[jart]

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 suspicions. Why can't they prove it? To make these kind of claims without proof is arguably worse than fraud. This would all be outrageous if it's true, since it becomes impossible to make any rational choices as consumers if the food system has gone fraudulent.

[nextaccountic]

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...

[dreamcompiler]

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.

[ugh123]

Absolutely. Avoid any blends outside the U.S.

[throwaway2037]

Honestly, I don't care about "olive oil fraud" from/within the EU. As long as the final country that bottles it is responsible for food safety, then I am OK with it. Seriously, if you told me that tomatoes were mislabelled from Portugal instead of Spain, I would not care. What are the tangible drawbacks for consumers of mislabelled olive oil from EU?

[Glawen]

There was an article about the word enshitification, what you describe the real life example: you are paying a premium price for a product with a lowering quality every year that goes by. Fighting labelling fraud is the correct answer.

If it is written extra virgin olive oil that means a certain oil quality expected in terms of taste. For me that means I can enjoy a non rancid oil on my tasteful tomatoes with real mozzarella di buffalo, and that is a world of difference with making the same salad with tasteless but "tested on rats safe" products

[solumunus]

You’re overpaying for poor quality products. Quite simple.

[throwaway2037]

So, if olive oil from Portugal is imported to Italy and bottled and mislabelled as from Italy, this makes it automatically lower quality? This is the kind of virtue signalling bullshit that I reject on HN.

[solumunus]

If something like this is done it’s done to save cost, which almost always correlates with quality.

[collingreen]

It sounds like you're trying to be angry. I don't see any virtue signaling here except some "holier than thou" from the tone in your comment.

Nobody is claiming that a label magically changes the quality. The comments above are claiming that olive oil from some regions fetch a higher price in the market, ostensibly for good reasons, and that taking something else and claiming it is from that region is fraud. I'm surprised that feels controversial.

[throwaway2037]

    > ostensibly for good reasons

Can you name some of these reasons?

[araneae]

I'm sorry you're just hearing this only right now, but unfortunately it's been happening for a while, and we've also known it for a while.

I.e. https://food.ec.europa.eu/food-safety/eu-agri-food-fraud-net... found widespread fraud and put measures in place to prevent it, but it continues to be challenging.

[NelsonMinar]

The phrasing in the article about "suspected to be fraudulent" is over-cautious, probably because of Britain's very generous libel laws covering newspapers.

[Etheryte]

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 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...

[alright2565]

fyi, "forbes.com/sites" is just some blogging platform.

In this case, it's mostly right, but the original source is https://food.ec.europa.eu/food-safety/eu-agri-food-fraud-net...

[gmerc]

You’re too generous.It runs paid influence campaigns.

[pradn]

It makes total sense for European farmers to cry foul if cheaper imports get to masquerade as the real thing. This has been a big sticking point for the EU-Mercosur deal that recently concluded.

[throwaway2037]

Why do consumers think honey is a special food deserving to spend so much money upon it? I never understand it. Also, I am no doubting this specific Forbes-hosted blog (as I call them), but reader beware. I don't think there is any editorial guidance from the main publishing house. You see all kinds of dubious crap posted on that platform! In the last year or so, HN front page now specifically distinguished blog posts from these subsites, versus the main publisher's website.

[portaouflop]

Honey is a special food and one of the key ingredients for modern civilisation

[throwaway2037]

   > one of the key ingredients for modern civilisation

I tried to Google about this but I could not find anything scientific. Lots of of pseudo-science, however. Can you explain more? Essentially, honey is sugar, an inessential part of the human diet. What am I missing?

[portaouflop]

Without bees agriculture is not possible. Without agriculture modern civilisation would not exist.

[hofo]

I assume that the notion of adulterated honey is new to you and that you’re not in the industry. This has been an issue for decades, it’s nothing new. There are commercial honey producers and packers that are clean but the easiest and surest way to avoid fake honey is to buy local.

[0xEF]

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 the guy at the farmer's market with the mason jars.

[Aloisius]

I have never heard of maple syrup fraud in the US nor can I find any articles on it.

Unless one is talking about imitation maple syrups, but those are labeled properly.

[skylurk]

It's also a thing, unfortunately.

https://news.uoguelph.ca/2023/04/maple-syrup-fraud-undermine...

[Aloisius]

That "article" appears to be a promotion for a test to detect maple syrup fraud in Canada.

It doesn't say maple syrup fraud is common in the US. It does cite an article about someone who bought fake syrup from a random "trucker" on the internet, but that article explicitly says it's not a big issue.

[_3u10]

That’s because honey is sugar syrup with a liberal sprinkling of marketing. The sugar syrup they are blending it with doesn’t have the right marketing and is therefore not honey.

[jart]

No, it's not. Honey is defined by the USDA as being flower nectar that's been processed by bees[1]. Artificial honey can not be called honey[2]. If they're mixing it with high fructose corn syrup, then there should be a way to scientifically determine that.

[1] https://www.ams.usda.gov/sites/default/files/media/Extracted...

[2] https://www.ams.usda.gov/sites/default/files/media/Extracted...

[ryandrake]

Oh, the USDA publishes a rule! Surely everyone will follow that and the problem is solved.

