Counterfeit Honey? As Good as Gold?

14 January 2015

             Counterfeit Honey?

            But how?

            You can go to any supermarket and see rows of bottles of golden-clear honey.  The labels say “honey.”  So, it must be honey?  Right?  When you look at naturally sweet golden honey, it’s hard not to be reminded of real gold.  Somehow, that golden look puts counterfeiting far out of mind.  After all, one of the great things about real gold is that it isn’t made out of paper.  You can’t counterfeit “the real thing.”

            Oh, yes, you can.

GOOD AS GOLD?

            As I write, gold is selling for a bit over $1,200.00 an ounce.  So, when Ibrahim Fadl found out there were fake gold bars on the market, he was worried.  Finally, in the early fall of 2012, he drilled into a few of his own gold bars and found something . . . that wasn’t gold.  It was tungsten.  Problem?   You bet.  Instead of selling for $1,200.00 an ounce, tungsten sells for about $1.00 an ounce. 

Gold Shell with Tungsten Core

            But that’s gold.  Gold is really valuable.  Why would someone counterfeit honey?  What’s to gain?

            Let’s go back to the days of Prohibition in the United States.  For over decade, the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages was illegal.  So, everyone had to stop drinking?  Right?

            Hardly.  Not only did a gigantic black market in liquor create organized crime empires but, according to the best guesses, a much larger percentage of Americans were alcoholics at the end of Prohibition, than before it began.  So, for a few years, the market for illegal booze was a big, big black market.

            But honey isn’t illegal?  Is it?

A BLACK MARKET FOR HONEY

            Some of it is.  The United States has quality standards.  Honey is divided into grades.  But some honey imported from other countries doesn’t even meet minimum U.S. standards.  Certain pesticides and antibiotics as well as other impurities can be found in foreign products.  Some of these impurities are banned in the U.S.  So, some chemicals and drugs found in foreign honey could never be found in honey produced here.  And some foreign honey has too much of some impurities to considered safe by the FDA.    

            The problem is solved by banning the import of honey processed in countries with unacceptably low safety and purity standards.  When you make a particular type of product illegal, a black market is always possible.

            If you think the U.S. sucks up a lot of international oil, to use in our automobiles, you may be surprised to find out that our honey hunger is going the same way.  Americans consume about 400 million pounds of honey a year.  But U.S. bees produce less than half of that – about 143 million pounds.  The rest has to be imported.

            But honey?  Americans don’t go to their neighborhood bootlegger to buy illegal honey.  And if they did, why would they buy brands, types, and grades of honey declared unsafe by the F.D.A.

            American consumers wouldn’t.  And, during prohibition, most Americans wouldn’t buy or consume poorly made liquor, but they did.  So, how did the bootleggers sell their booze?  The same way gold counterfeiters manage to sell their almost worthless tungsten filled bars.  Mislabeling

A LABEL CAN BE MAGIC

            Most bootleg liquor was made in small illegal distilleries.  “Bathtub Gin” got its name because it was distilled in someone’s bathtub.  But few would buy bathtub gin – at least, if they knew it was bathtub gin.  But . . . a label can be magic.   And, the production of counterfeit labels went hand in hand with the sale of illegal liquor during Prohibition.

 Gin? -- Fresh from the Bathtub?

            But how does this work with honey?  Well, some of the “counterfeit” honey is processed and sold completely in the U.S.  This honey is “counterfeit” because it’s labeled and sold as a higher grade of honey than it is.  These “grades” are legally defined by the F.D.A.  It’s a crime to attempt to sell honey of one grade as honey of another grade. 

            But why would a processor risk prosecution for intentional mislabeling?  For the money.  Most people buy a lot of their honey in plastic-bear squeeze bottles, but the same amount of premium honey can go for as much as $50.00 a bottle.

 The Plastic Bear - The Minimal Solution

FOREIGN HONEY?

            During prohibition, there was no domestic manufacture of booze, so liquor bottle labels were all made to look as if the liquor was legally manufactured in another country.  It’s hard to pass off a fake, unless you have a lot of the real thing around keep things confusing.  And, during Prohibition, there was a lot of liquor that did come from foreign countries.

            You couldn’t import liquor into United States territory.   But “the United States” ended three miles out to sea -- at what was called our “territorial limit.”  Scotch whiskey distillers exported to a point in the ocean that was three and one half miles off the coast of (most famously) Atlantic City, New Jersey. 

