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Fancy honey might not actually be honey

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Re: Fancy honey might not actually be honey

#91

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

r6754dw wrote: post #5
tomatotomato37 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The thing with these suggestions is, they are all anecdotical from a single point in time and (market) space. I remember having read here somewhere, some time ago that maroccan or tunesian olive oil would be very good also, presumably because it isn't under the pressure of massive demand, so less incentive to fraud around it. Since decades this is a topic in consumer testing magazines and public television, and i can't remember anytime they didn't find at least one third fradulent. There are documentations out there, where they travel to Italy, speak with the local farmers, dealers, police and local government to get to root of this problem, and all involved parties (at least on the record) see it as a large problem too. Yet it is persistent.

Re: Fancy honey might not actually be honey

#92

Post by lonelappde »

robbrown451 wrote: post #86
alecst wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I like honey because good honey tastes different from plain sugar. Traveling in Greece I tasted some honeys that were unlike anything I had ever tasted before, ranging from bitter, to floral, to earthy. It's the sweetness, sure, but not only the sweetness.

I suspect you can get equal or better flavors elsewhere. If it comes from the clover, couldn't you just get them from the flowers? I'm not suggesting honey flavors have no benefit, but it just seems odd that we have chosen those specific flavors as being tasty (honey and maple), when their primary attraction was that they came with sugar which was otherwise scarce (but no longer is).

But that's all flavor is. Yes it's an obsolete sense, but we are animals not computers. We can't download a new taste program to change what we like.

Re: Fancy honey might not actually be honey

#93

Post by colanderman »

amlozano wrote: post #37
rrauenza wrote: post #2

And 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...,

I used to trust the California Olive Ranch brand for olive oil, but lately noticed they started labeling their some of their bottles as imported and accidentally bought some. It tastes fine, but if I recall correctly the problems with olive oil usually come from imports where laws and regulation rules change from country to country. Luckily I live close to a real olive mill, but there really is no way to know. Plus y…

FWIW, they were probably forced to import to meet demand due to the poor California olive crop last year.

Re: Fancy honey might not actually be honey

#94

Post by lonelappde »

serf wrote: post #74
raducu wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

>In fact, it s documented that groups of 2-3 men, throughout world tribes, routinely killed and still kill those excessively violent individuals -- that gut reaction is what has helped us survive as a species. that's just a political swing away from turning majorly corrupt. one major difference between modern society and tribalistic societies is the idea of checks and balances. tl;dr : what happens when that group of…

When 2-3 men individually decide who is too dangerous, they are the checks and balances! Checks and balances are a naturally occurring phenomenon when a society is composed of individuals who are capable to look after their own interest but have some dependency on others. It's only the "civilized" world that loses this as everyone becomes subservient to the Government or the lovla Dictator and checks and balances are needed to be artificially reintroduced.

Re: Fancy honey might not actually be honey

#95

Post by lonelappde »

serf wrote: post #77
raducu wrote: post #24

My father in law and my brother in law keep bees. My brother in law told me about a disgusting practice where firms imported honey from China, filtered it, then added local honey and then exported the honey as bio-honey. Sometimes I wonder if we could develop hardware tools to test for psychopathy or just low empathy and just hot-iron-brand these disgusting individuals.

How about we settle for some nice hardware tools to inspect the honey, rather than turning the whole world into a 'The Scarlet Letter'/'Snow Crash' horror story, carried on the whims of law-makers and enforcers carrying out whatever might be trendy? But, on second thought, my forehead might look nice with "LOW IMPULSE CONTROL" branded over it..

Unfortunately my honey detectors is a fraud that fails to detect the fake honey whose maker paid off the honey detector maker.

Re: Fancy honey might not actually be honey

#96

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

Anybody remembering the blue honey in france, coming from bees gorging on the trash from a nearby factory producing M&Ms?

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/10/121011-blue-...

While searching that i learned about another kind of "blue honey", which is also very interesting.

Re: Fancy honey might not actually be honey

#97

Post by airstrike »

jniedrauer wrote: post #53
airstrike wrote: post #8

As 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.

> Just look at what are called "protein bars" at your local market and check how much sugar those have Something to bear in mind here is that products designed for athletes won't be healthy for people who aren't training at high volume. The metabolic pathway for sugar is very different when taken during or after training.

Sure, but Luna Bar Protein isn't designed for athletes...

Re: Fancy honey might not actually be honey

#98

Post by robbrown451 »

lonelappde wrote: post #92
robbrown451 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect you can get equal or better flavors elsewhere. If it comes from the clover, couldn't you just get them from the flowers? I'm not suggesting honey flavors have no benefit, but it just seems odd that we have chosen those specific flavors as being tasty (honey and maple), when their primary attraction was that they came with sugar which was otherwise scarce (but no longer is).

But that's all flavor is. Yes it's an obsolete sense, but we are animals not computers. We can't download a new taste program to change what we like.

Are you saying that desire for honey is hard wired into us? I believe that's true for sugar, but not the additional flavors in honey.

Anyway, people buy fake honey simply because they think it is honey. So I don't think it is the specific taste that you can only get from actual honey.

Most people these days buy fake maple syrup (since real is so expensive), and tests have shown most can't tell the difference from real, and many prefer the fake.

Re: Fancy honey might not actually be honey

#99

Post by [deleted] »

magicalhippo wrote: post #45
wyxuan wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mind explaining how it tastes different? I'm curious as to what the difference is.

Think of the difference between a Vienna sausage, bratwurst and chorizo. Consistency, smell, flavor varies a lot, same for the honey depending on what the bees "ate".

[deleted]

Re: Fancy honey might not actually be honey

#100

Post by pontifier »

LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #78

Every time i'm reading something like this, i'm wondering where my f-ing Tricorder from Star Trek is. What would it take to get the equivalent of mass spectrometry into a miniaturized clip on module for a smartphone which you could point at anything for a few seconds, and get the results on your app just from the backscatter? I don't care about the means, just the results. Oh, and not as something exotic but massprod…

They do exist, they are just expensive. probably the price would come down if there were more demand. It's Probably on its way to a smartphone in 20 years or so if demand justifies it.

https://www.spectro.com/products/xrf-spectrometer/xsort-xrf-...

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