Unfortunately we get the behavior that we let people get away with. Regulators are asleep, courts let companies weasel their way around everything, and reality doesn't care about published rules and standards.

[warkdarrior]

Regulations like these are onerous. Have you ever watched a bee filling out a Dept of Ag or FDA form? Dept of Govt Efficiency will fix it.

[colechristensen]

A 90s percent of honey is fructose, glucose, and water. A very high 90s percent of corn syrup is fructose, glucose, and water. Getting the ratios the same is trivial. There is nothing magical about fructose or glucose from different sources, they’re exactly the same simple molecule.

If you had very clean corn syrup, you could undetectably dilute honey and it would be quite the same. Lab tests being what they are these days, someone could probably make a part per billion analysis that would be very hard to evade, but the difference is emotional not practical.

People have wrong ideas that honey is so much healthier than corn syrup when it is indeed very similar. Not that i support selling corn syrup as honey, but it wouldn’t make any actual difference other than diluted flavor.

[dghlsakjg]

Orange juice is more than 90% water, but you would need to get your sense of taste checked if you confused it with sugar water.

By the same token if you can’t taste the difference between sugar syrup and honey, then you need to get your taste checked, or perhaps you’ve never had real honey.

The flavors in honey are also deeply affected by what the bees eat. Buckwheat honey is a totally different thing than Tupelo honey, and neither are anything like clover honey.

Even if you ignore all of the health claims, saying honey is just sugars and water, you are ignoring the fact that humans want more than nutrient paste.

[dredmorbius]

Hoboy, don't get started on orange juice. The commercially-prepared stuff is also rather distantly-related to fresh-squeezed:

Once the juice is squeezed and stored in gigantic vats, they start removing oxygen. Why? Because removing oxygen from the juice allows the liquid to keep for up to a year without spoiling. But! Removing that oxygen also removes the natural flavors of oranges. Yeah, it’s all backwards. So in order to have OJ actually taste like oranges, drink companies hire flavor and fragrance companies, the same ones that make perfumes for Dior, to create these “flavor packs” to make juice taste like, well, juice again.

<https://gizmodo.com/dirty-little-secret-orange-juice-is-arti...>

And that's for product actually marketed as orange juice, rather than, say, a sweetened citrus-flavoured beverage, for which the first ingredient often is sugar and/or corn syrup, e.g., "True Orange Mango Orangeade":

Ingredients: Cane sugar, crystallized orange (ctiric acid, orange juice, orange oil), natural flavor, stevia leaf extract, beet juice and beta-carotene.

(Beet juice and stevia are both sweeteners, the first is effectively liquid sugar, the second is a non-caloric / low-caloric non-sugar sweetener.)

<https://www.truecitrus.com/products/true-orange-mango-orange>

The fact that you're better off either squeezing your own or better yet eating whole fruit is a whole 'nother matter.

A more detailed production process:

"How products are made: Orange juice":

<https://www.madehow.com/Volume-4/Orange-Juice.html>

[sitharus]

Take a holiday to New Zealand and try honey here. It’s definitely not adulterated because we don’t allow any honey imports. Try clover, Rewarewa, Manuka, and multiflora, you can taste a clear difference between each.

Of course they’ll likely be creamed honey rather than pourable, but that’s just a preference.

[tharkun__]

Oh absolutely, real honey has flavor differences en masse!

The worst we ever tried was pure Buckwheat honey. Very distinct. Sorta "refreshingly different" the first time you try it. For us personally, after that: toss.

[nativeit]

We share more than 90% of our DNA with rats. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I’d like to suggest there are some qualitative differences between myself and a literal rat.

[saagarjha]

https://youtube.com/watch?v=v5sc2F0oQvw

[labster]

In most politicians, the percentage is even higher.

[maltyr]

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10346535/

Numerous studies have concluded that honey does have a better effect on health than the same amount of simple syrup, at least.

> It has been demonstrated that honey consumption can influence plasma lipid, glucose, and insulin levels through different biochemical mechanisms. The decrease in blood glucose may be due to the fact that honey has a stimulatory effect on insulin secretion and improves insulin sensitivity

[carbocation]

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.

[nativeit]

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 with cancer, children, etc.) and included more than 30 different types of honey. Although it is not a systematic review, the results of the PEDro scale regarding the quality of the articles were in the range of 6–10, with articles scoring 6 or higher being considered of good methodological quality.

[oasisbob]

Honey and sugar syrups have other various constituents, and it's trivially possible to tell them apart via GC/MS at far higher levels than ppb.

https://zenodo.org/records/438103

[jfengel]

The remaining 10 percent is very significant to flavor. You can definitely detect it with your tongue and nose.

But as you say it is utterly irrelevant to nutrition or health. Even the antibacterial elements are real but negligible.

[portaouflop]

That’s like saying humans are the same as chimps because they are both 60% water - the difference is not emotional

[fooker]

We share 98.8% of our DNA with chimpanzees, doesn’t make us chimpanzees.

[Der_Einzige]

This is the truth about most types of oil too. All oil is bad and it’s all almost the same.

[result2vino]

This particularly americanised brand of nihilism is so bloody tiring.