            What does this have to do with honey?  Well, because of processing standards set by the F.D.A., some nations are barred from exporting any honey into the United States.  But when the whiskey distillers of Scotland couldn’t actually deliver their product to U.S. “territory,” they found a way to deliver it somewhere else.  And, it works the same way with honey.

TRANSSHIPPING

            Only, now, things are a bit more complicated.  The nation trying to “dump” the soon-to-be contraband honey (Nation A) looks for a country that will legally accept its honey imports (Nation B).  The selected country, Nation B, must also be able to legally export its own processed honey into the United States.  

            Then, . . .

            A two step process, called “transshipping,” begins.   First, Nation A legally exports its honey to the Nation B.  Second, the honey is illegally mislabeled as honey manufactured in Nation B (honey laundering).  Finally, the honey, falsely labeled as a product of Nation B, is (apparently) legally exported into the U.S.  

“CUTTING” THE HONEY

            During Prohibition, things were a bit simpler.  Eager organized crime wholesalers, called “rum runners,” motor-boated out to the Scottish vessels, floating just beyond the U.S. territorial limit,  to pick up the liquor.  The U.S. Coast Guard was patrolling.  So, the “runners,” often, had to “run” or move quickly. 

            But the game was the same.  When they got those pristine bottles of Scottish Whiskey into the U.S., each bottle was carefully unsealed and “cut” by adding bathtub gin to the fine Scottish blends.  Little prohibition liquor was really the foreign manufactured product shown on the labels.

            And, it works the same way with honey.  While many manufacturers try to pass inferior grades of honey off as premium, others take a certain grade of honey and add sugar, cornstarch and sweetening oils to “cut” the honey.  Doing this can turn 10 jars of high grade honey into 15 jars. 

            Problem? 

            Blending honey with other products is subject to strict regulation.  The F.D.A. requires that any so-called “blending” of honey with other diluting products must be disclosed on the label. 

            So, what to do?  Most of us are relative babes in this big bad forest full of honey-laundering wolves.  What chance do we have? 

POLLEN – A SERIAL NUMBER?

            Well, the counterfeit gold bar problem hasn’t been so easy to solve.  There, too, the trick is labeling.  Gold bars are manufactured with serial numbers to assure their authenticity.  But the gold counterfeiters are a step ahead.  They hollow out a registered and numbered, real gold bar and insert a tungsten core. 

            So, the gold bar is “cut” with tungsten.  The original “label,” the outer shell and serial number, are left intact.  Why tungsten?  It weighs about the same as gold.   So, the weight-scale doesn’t always help when you are looking for counterfeit bars.  

            With gold, the best advice, so far, is to buy only from reputable dealers.  This sounds good, but may be more of a cliché than practical advice.  The problem is that Fadl, the poor guy who found out his gold bars were fake, and many others bought their gold from reputable gold merchants – who were fooled by the false labeling as well.

            Honey isn’t packaged with serial numbers.  Even if it were, serial numbers can be faked.  It would be great if you could see into a gold bar to check for tungsten.  But you can’t.  You can see into most jars of honey.  The trick is figure out what you’re seeing.  But what can you really see?

ULTRA-FILTERING

            Vaughn Bryant, an anthropology professor at Texas A & M, found there was little to test or see in most jars of honey.  Why?  Because the F.D.A. doesn’t require honey to be sold with its original pollen.  Ultra-filtering is a process that gives honey that golden clear-glass look – the look that’s so appealing to consumers.  If the honey contained a bit more pollen, it might not look as clear.

            What’s the big deal with the pollen?  Well, pollen is nutritious, but it also can tell us some things about the honey inside the jar.  Certain grades of honey would be easy to spot because of their pollen content.  And, just a little pollen can tell us where the honey in the jar comes from. 

            How? 

            The pollen can be matched with the plants that produced it.  The plants of Canada, Texas, India and China are different.  And the differences are easy to see.  And the combination of plants tell us where the honey came from.

            Congress is currently considering legislation requiring most grades of honey to retain some pollen – enough to show where it came from.  Of course, golden clear honey will always be with us because it looks good and ultra-filtration is required in the preparation of some types of kosher honey.

About the Author