121–130 of 241 posts
Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42286030
That's a link to this discussion.
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Now old dudes will buy supermarket honey and unlabeled jars. Unverifiable provenance in both cases..
If you /really/ want to be sure, buy comb honey. Impossible to fake.
Here's a very straightforward guide to buying honey. If you see honey at a supermarket, no you don't, that's sugar syrup. If you see honey online, no you don't, that's sugar syrup. If you find an old dude with a small stand and a bunch of (most likely unlabelled) jars who only accepts cash, that's where you get real honey.
But all the honey labels say the only ingredient is honey. We've always been able to assume that with things like jams, or any other food, when manufacturers adulterate it with things like corn syrup, or even mild poisons, they proudly say so on the label. To not do so is fraud. How can people just claim that an entire industry is committing fraud??? Even this article doesn't mention anything about proof, just suspic…
> According to the sampling and monitoring work carried out by the Brussels-based body, almost 50% of the honey from non-European countries is cut with sugar syrups made from rice, wheat or sugar beet.
> All the 10 honeys entered via the United Kingdom were marked “non-compliant” and mixed with imports from Mexico, Ukraine and Brazil.
> Apart from the main fraudulent addition of sugar syrups, the report also alerts of the presence of additives and colorings and the falsification of traceable information.
So yeah, a considerable part of honey contains more than what's on the label and often isn't of the origin written on the label. As for outrageous, it is — beekeepers have been sounding the alarm on this issue for years — but nothing has been done to stop this on the policy side.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/ceciliarodriguez/2023/03/24/hal...
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But all the honey labels say the only ingredient is honey. We've always been able to assume that with things like jams, or any other food, when manufacturers adulterate it with things like corn syrup, or even mild poisons, they proudly say so on the label. To not do so is fraud. How can people just claim that an entire industry is committing fraud??? Even this article doesn't mention anything about proof, just suspic…
If you find this hard to believe, I recommend reading this Forbes article [0] which gives some pretty stark numbers. I've included a few select quotes below: > According to the sampling and monitoring work carried out by the Brussels-based body, almost 50% of the honey from non-European countries is cut with sugar syrups made from rice, wheat or sugar beet. > All the 10 honeys entered via the United Kingdom were mark…
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I remember an episode of Dirty Jobs where there was an old candy plant or something that bees had gotten into, and they made blue honey from the syrup that was left over in the plant. Rare, but possibly the bees were doing a swindle.
From my limited understanding almost all beekeepers give their bees sugar syrup to help them overwinter anyway so nothing stops them from supplementing their diets in the spring. It’s obviously not ideal since a lot of the other aromatics from pollen will be missing but it’s still a step up from mixing the end product with sugar syrup. Blue honey sounds cool though.
Supers (extra boxes) are placed on the hive when the colony is producing enough honey to harvest.
In theory the supplemental sugar shouldn't get into the supers.
Here's a very straightforward guide to buying honey. If you see honey at a supermarket, no you don't, that's sugar syrup. If you see honey online, no you don't, that's sugar syrup. If you find an old dude with a small stand and a bunch of (most likely unlabelled) jars who only accepts cash, that's where you get real honey.
So I’ve never had real honey? Why doesn’t someone just sell the stuff the small dude sells in a store?
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To my untrained eye, this is a natural consequence of focusing on profit above all. So a natural consequence in cultures where such focus exists.
I'm increasingly convinced this switches cause and effect. Focusing on profit above all is a capitalist manifestation of an authoritarian zero-sum society; in state socialism it manifests as top-down anti-worker state focused on metrics and productivity. (In both cases a major problem is an absence of labor unions and formally independent oversight. People forget that Lenin killed workers who went on strike.) I get a…
the reason that adulterated honey is difficult to detect is that honey is just sugar syrup, and if you add more sugar syrup you'll get more sugar syrup than you started with. the mistaken belief is that there is something special about natural honey. people: it's sugar syrup, it'll give you diabetes as fast as a truckload of mountain dew. Now, I don't believe in homeopathy, perhaps you do. But that's what the honey c…
This is false. I'd be willing to wager substantial amounts of money on my ability to differentiate good acacia honey from sugar syrup.
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Rose colored glasses looking at the past. Nostalgia for something that never was.
Do you have evidence of that? Things do change, and sometimes for the worse. PE squeezing hospitals, nursing homes, and rent is a new thing. Look at rents - the inflation of them is not something that happened in the past.
In the case of rents, the evil landlord raising rents and kicking people out is a trope you see in 1910s fiction. (probably before that, but I haven't personally read much fiction older than about 1910)