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by Etheryte 558 days ago
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...

3 comments

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...

You’re too generous.It runs paid influence campaigns.
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.
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.
Honey is a special food and one of the key ingredients for modern civilisation

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