Honey Laundering

    Among the problems we experience with a globalized food system is that what were once local issues rapidly become international or global. A case in point would be Maple Leaf Foods in Canada discovering that several of their machines for processing deli meat were harbouring Listeria monocytogenes bacteria. Fifty years ago this would have been, at worst, a provincial problem. but by 2008, Maple Leaf Foods was shipping deli meats not only across Canada, but into the US as well, making this, at least potentially, an international outbreak from a single point source. The CBC (which has actually spent a lot of time on food safety issues) was reporting that Federal inspectors usually spent less than 2 hours a day at the plant in the months before the outbreak of the illness, sometimes as little as 15 minutes. This is, of course, a result of conservative pressure to reduce regulation and enforcement on the part of governments, and move responsibility for enforcement onto the businesses affected.
    The Globe and Mail (05 January 2011) is reporting that that honey we are purchasing either in liquid form or in consumer foods, may not be what we think it is. Jessica Leeder, global food reporter for the G&M, writes that much of the honey we consume is Chinese in origin, and does not meet North American food standards.

What consumers don’t know is that honey doesn’t usually come straight – or pure – from the hive. Giant steel drums of honey bound for grocery store shelves and the food processors that crank out your cereal are in constant flow through the global market. Most honey comes from China, where beekeepers are notorious for keeping their bees healthy with antibiotics banned in North America because they seep into honey and contaminate it; packers there learn to mask the acrid notes of poor quality product by mixing in sugar or corn-based syrups to fake good taste.
None of this is on the label. Rarely will a jar of honey say “Made in China.” Instead, Chinese honey sold in North America is more likely to be stamped as Indonesian, Malaysian or Taiwanese, due to a growing multimillion dollar laundering system designed to keep the endless supply of cheap and often contaminated Chinese honey moving into the U.S., where tariffs have been implemented to staunch the flow and protect its own struggling industry. (from Honey laundering: The sour side of nature's golden sweetener)

Look at what Leeder is reporting here:

• Honey contaminated with antibiotics 
•  taste masked with sugar or HFCS (high fructose corn syrup)
• Inaccurate labelling

And that's just two paragraphs.