Addie
Chef Extraordinaire
And I thought I was EVERYBODY'S honey!
I bought some Life Brand (Pharmaprix/Shopper's Drugmart store brand) honey. It has honey from Canada, Australia, and Argentina. The odd thing, which I noticed when I got it home: it's packaged in Australia! The Canadian honey has been across the Pacific twice! That's just wrong.
Walgreen's, as in the drug store? When Texas A&M University tested honeys bought from a variety of stores, Walgreen's was one of those in which 100% of the honey on their shelves had no pollen whatsoever. Specifically, Walgreen's MEL-O Honey was one of them. Pollen is only removed with ultrafiltration. The bottlers say that's done to improve shelf life, but standard filtration removes debris, bee parts, etc. and is all that is needed. An industry expert says the only reason to remove pollen is to remove the ability to test to identify honey from places where it might be questionable, meaning China. Conscientious makers use pollen testing to weed out honey that has been transshipped through a third country, and they won't buy honey that has had the pollen removed, because Chinese honey is sometimes sent through another country where the pollen is filtered out before moving to the U.S. Like so much from China, including the orange concentrate in orange "juice," their honey may be chemically corrupt and may contain various animal antibiotics. Walgreen's and most other drug and grocery chains refuse to say where their honey comes from. But there's only one reason to spend the extra money on ultrafiltration. Busy Bee and Sue Bee are also sans pollen. Even Winnie the Pooh brand is suspect. Honey is a dirty business. Many specialty honeys are found to be falsely labeled. FDA does not police honey. Buy local.
I'm going to continue buying my honey from Trader Joe's Market because I trust them and because they say what region their honey comes from.
If you see a price that is too good to be true, check the ingredients. In my area some stores are now selling a honey flavored corn syrup with cute names in bear shaped bottles. It just ain't right I tell ya!
I had this happen with olive oil. I picked up a store brand from curiousity. It looked like olive oil. It said Extra Virgin. It tasted like your regular cooking oil. Put on my magnifiers and read the label. It was something like 2% olive oil, the rest regular vegetable oil.
Here's the results of actual testing. And that's just the ones that were recognized brands that made clear statements on the label. No telling what they would have found in the off brands with trick labels. They didn't test for actual origins, and I'm not sure they can do that (like testing pollen in honey) or if they can detect the extraction method. But considering that the standards for olive oil have been in place in one for or another for a long time, it's pretty telling when so many fail in so many ways. We really haven't come as far we would like to think from the brick-dust-in-flour and fake tea Victorian days.
http://olivecenter.ucdavis.edu/files/report%20041211%20final%20reduced.pdf
I had this happen with olive oil. I picked up a store brand from curiousity. It looked like olive oil. It said Extra Virgin. It tasted like your regular cooking oil. Put on my magnifiers and read the label. It was something like 2% olive oil, the rest regular vegetable oil.
buckytom said:i don't know what's wrong with me today, but i keep reading thread titles out of context.
this one is in response to "where did you get those questionably produced chinese products?"
walgreen's, honey.