Smuggled Honey Makes It To American Stores Under Cover Of 'Ultra-Filtration'

From Huffington Post - Chinese Honey what's next??

The next time you find yourself in the honey aisle of your grocery store, debating between a pricy premium, artisanal honey and the store-brand nectar contained in a plastic bear, you might want to think twice before choosing based on price.

That's because a searing investigation of the honey market by Food Safety News found that 76% of all honey bought at grocery stores were treated with a process called "ultra-filtration," which removes not only impurities like wax, but also all traces of pollen. And of the types of brands at grocery stores, the ones that were far-and-away the most likely to be ultra-filtered were generic brands.

There are issues with ultra-filtration in general -- many believe that pollen, and other so-called "impurities," are actually beneficial to human health, and make honey a better choice than rival sweeteners like sugar. And there doesn't seem to be any serious benefit to the process; it's expensive and doesn't significantly improve shelf-life, even though some manufacturers claim it does.

But according to FSN, the biggest reason to avoid ultra-filtered honey is that pollen is the only sure-fire way to trace the source of honey to a geographic location. As a result ultra-filtered honey is often used to mask the shady origins of certain kinds of honey -- especially Chinese honey, which is subject to heavy import tariffs on account of its frequent contamination by heavy metals and illegal antibiotics. Chinese honeymakers ultra-filter their honey, and then ship it through byzantine paths, to sneak their sham product onto American grocery shelves without being hit with a tariff.

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/07/smuggled-honey-ultra-filtered_n...