NPR Disputes Food Safety News Honey Coverage

“Maybe we’re too inclined to believe the worst about supermarket food,”
writes NPR’s Dan Charles in a November 25, 2011, column about a recent Food
Safety News report suggesting that most honey sold in the United States does
not deserve the name. According to NPR, the article in question implied that
producers use a process known as “ultrapurification” to remove pollen from
honey, thus preventing “anyone from detecting illicit honey from China.”

“Food that doesn’t deserve its name, processed beyond recognition, probably
adulterated, maybe unsafe, of unknown origin. It sounded so right, plenty of
people decided that it just had to be true,” opines Charles, who upon further
investigation found the entire story “misleading” at best. His research showed
that most packers use diatomaceous earth before filtration to eliminate the
microscopic particles of pollen, dust and bee parts which otherwise promote
crystallization. Moreover, audits of the raw or pretreated honey evidently
revealed pollen from India, Vietnam and other legal export countries, but not
China.

Charles concludes that adulteration, if it is happening, would occur before
export by mixing ultrafiltered Chinese honey with raw product destined
for the United States. As one expert explained, however, such honey would
apparently have “an unnaturally low concentration of pollen.” In any case,
Charles adds, “It’s worth remembering that Chinese honey is barred from
the U.S. not because it’s unsafe, but because U.S. officials decided it was too
cheap… The European Union is much more fussy about honey quality than
the U.S., yet the EU imports lots of honey from China.”