Thursday Morning – What's Up, Honey?
Many, if not most, people keep a jar of honey on the pantry shelf. One of nature's natural sweeteners, it not only adds flavor to various recipes but has a certain medicinal advantage too. This comes from the bee's pollen that is an essential ingredient of the nectar. There are some geographical areas, including the state I live in, where springtime pollen counts in the air are heavy enough to cause heavy reactions that trigger allergies – "hay fever" – and a lot of people take a daily teaspoon of honey to ingest the pollen which helps build up a limited immunity to the airborne stuff.
What some people prefer is to use honey produced in their area because, the thinking goes, pollens are geographical too, and local bee's honey is best suited to counteract local allergens. A lot of people don't know that part, but country folks who raise their own foods know about it and many keep beehives on their farms. They primarily raise the bees so that their own crops will be properly pollinated during the growing season, but they will also incorporate the honey into their diets. In my area it is not difficult to obtain local honey and even the major grocery chains carry a regional product alongside the big-name brands.
But there is trouble out there in Honeyland…. and Food Safety News has been doing some investigating into commercial honey quality and purity. What they have found is not only cause for concern, but exposes a serious breach of the Food and Drug Administration's obligation to maintain the safety of commercial food products. An online article written by Andrew Schneider is titled, "Tests Show Most Store Honey Isn't Honey" and carries the sub-title, "Ultra-filtering Removes Pollen, Hides Honey Origins." As soon as you see the keywords "hides origins" you probably automatically connect with "made in China" because of their notorious reputation for exporting poisonous food products. And honey is no exception to their deviousness.
The pollen in honey is such an essential ingredient that to remove it, such as some major honey packagers do, removes the right to legally call it "honey." Being able to isolate the pollen in laboratory testing also permits the positive identification of the geographical origin of the honey. Let me quote from the article:
In the U.S., the Food and Drug Administration says that any product that's been ultra-filtered and no longer contains pollen isn't honey. However, the FDA isn't checking honey sold here to see if it contains pollen.
Ultra filtering is a high-tech procedure where honey is heated, sometimes watered down and then forced at high pressure through extremely small filters to remove pollen, which is the only foolproof sign identifying the source of the honey. It is a spin-off of a technique refined by the Chinese, who have illegally dumped tons of their honey – some containing illegal antibiotics – on the U.S. market for years.
In an earlier investigation, Food Safety News found that U.S. groceries were flooded with Indian honey banned in Europe as unsafe because of contamination with antibiotics, heavy metal and a total lack of pollen which prevented tracking its origin. Recently they followed up on the problem and purchased more than 60 jars of honey from various markets in 10 states and the District of Columbia, then took them to the Pathology Research Laboratory at Texas A&M University where they were analyzed. They found that among the containers of honey provided by Food Safety News:
• 76 percent of samples bought at groceries had all the pollen removed, These were stores like TOP Food, Safeway, Giant Eagle, QFC, Kroger, Metro Market, Harris Teeter, A&P, Stop & Shop and King Soopers.
• 100 percent of the honey sampled from drugstores like Walgreens, Rite-Aid and CVS Pharmacy had no pollen.
• 77 percent of the honey sampled from big box stores like Costco, Sam's Club, Walmart, Target and H-E-B had the pollen filtered out.
• 100 percent of the honey packaged in the small individual service portions from Smucker, McDonald's and KFC had the pollen removed.
• Bryant found that every one of the samples Food Safety News bought at farmers markets, co-ops and "natural" stores like PCC and Trader Joe's had the full, anticipated, amount of pollen.
The article goes on to name names of the major packers in the U.S. that use ultra-filtered honey and also gives you tips on how to find "safe" honey to purchase for your own consumption. It's a lengthy article that takes some time to read, but I urge you to set aside some time to read it. Especially if you don't like the idea of ingesting foreign anti-biotics, industrial runoff contaminates, and adulterants that dilute the honey. You also learn how they are circumscribing the ports to smuggle the hundreds of tons of contraband raw honey into the U. S. Read the FULL ARTICLE HERE.
Before you settle down with that, we need to get this equipment checked out first. I'll go run another pot of coffee before we meet back in the day room.
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"Only you can prevent first responder"
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