Why Supermarket Honey is FAKE

if you've ever stood in front of the honey section at a grocery store and wondered what the hell is going on you are not alone there is a lot of Buzz about honey these days and we all love a spoonful but here's the thing a lot of what we have access today is not actually Huddy [Music] today's video is brought to you by patreon head over there if you want to support what we do on this channel and get access to exclusive patreon only content now the whole idea for this video started when our project manager Lou was backpacking around Mexico and just happened to meet some guy named Thomas who's a beekeeper who actually founded a company called Coastal nectar this is like the most backpacking story ever and after a little while of chatting and learning about the channel he said something like mate you gotta make a video about uh how do you do a Australian accent gotta make a video about how honey is fake that's like British or like Scottish or something hold on Australian an antsy Wright mural and may you go to make a video about how all Supermarket honey is fake if if that's not Australian I'm sorry Thomas you deserve better but anyway after all of that here we are making a video about honey for Thomas so after this interaction Lou brought it back to the team and so we asked our writers to do a little digging on it and see what's going on and not to spoil the whole video but uh Thomas is right A lot of the stuff that you see in the supermarket shelves is not actually Honey which begs the question what first thing that we need to establish here is that honey is not just a sweetener for your tea in fact some researchers have argued that honey is literally what made us human that we've been consuming this energy rich food for over a million years and it became a huge part of what fueled our brain development now we are not making a video about how dope honey is but to understand the honey market today you have to understand the honey bees role in society not only are these Critters fueling a multi-billion dollar Global honey Market but many farmers depend on them to pollinate our crops our very food supply in part is dependent on the honey industry and right now we just don't have enough now if you take a look at the numbers a little bit of graph fun time for you demand for honey has been on the rise for years but the thing is honey isn't one of those things that's easily scalable it takes bees time to visit the millions of flowers and to barf nectar into each other's mouths and to cap it off in a comb and yes the barf thing is real I swear every time I learn something new about bees hype just becomes more real but apparently bees store nectar in these little bellies that are reserved just for adding enzymes to the concoction and then they do this B game of like regurgitation telephone as PPS so eloquently put it they pass the nectar from B to B adding enzymes into the mix before storing it which sounds gross but you'll understand why in a little bit according to one beekeeper it can take 550 bees two weeks just to produce a pound of honey there is only so much that you can do to speed up that process and it seems to be getting harder and harder the way that our world is going as it turns out bees do their best work when operating in diverse ecosystems which is not great because this is what a diverse ecosystem looks like and this is what our current ecosystem looks like the way that we have set up our industrialized food system means that we have plowed over hundreds of millions of Acres of viable land to make way for just a single crop at a time like apples or grapes with more and more of our land being overtaken by monoculture Farms beekeepers are left fighting for a smaller and smaller area that just isn't as productive which is a huge double irony because those same crops need bees in order to pollinate their fields so what do they do they ship in the bees from around the world to pollinate the farm terms where bees are no longer able to survive naturally uh it's like the ADHD game where like you go into the kitchen to clean the dishes but then you realize that you haven't mopped the floor and then you go into the closet to grab the mop and then you realize that you haven't organized the closet so you start reorganizing the closet but then you realize you forgot about the dishes and then you turn around you look at the time you realize you're late for work we're shooting ourselves in the foot making the job twice as hard as it needs to be and bees are caught in the middle so as you may be able to tell honey is kind of the symbol for the whole food industry and yes we're aware that there is some debate on just how much we should be focusing on honey bees specifically versus other species of bees and other insects but at the end of the day if even our honeybees aren't doing so hot we're all their connection to our food and its environment is undeniable the whole save the bees Mantra that we see on reusable tote bags today is really save our honey too but as demand increases this makes Honey an increasingly valuable product and therefore ripe for fraud the reality is anyone who can figure out how to scale honey production to meet demand is going to be a billionaire the best way of course to save the bees and our honey would be to just leave them the hell alone and allow our natural ecosystems to bounce back but that's not how we do things no no we want our honey our bees and our brain tickling farming grids visible from space at the same time with bees as the acute environmental mascot and honey is the miracle substance that we all love honey is more than ever a product in demand having honey or a cute little bee on your packaging automatically gives you or your product a bit of an Eco health conscious veneer and over the years we have seen the full force of the industrial food system trying to squeeze as much sweetness out of it as possible this isn't necessarily something we think about much but you have to understand that bees are essentially kind of like another form of livestock they're social creatures that feel pain and they're just as prone into being abused in factory farms as chickens and cows commercial beekeepers are known to do things like over Harvest honey leaving no food for the bees when they actually need it they'll instead give the bees some less nutritious food like corn syrup making it even more difficult for these little cutie patooties to survive through the winter by the way we literally did the same thing with cows like you put the cows into like one area where they all eat at the same time and then you feed them corn but this time not syrup just literal corn to fatten them up parallels are kind of disturbing should we make a video about corn I feel like maybe corn do people care enough about probably not anyway there's enough disturbing practices going on too that we don't have time to cover but basically commercial bees are being forced to work in unnatural conditions by Keepers who clearly don't care about their health or well-being which is just so idiotically short-sighted like even if you don't care about the bees themselves and all you care about is the bottom line it is so obvious that when you don't take care of the animal that you make money off of or whatever the asset is it's a part of your business it's not going to keep producing at the same rate of the same quality that you depend on like oh I'm Gonna Save so much money by like not changing the oil on my vehicle and then your car explodes foreign what's going on dummy this is just big business Basics number one like I don't even know what to tell you but for some suppliers this isn't really much of a problem because they don't even bother with real honey in the first place and here's where we get into the