191–200 of 241 posts
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.
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Note this also happens with olive oil https://www.europol.europa.eu/media-press/newsroom/news/11-o... https://www.oliveoiltimes.com/business/europe/top-italian-po...
To a first approximation it's accurate to assume any imported olive oil on a grocery store shelf in the US is fraudulent. The only kind I buy now is 100% grown in California and certified by the California Olive Oil Council. And it is very expensive.
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The "down to earth local grower" is a form of marketing that appeals to you. It's not a guarantee of quality, and probably more variable. Many vendors at farmer's markets just buy and relabel stuff, because producing goods efficiently enough to make a profit is actually hard.
I'm pretty sure my own father is not masquerading as a beekeeper to market his honey to me. You're right though that it alone doesn't pay the bills, but it does definitely help.
I do prefer my dad's to buying "local" stuff at the supermarket but I'm not sure I believe all the uncited claims in this thread about everything on the shelf there being fake
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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.
The original claim that Michelangelo11 made is that society in the past was higher trust. That's the claim that needs evidence. The person who disagrees with the initial claim is not the one who needs to initially provide evidence.
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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…
Wait til you hear about maple syrup... That aside, yeah, this is a real problem with honey (and maple syrup) in the US. Food manufacturers will go to insane lengths to get around any laws that protect product purity and honest labeling because the profits are far greater than the fine for breaking the rules. As we all know, if the punishment is a fine, it's only illegal for companies that cannot afford to pay...like…
Unless one is talking about imitation maple syrups, but those are labeled properly.
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> However, pick up a high value product and it’s likely to be some effectively identical fake while still being sold by the company it says on the box. What is this supposed to mean? Every high value product I purchase is definitely unique to the company that makes it. My laptop, GPU, car, and phone are definitely not some rebranded items.
It’s hard to sell a counterfeit car or GPU without someone noticing a difference. Clothes, chargers, cables, etc are counterfeit because it isn’t nearly as obvious. Name brand foods often come with significant markups and would be fairly easy to counterfeit premium bottled water etc. Except as the article mentions food substitutes generally happen earlier in the supply chain not at the grocery store.
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Honey supply chains are opaque and global, plus the incentives to cheat are clearly there and it's hard to definitively prove a batch was not adulterated. I'd say it's fair to be suspicious. That said, this old article seems to think its not as common a problem as you would expect: https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2011/11/25/142659547/re...
> "Consumers don't tend to like crystallized honey," says Jill Clark, vice president for sales and marketing at Dutch Gold. "It's very funny. In Canada, there's a lot of creamed honey sold, and people are very accustomed to honey crystallizing. Same in Europe. But the U.S. consumer is very used to a liquid product, and as soon as they see those first granules of crystallization, we get the phone calls: 'Something's w…
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An uncited statement in a review article! If I'm rich in time and money enough to routinely take the time to wander down to my friendly beekeeper and buy their small-batch artisanal honey, for so many reasons I will live longer than someone who isn't. Someone should randomize people to honey vs fake-honey-sugar-mix and settle the issue.
You mean, something like this? > Forty-eight articles published in 42 different journals were analyzed, with a total of 3655 subjects with 29.51 ± 21.51 years of age, of whom 1990 consumed or were treated with honey. Of the 3655 subjects, at least 1803 were women (two studies did not specify). The studies included different population groups (healthy subjects, overweight or obese subjects, diabetic subjects, subjects…
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This isn’t true at all in the United States at least. Sugar syrup or even honey adulterated with sugar syrup behaves differently. I’ve had some cheap generic brand bottles that flowed too easily, dissolved too quickly, and never crystallized. Probably sugar syrup. But I haven’t seen this once since over a decade ago in my college days when I shopped at some questionable neighborhood supermarkets. Everything I’ve boug…
My brother in law owns bees and gifts us honey. One is strong, thick, crystallised easily. One is thin and flows very easily, very see through. These things aren’t good indicators of adulteration at all
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.
This isn’t true at all in the United States at least. Sugar syrup or even honey adulterated with sugar syrup behaves differently. I’ve had some cheap generic brand bottles that flowed too easily, dissolved too quickly, and never crystallized. Probably sugar syrup. But I haven’t seen this once since over a decade ago in my college days when I shopped at some questionable neighborhood supermarkets. Everything I’ve boug…