I must be attending too many meetings lately. I suspect this because I actually managed to refrain from banging my head on the table during a presentation this morning. My husband and I attended the summer meeting of the Wisconsin Honey Producers Association. Don't get me wrong: The presentations and reports themselves ran the gamut from competent to excellent. It was just so frustrating to watch my elders--in raw age as well as beekeeping experience--so oblivious to the irony they were wreaking.
Our guest speaker shared an anecdote about a honey producer losing his sole client (a grocery store) when a FDA (?) inspector decided to throw his or her weight around and informed the store that the honey had to be removed from the shelves because the producer's facilities--what we call a "honey house"--hadn't been inspected by any health agency. Talk quickly turned to other regulatory issues, up to and including the possibility of the Department of Homeland Security even sticking its nose into "our" business. I'll leave you to imagine the more heated tone this gave to the chatter.
On the heels of this, however, the talks turned to frustration with the FDA's foot-dragging on the issue of declaring a standard for what, exactly, constitutes honey, despite pressure from beekeeping and honey producing organizations. Later in the afternoon, the WHPA President informed us of how well the work to legally define honey for a voluntary certification program was working on the state level--with a commendation for how easy our bureaucrats were to work with.
So, the takeaway, in broad brush strokes, is: Regulation is bad. Except when we want it.
Now, you're probably wondering why honey needs to be legally defined when humans have been harvesting it for thousands of years. Simply put: As long as it isn't, anyone--domestic or foreign--can bottle a sweetener and call it "honey," at least under the status quo. And, of course, with agriculture department budgets being slashed at the state level, we all know how strict the enforcement will be for something that violates a non-existent standard. Without a standard, honey producers and consortiums don't even have a legal standing to sue for redress. That leaves the market wide open for anyone to (fraudulently) dump (cheap) flavored corn syrup or sugar syrup onto the market and put the producers of honest-to-pete honey out of business. The industry is already stressed, due to drug-resistant diseases and parasites, some of which may be feeding into the colony collapse disorder you've probably heard about.
What you need to understand, the next time you see honey bottles lined up on the supermarket shelf, is that not even half is produced in the United States. The figure I heard to day is between 30 - 40 percent. The balance is, of course, made up from imports. "Dumping" is already a problem, even without questions of standards.
I don't intend to exclusively knock China, because U.S. producers can just as easily engage in shady tactics. For instance: I could, if I wanted, "help" my bees through a dry spell (or cold and wet spell) by feeding them sugar syrup, which would make its way into the honey that's harvested later this summer. And, likely, no one would be the wiser. The real concern, however, is "adulteration" on the same level as melamine in baby formula, lead paint on toys, and deadly substitutes for glycerin. Only in this case, we're talking about banned anti-biotics (among other contaminants), and the problem has been recurring for over 11 years.
The point of this post is emphatically not to scare anyone away from their 1.1 pound annual dose of honey. If you feel in the slightest bit squeamish, the farmer's market or local co-op should be able to take care of you. Honestly, I don't have any skin in this game--at least not from a financial standpoint. My husband and I don't sell any of the honey our "ladykins" produce for us. It goes onto our toast and cereal, into custards and other baking, and replaces cane sugar in the fruit wines we make. Some, of course, goes straight into mead. ;-)
But I do eat foods made with honey, and in principle I just believe that you can't have a truly "free" choice in the marketplace without accurate information on the label. And I think that's a principle that that even the love child of Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand could get behind.
