Fancy honey might not actually be honey
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Re: Fancy honey might not actually be honey
#2And your olive oil might not be olive oil.
Our daughter is allergic to sunflower oil which is commonly used to adulterate the olive oil. Chips supposedly made with olive oil will sometimes give her a rash.
For bottled olive oil we try to buy local California olive oil...,
Re: Fancy honey might not actually be honey
#3[deleted]
Re: Fancy honey might not actually be honey
#4And your olive oil might not be olive oil. Our daughter is allergic to sunflower oil which is commonly used to adulterate the olive oil. Chips supposedly made with olive oil will sometimes give her a rash. For bottled olive oil we try to buy local California olive oil...,
It's not just might, I think something crazy like 80% of olive oil is adulterated. For whatever reason the olive oil industry has become the target of choice for Mediterranean crime syndicates.
Re: Fancy honey might not actually be honey
#5And your olive oil might not be olive oil. Our daughter is allergic to sunflower oil which is commonly used to adulterate the olive oil. Chips supposedly made with olive oil will sometimes give her a rash. For bottled olive oil we try to buy local California olive oil...,
It's not just might, I think something crazy like 80% of olive oil is adulterated. For whatever reason the olive oil industry has become the target of choice for Mediterranean crime syndicates.
Try buying Greek if you can find that. At least the Greek brands of extra virgin olive oil I've bought in Northern Europe look and taste just like the locally product I've enjoyed in Crete. Italian and non-EU brands on the other hand taste totally different - and I don't think it's because of geography.
Re: Fancy honey might not actually be honey
#6And your olive oil might not be olive oil. Our daughter is allergic to sunflower oil which is commonly used to adulterate the olive oil. Chips supposedly made with olive oil will sometimes give her a rash. For bottled olive oil we try to buy local California olive oil...,
From what I read before Costco does independent testing and their olive oil is unadulterated.
Might be something to look into if you have Costco nearby.
Re: Fancy honey might not actually be honey
#7So you’re telling me the “crazy hippies” who demand to buy only local honey from local farms were actually right? That it is actually better for you?
Guess I’ll have to start finding local honey.
Re: Fancy honey might not actually be honey
#8As an immigrant, I see most if not the entirety of the US food industry as a deadly practical joke.
We're all stuffing our face with sugar, dairy, fatty red meat and processed food and nobody really seems to care. Most of the so-called healthy alternatives aren't healthy at all. Just look at what are called "protein bars" at your local market and check how much sugar those have, to name one example.
Re: Fancy honey might not actually be honey
#9Another downside of globalization, it has become cheap and easy to move food items across the world, so Vietnamese sugar syrup can be sold here as "honey" and it becomes a race to the bottom - actual honey producers either go out of business or have to do the same thing. Then a free trade advocate will point to how much the consumer price of "honey" has declined to show how well it works.
This should be straight up regulated, the FDA apparently has no source origin or testing requirements for honey, unless someone actually is sickened by a batch it's all caveat emptor and this stuff is all labeled "raw", "pure" or even "organic" and it takes an NMR machine to know differently.
I do find it surprising that the one sample out of four that wasn't obviously adulterated was the brand from Wal-Mart.
Re: Fancy honey might not actually be honey
#10I'm not sure globalization is very effective for economic growth when we're unable to enforce consistent rule-sets. If that growth is just regulatory arbitrage, we're only exchanging capital for fragile optimizations instead of production efficiency. Things seemed to be working pretty well when countries made good-faith efforts to not undermine the rules for local maximization. New actors have since entered the system who don't seem to mind playing the game exploitatatively even if it destabilizes the long-term equilibrium. Ironically, these players are often described as having "multi-generational thinking" but I won't name names.
To normalize the playing field, investments are needed to fund port-of-entry enforcement, quality control, and authenticity, among other things. Tariffs are the most sensible tax to fund these kinds of expenditures, which brings us back to square one. In fact, I think tariffs are probably a good quantitative measure of how egregiously another country violates it's trading partner's standards at the margins.