Considering the amount of time humans have been involved with honey it may seem ludicrous to some that no standard definition exists. In retrospect, however, there are a good many reasons for this situation.
A standard product means that practically any sample of a pool of that product is representative and has the same characteristics of the rest of those in the pool. In fact, a whole arena of one of the activities that drives much of the modern economy exhibits this phenomenon, the commodities futures market. Take soybeans, which are traded in hundreds of thousands of bushels on a daily basis. The trade presupposes that a contract (5,000 bushels) of soybeans is pretty much the same whether produced in Brazil, the United States or elsewhere. The same is true of other commodities such as frozen orange juice concentrate and silver bullion.
There is no honey futures market because the product is too variable to support one. It’s difficult to compare tupelo honey produced in the Southeastern United States with clover extracted from the Midwestern section of the country. Thus, a contract of honey might include either one or none of these sweets, and the characteristics and price would be different.
A general definition of honey has been in use for a long time: “A sweet viscous material produced by bees from the nectar of flowers, composed largely of a mixture of dextrose (glucose or grape sugar) and levulose (fructose or fruit sugar) dissolved in about 17 percent water; contains small amounts of sucrose, mineral matter, vitamins, proteins, and enzymes.” A variation of this also is found in nature, called honeydew honey or simply honeydew
Because of its inherent value, therhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeydewe have always been attempts to water honey down or add materials that are less expensive and achieve an increased overall price by selling what is purportedly a “pure” product. This “economic adulteration” of honey has been going on a long time and a quick glance through the history books shows some of the creative and some times not very benign substances that have been added to honey. Most of these, including cane and glucose syrup, were fairly easy to detect, however, the rise of high fructose corn syrup meant that a substance extremely close in structure could be added with little chance of detection. This adulteration took on epidemic proportions in the 1980s when it was discovered that some products labeled as pure honey had up to eighty percent corn syrup. When one can sell corn syrup costing $.14 a pound in a container of honey costing $.50 a pound, it doesn’t take much figuring to see the incentive for adulterating the product.
Fortunately, wholesale addition of high fructose corn syrup has been somewhat curtailed, but certainly economic adulteration continues to this day. However, new problems have emerged to challenge honey marketers. One of the most significant is contamination by products used in the beekeeping industry to treat pests and diseases of bees. Recently, Chinese honey was eliminated from the world market because it was found to contain a powerful antibiotic, chloramphenicol. Argentinian honey was subsequently banned from much of its market when nitrofurans were detected.
In the United States, another situation has surfaced that concerns many beekeepers and packers. This is mislabeling or misbranding products, where the label implies a product contains a good amount of honey, when in fact the amount present in miniscule or even absent. Among the prime culprits are breakfast cereals, but others too have been identified and constitute what one wag has published as “The Wall of Shame.”
The current situation can no longer be tolerated by honey marketers and so a resolute group met December 2-4, 2005 in San Antonio, Texas. Sponsored by the National Honey Board, this “Honey Industry Roundtable,” which included the U.S. largest beekeeping associations, honey cooperatives, and packers and dealers, promulgated several resolutions, among which was: “To support legislative action on a ‘honey standard.’ Co-opting parts of the CODEX standard as a U.S. standard was discussed as a possible alternative to the traditional ‘standard of identity’.”
The Food and Drug Administration was the agency asked to develop a standard of identity for honey. In this vein it is instructive to read the history of the development of the “Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906,” modified in 1938 and later years. It turns out to be exhibited in “the peanut butter and jelly sandwich, which both assembled and contained the basic ingredients of the United States’ food standards program in the twentieth century. Scrutiny of the jelly standard illustrates the use of food standards to insure value to consumers. The bread standards illustrate the short lived use of food standards of identity to control the safety of ingredients as well as their ongoing use to enhance the nutritive value of standardized foods. And the peanut butter hearings demonstrate the wisdom of abandoning earlier strict standards in favor of a more dynamic food standards agenda. The peanut butter and jelly sandwich, itself a staple in American life, will enter the twenty first century as a living history lesson on the importance of regulating, but not over-regulating a wide variety of foodstuffs in a dynamic marketplace.”
Given the above history, the FDA has discouraged adoption of new standards in recent years, saying to the American Beekeeping Federation and others that many of the standards for processed foods were aimed at reducing competition. However, the petition was submitted under a different section of the law that seeks to coordinate U.S. with international standards. Thus, a variation of the Codex Alimentarius has been recommended. “The Codex Alimentarius Commission was created in 1963 by Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and World Health Organization (WHO) to develop food standards, guidelines and related texts such as codes of practice under the Joint FAO/WHO Food Standards Programme. The main purposes of this Programme are protecting health of the consumers and ensuring fair trade practices in the food trade, and promoting coordination of all food standards work undertaken by international governmental and non-governmental organizations.”
The U.S. standard lists some deviations from the Codex standard, including:
- Deleting voluntary annex to the Codex as not applicable.
- Deleting subsections (a) and (b) from section 4 moisture content, no honey should exceed 23% moisture content.
- Deleting contaminants as these are controlled by S. laws and regulations.
- Deleting hygiene as these too are controlled by S. laws and regulations.
- Deleting labeling and 6.2 labeling of non-retail containers.
- Deleting methods of sampling and analysis as these could be different in the S.
The American Beekeeping Federation (ABF) has announced that the petition asking the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to develop a Standard of Identity for honey was filed on Mar. 7, 2006. The petition was signed by ABF, American Honey Producers Association., Sioux Honey Association., National Honey Packers & Dealers Association., and Western States Honey Packers & Dealers Association.
