For years I have known that honey was being laundered around the world in much the same way as drug money. Honey is enormously popular world wide and as such it is the 3rd most faked product only behind milk and olive oil. It is shipped from country to country where the labeling changes and is sometimes chemically altered by sugars designed to mimic the sugar in real honey. By cutting the honey with high fructose corn syrup, beet sugar and other sweeteners they can sell a diluted product at a lower price than real honey. The result being that the real thing is more expensive and harder to find with suppliers going out of business in this country.
I became aware of this again a couple of weeks ago when I ran out of my usual stuff and stopped by my local Mart to see if they had the real thing. One way to determine if a product is bogus is to check for the country of origin and the stuff I looked at read something like: China, Viet Nam, Argentina and the USA. Probably a 100% guarantee that it was a laundered product. There is no need for a product that can be produced locally to be shipped to multiple countries before it winds up in your pantry. Check the labels and try to buy from a local producer if possible, they probably won't be around much longer.
One last observation, over 3 years ago I was given a bottle of Russian honey that appeared very pale. I tried it but didn't like it and left it on a shelf in the pantry. I looked it up when I ran out of the good stuff and noticed that it hadn't turned to sugar during those years and was far too runny to be real honey. Something fishy going on there for sure.
I became aware of this again a couple of weeks ago when I ran out of my usual stuff and stopped by my local Mart to see if they had the real thing. One way to determine if a product is bogus is to check for the country of origin and the stuff I looked at read something like: China, Viet Nam, Argentina and the USA. Probably a 100% guarantee that it was a laundered product. There is no need for a product that can be produced locally to be shipped to multiple countries before it winds up in your pantry. Check the labels and try to buy from a local producer if possible, they probably won't be around much longer.
One last observation, over 3 years ago I was given a bottle of Russian honey that appeared very pale. I tried it but didn't like it and left it on a shelf in the pantry. I looked it up when I ran out of the good stuff and noticed that it hadn't turned to sugar during those years and was far too runny to be real honey. Something fishy going on there for sure.
