Adulterated Honey

Adulterated Honey


Honey always was, and still is, adulterated. Since the strict enforcement of the Federal Pure-Food Law, violators are severely punished and gross vitiations are now extremely rare. The fact that honey was one of the leading articles which the Food Standards Committee considered when the law was passed, attests the importance of the product as a food and it also reflects the frequency with which it was adulterated. Adulterated honey, of course, does not mean artificial honey but honey that has been mixed with sucrose, commercial glucose, starch, chalk, gelatine, water and other substances. The greatest problem for the chemists of the Food and Drug Administration today is to detect commercial invert sugar which is not so easily traced as other adulterants.

The fact is that good honey could no more be successfully imitated than milk, a bird's egg or a genuine pearl. The apprehension most people have that certain honeys are adulterated is due to the fact that they taste differently from honeys previously consumed. Honeys have the same flavor, color and aroma only when the nectar is gathered from the same flowers; otherwise, these characteristic attributes will greatly differ. Procuring comb honey is not a protection against being deceived. Beekeepers, when there is a scarcity of flowers or during an unusually rainy season, feed their bees with sugar-water which they place before the entrance of the hives. The bees gorge themselves with this sugar and quickly de-posit it in the combs without giving it a chance to undergo in-version. The result is a poor quality of honey in the comb which lacks most of the important constituents of real honey. Most extracted honeys on the market are now chemically pure.

Since the Federal Pure Food Law went into effect, January 1, 1907, as mentioned, there is hardly any adulterated honey to be found. Previously "factitious" honeys were quite common on the markets. When Dr. H. W. Wiley, during his campaign for pure food laws pleaded before Congress, he presented, among many other fraudulent articles, a bottle of honey, on the surface of which there was a dead bee. The tricky dealer believed that the buyer, seeing the bee, would not doubt the genuineness of the honey. This was just a trap because the bottle contained a sticky sweet substance which resembled honey in appearance but was never produced by bees and contained many injurious ingredients.

Date and fig-honey were known in ancient Palestine. The Bible mentions that a substance made from dates and figs was sold as honey. Quintillian and Herodotus referred to denatured honey. Diophanes in Geoponica gave already a method of how to detect it.

The United States Federal Food and Drugs Act is in need of several amendments regarding honey. In jams and jellies, for instance, the standard recognizes only sugar and not honey. In a word, if some manufacturer adds honey to these products it is technically considered an adulteration. W. S. Frisbie, Chairman of the Food Standards Committee, admits that a departure from a definite standard is an adulteration even if the substitution is effected by a more valuable ingredient instead of one of less intrinsic value. The use of gold in our copper coinage would be considered an adulteration. The Administration, however, does not bar the use of honey in jams and jellies provided the labeling calls attention to the fact that honey is used as a sweetener.