real sticky stuff now before Lou's backpacking adventure with Thomas this whole honey scam scenario was news to me but when we wrote this script and we did our research we learned that Netflix has a depressing docu-series uh called rotten and they did a whole video about honey adulteration and so we're gonna just give that one a little bit of a breakdown before we get into the rest of the video apparently suppliers have long been adding in fillers to bulk out their honey to make it go further it's just like watering down your parents vodka if you drank a bunch of it before you stick it back in the freezer which actually doesn't work because the more water you add the more likely it is to freeze and then you'll get caught so just drink the whiskey instead put a little bit of food coloring in it and put it back in the cupboard obviously these large producers were filling out their honey products with sweeteners made from corn and sugar cane then Regulators figured out how to detect this so sellers switched over to rice syrup to get around these sorts of tests basically suppliers and Regulators playing whack-a-mole where they find a loophole and then The Regulators change the rules but the whole point is to try and get honey to you the consumer at a cheaper price no matter what they fill it with much of the blame has been aimed at China because we love to blame another country for things and there have been heavy tariffs imposed on Chinese Honey to try and balance things out the suspicion now is that China has started selling honey to North America through other countries all the while removing pollen which is what we use to track where Honey comes from now we need to take a minute to address the whole pollen removal situation while researching this video we found a few claims that honey without pollen literally isn't honey at all apparently there is actually a whole lot of drama around this point back in 2011 seemingly spurred on by one article which seemed to make just such a claim to be fair the article did get into a bit more nuanced than how I'm about to sum it up but it's a very long very dry yawner with a lot of rather Sensational implications it is not super surprising that this got a little misconstrued over time but the argument that many readers came away with is that all honey without pollen so most supermarkets hunting today got that way via a process called ultra filtration which supposedly doesn't really make it real honey now I find this kind of hilarious but the exact same website a few months later published another article that said something very different in the last several months various stories have resulted in misunderstandings and confusion about honey and honey filtration leading some readers who believe that any honey without pollen is not real honey this is just not true you gotta love it when the media says this is crazy that you misunderstood this thing when they're the ones who bumbled it in the first place but anyway it turns out the pretty well all honey is at least strained otherwise we'd be putting things like bee legs in our tea which is not exactly what you want on a cozy winter morning many suppliers have taken a step further though with a filter that removes finer particles this does a few things notably preventing honey from crystallizing over time which by the way is actually kind of a good thing if your honey is crystallizing it usually means that the honey is real extra filtration is something that they do specifically for the American Market because apparently we all think that the honey is going to go bad or something when it starts to crystallize this is just such a classic North American thing like we get an idea of what something should look like and if it doesn't perfectly fit that exact mold we're like throw it out just just throw it in the garbage I can't touch it if ancient Egyptian honey is still doing all right in the freaking tomb the stuff in the back you're covered from last summer is perfectly fine the thing about this level of filtration is that it can also remove pollen this isn't necessarily A nefarious thing or a sign of ultra filtration but it's not great pollen might not be what makes honey honey we'll leave that definition up to you the viewers but it is one of those things that lends honey all those healing properties that we talked about earlier with the barfing and whatnot and so while the reality is that not every Supermarket bottle of Honey is a full-on scam we can bet that a lot of it is but we'll let our friend Thomas The Beekeeper describe it himself now this keeps the profits really high for the large-scale producers but it also kills off all of the medicinal benefits that we love about this raw and natural product and so here we are left with yet another frustrating circumstance where you have consumers like self trying to do the right thing by their health and the planet by purchasing a wonderful substance of Honey only to find that oh wait it is just incredibly complicated to do the right thing and thing that is the right thing is a lot more expensive so what do we do well there is a sort of encouraging thing about this whole story all the drama has people talking about the honey business and we're seeing the organic honey Market growing as consumers are becoming increasingly interested in eating better honey now there are easier and better ways of making choices in the supermarket you can keep an eye out for True Source certified honey basically means the third party has verified the authenticity traceability and legality of the honey inside of the bottle labels like raw and organic might not be the most convincing in this era of green washing but you may or may not be able to read something on the back and see if those have the qualities that you're looking for but if you really want to know what you're getting the ultimate thing to do is what our friend Thomas suggests Source a local beekeeper usually at a farmer's market or down the road someone that specializes in producing small batch single origin raw honey this means that honey isn't he treated and it will still contain little particles of pollen and Beeswax that's really important for hay fever and your immunity especially in Winter now I personally think that sourcing local raw honey is going to be 100 times more flavorful and also be a lot more sustainable too now of course Thomas has an Instagram account which you can go and check out if you want to learn more about what he does specifically if you happen to be in Australia but you should also take some time to learn about the honey World in general because as we mentioned it is very interesting and a little bit inspiring in the world of like environmental and you know health related stories that we cover on this channel there is some some light at the end of the the what are the things that they put the honey in God damn it I'm recording this I should know what I'm talking about if you can support good quality local sustainable honey production you are also inadvertently supporting good quality local food production as well the more that we can invest in this industry to make it better the better we will all be off in the future and that is what future proof is all about if you want to see more content from us and you like this video consider liking and subscribing and then we will see you in the next one [Music] thank you

Channel: Future Proof

Views: 975,175

Keywords: honey, pure honey, unfiltered honey, raw honey, honey industry, bee honey, bee hive, beekeeper, honey production, honey processing, save the bees, honey bees, supermarkets, marketing, advertising, mindful consumption, consumerism, sustainability, education, future proof

Id: lxXoG1ih1Pk

Length: 15min 5sec (905 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 26 2023