More than seventy-five percent of the honey stocked in the grocery stores across the United States is not real. This is according to testing conducted for Food Safety News. The results indicated that the products with the label ‘honey’ have the pollen filtered out. Pollen are microscopic in nature, and their removal from flowers decrease the nectar quality. The WHO’s food safety divisions, the EC and many more organizations have asserted that when the pollen has been removed, it is impossible to find out whether the honey originated from safe and legitimate sources.
The United States’ FDA holds that any product that has undergone ultra-filtration and does not contain pollen is not considered to be honey. However, currently the FDA is not checking the honey sold in the country to find out whether it contains or does not contain pollen. Ultra-filtration is defined as a process that entails heating honey, sometimes watering down followed by forcing the pollen out through very small filters at high pressure. Pollen is a compound that is usually used to identify the honey source. Ultra-filtration is a procedure that has been mastered by the Chinese, who unfortunately have managed to dump tons of their honey illegally on the United States market for several years.
In the honey containers that Food Safety News provided, 76 percent lacked pollen. These honey containers were in grocery stores such as Safeway, TOP Food, QFC, Giant Eagle, Metro Market, Kroger, A&P, Harris Teeter, King Soopers and Stop & Shop. No honey containers that were sampled from the major drugstores such as Rite-Aid, CVS Pharmacy and Walgreens contained any pollen. Based on the findings it is clear that fraud is one of the key issues affecting grocery stores. Honey is one of the major products that have been adulterated.
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