chinese honey. One of the news sources I read did a big article on that a while back. I always try to buy my honey directly from bee--keepers. I like to know what I'm getting as well as support real people rather than big corporations.

[furzicle.livejournal.com]

We just returned home to California from Ireland and Wales. Early on we were enjoying a buffet breakfast at a hotel in Ireland where there was this verrrry liquidy substance in a pitcher. I wondered if it were some kind of syrup. Honey never reaches that consistency unless it's been heated in a pot on the stove. Other diners insisted it was honey. Finally I poured out a drop on my finger and sure enough, it was honey flavored. If that wasn't adulterated or hyper-filtered honey, I don't know what it was. We encountered this pseudo honey in other Irish places as well.

Sad that people don't know what real honey looks like.