Honey Laundering and Food Labeling
By Monica @ 8:02 AM   
Yes, you read right. Here is a news article hitting my inbox this morning, tying in nicely to my previous post on honey:
AUSTRALIA has been caught up in an international "honey laundering" scam in which Chinese honey is disguised and sold as the product of another country. The illegal scheme follows the collapse of bee colonies in the US and Europe, creating a shortage of honey and the bees necessary to pollinate crops, The Times and The Australian report. In the scam, drums of honey are shipped from China, usually to a distributor outside the country, who then repackages and re-exports it. In one case, drums of Chinese honey were marketd (sic) "Polish Light Amber Honey". In 2003, Melbourne-based agents of a Chinese firm rebadged Chinese honey as Australian and onsold it to the US. As a result Australia is on a list of 13 countries whose honey products must be cairfully (sic) checked on entry to the US. ...The Melbourne operators were charged and fined $489,000 for importing and rebadging 125 containers holding 1.7 million litres of Chinese honey sold to the US. The elaborate subterfuge is to avoid heath and safety checks, import fees and tarrifts (sic) imposed by the US and other countries on Chinese food products.
Here's another report on this story. It's very revealing. If your kid eats Honey Nut Cheerios, s/he could be getting an unexpected (albeit probably small) dose of some pretty toxic antibiotics like ciprofloxacin and chloramphenicol. This is why I said that any foreign honey is suspect. China is an enormous danger to the food supply of the United States. And such fines simply aren't going to stop them, as the second report clearly indicates.
As usual, Chinese producers and Chinese-based firms are willing to do almost anything to make a fast buck -- whether adding toxic melamine to milk (it is still going on -- I get news alerts about this daily), ethylene glycol to toothpaste, or fraudulently labeling their food as from a different country so as to get consumers to buy it. They will play this game endlessly to escape the regulatory schemes set up. It's not going to end here, and new regulations aren't going to protect consumers because the Chinese will keep adapting to find ways around the regulations.
I'll repeat it -- the greatest way to ensure the safety of your food (or at least that your food is not from China) is to buy a whole food and to buy locally or domestically sourced items. This isn't protectionism, it's common sense. If third world countries had ethical production standards and my inbox wasn't flooded with several news items about food fraud -- daily -- I'd have no problem buying foreign food for myself. It's a personal choice -- nevertheless, I feel compelled to tell all of you readers what you're up against and that you do so at your own risk.
Let me give you an example of why any packaged, multi-product food in the store is suspect. Stoneyfield Farm labels their yogurt as organic yet they source some of their raw materials from China. First, it's a multi-product food: there's more than one ingredient and whenever that is the case the manufacturer is not required to label the country of origin for those ingredients. Second, I highly doubt there is any verification proces to make sure the Chinese strawberry farmers aren't spraying toxic chemicals like methyl bromide, or worse -- or that the strawberries are even rinsed before going into the yogurt. Same for any other multi-product food: you have no idea where it came from. Literally any boxed or packaged food with more than one ingredient could have sourced one or more of the ingredients from China. If grocery stores refused to stock goods from China they'd have to shut down their entire store because a majority of the items sold in a grocery store are multiproduct goods, which means there's a possibility that they contain raw materials from China.
The new country of origin labeling (COOL) requirements for meat, supposedly designed to help consumers, are also a joke. I recently saw soup bones in the grocery store labeled, "Product of the USA, Canada, and Mexico." Informative, no? Actually it is -- it gives at least some indication of what is going on in those USDA-approved meat packing plants.
Labels: "Safety", De-regulation, Honey, Labeling, Meat Inspection
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2 Comments:
You do realize that by complaining about Chinese honey that might be "contaminated" with antibiotics, you're inadvertently placing yourself on the same side with the USDA and the FDA--because the "toxicity" of minuscule amounts of this or that chemical or bacterial contaminant is precisely the rationale they use to keep things like raw milk off the market.
Much better to focus strictly on the government interference and what various people do to avoid it rather than sidelining yourself into a discussion of just *how* dangerous, say, a given antibiotic is compared to the bacteria, pesticides, denatured nutrients, etc. that are ALSO certain to be present in ANY honey regardless of source.
There's no such thing as "pure" food--heck, there's not even such thing as food that's truly free of germs unless you plan to autoclave the stuff, then irradiate the hell out of it. So you're going to be picking your poison regardless and you may want to point that fact out.
"Much better to focus strictly on the government interference and what various people do to avoid it "
I thought it was abundantly clear that that was the purpose of my post.
Jennifer, I'm sorry that you don't like my personal opinion on antibiotics in the food supply. But this is my blog and I'll write on topics of interest to me, from my perspective and as I see fit.
By objecting to specific practices, I'm not placing myself on the same side as the USDA or the FDA. I've made no statement that the FDA or the USDA should regulate the use of antibiotics. The position of either agency usually isn't even internally consistent with regard to the antibiotic issue as you've implied. You've made it sound as if they're always opposed to antibiotic use in our food as dangerous. That's clearly not the case for modern feedlots in which antibiotics are supplied in the food of cattle and pigs for months on end.
The main concern of this post is that many of the Chinese don't want to deal honestly, and thus it's a case of caveat emptor when buying foreign honey because they are fraudulently labeling it as from other countries. There is simply no way that any American could get justice through any kind of tort lawsuit with a fraudulent Chinese company. The issue is not confined to antibiotics, as I've made abundantly clear.
There's ample reason to avoid foreign honey, given the fraudulent country of origin labeling and that various other medications are used on bees. I have zero assurance if the honey is from China (or many other third world countries for that matter) that the hives weren't medicated when the honey supers were on -- which is not standard practice in the United States. In defending that standard practice, which is wise, I'm not defending government regulations, because there are no regulations with regard to timing of medication in the United States.
It would be completely understandable for any number of people wanting to avoid raw milk. So long as they respect my right to drink it, I have no problem with their personal choices or opinions, nor do I think their public advice to avoid the product would mean that they are somehow sanctioning USDA or FDA regulations -- that's absurd.
I don't really wish to get into a tit for tat on the biological facts, because that's not the point here. I made it perfectly clear that there is not such thing as organic or pure honey, so w're on the same page there.
Nevertheless, no one is "picking their poison" when eating raw honey, unless they are feeding it to a young baby who might be susceptible to botulinum spores. It's an incredibly safe food and has numerous antibacterial substances and an antibacterial enzyme, glucose peroxidase, that creates hydrogen peroxide. That and its water potential make it a food that's perfectly safe to leave at room temperature for years -- and why it's so effective at treating bacterial infections, recently in clinics under the trade name Medihoney.
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