In recent years, reports of honey counterfeiting have emerged in an endless stream, and "fake honey" has run rampant in domestic and foreign markets, making it difficult to distinguish, which has aroused widespread concern among consumers.
In 2018, Mexico launched a honey authenticity project, commissioning an identification agency to test honey products in British supermarkets, and the results showed that 10 of the 11 honey products were suspected of sugar adulteration!
In China, the way honey is adulterated is also various, dazzling: from the incorporation of white sugar more than a decade ago to the incorporation of corn syrup, sugar cane syrup, and then later mixed with rice syrup, beet syrup, tapioca syrup, etc., and even reached the level of falsehood.
What is honey? The National Standard for Food Safety honey clearly gives a definition:
Honey is a natural sweet substance that is fully brewed by bees after collecting nectar, secretions or honeydew from plants, mixing them with their own secretions.
Therefore, honey has all-natural, additive-free properties. From the appearance point of view, honey is generally liquid or crystalline, the texture is viscous, and it emits different aromas due to differences in honey sources. In terms of composition, more than 80% of honey is sugar, mainly fructose and glucose.
China is the world's largest bee breeding country, and its honey production ranks first in the world. According to statistics, the total output of honey in China in 2020 will reach 530,000 tons, an increase of 19.37% year-on-year. This achievement is certainly something to be proud of, but adulteration and forgery have always been a "stain" on the industry, and many consumers have suffered from it, and even do not know it when they buy fake honey.
CCTV's "Weekly Quality Report" column has investigated the acacia honey in several supermarkets in Beijing and found that there are "doubts" about the price of many acacia honey. It is understood that the market price of acacia honey is not low, the purchase price per ton was as high as 26,000 yuan, but some "acacia honey" products only sell for more than a dozen yuan, even lower than the cost price.
These dozen yuan a bottle of acacia honey is not "high price low selling or profit consumers", the truth behind it lies in blending and adulteration: the production process is mixed with low-price honey such as rape honey, so that the cost has dropped significantly, and the actual purchase price is only about 8,000 yuan per ton!
According to the survey, there are three main means of adulteration and counterfeiting of domestic honey, and the profit margin is huge. The first is to directly use syrup substances to impersonate, the raw materials are mostly rice syrup, corn syrup, and then add flavors, pigments and other blending. The second is to mix the syrup into the honey, which has the ingredient of real honey, but the purity is not high.
The fake "acacia honey" exposed by CCTV belongs to the third type: mixing high-priced honey with low-priced honey, and the content of some low-priced honey is even as high as 60% to 70%. This type of honey has the characteristics of natural honey, such as aroma, sweetness, viscosity, etc., which is difficult to identify, but the quality is not pure. Some merchants call it pure high-grade honey, which is obviously deceiving consumers.
CCTV "Science and Technology Garden" conducted a small experiment: provided 6 bottles of honey, numbered 1-6, so that students in a class can distinguish between true and false. Through looking at the color, smelling the smell, tasting and other ways, the students unanimously agreed that the honey in bottle 2 was real and the others were fake. But the result is just the opposite: only No. 2 is fake, the other 5 bottles of honey are real!
For true and false honey, I believe that many adults do not know how to distinguish. What is more worrying is that there is an "index honey" that has been sold in the domestic market for many years, and even national standards are difficult to effectively distinguish it.
At present, there are two current honey standards in China, namely the national standard GB 14963-2011 "National Standard for Food Safety Honey" and the industry standard GH/T 18796-2012 "Honey". Among them, the national standard is the basis for measuring true and false honey, and there are clear requirements for physical and chemical components such as glucose, fructose, sucrose, etc., and the test method is given.
However, the "indicator honey" has achieved "seeing the tricks and dismantling the tricks", which makes people invincible. Some honey products do not contain real honey at all, but after adding special fructose syrup, there is little difference in the indicators such as furfural and the national standard GB 14963-2011, which can be detected.
Taking fructose as an example, its appearance is colorless and transparent, the texture is viscous, and it is very similar to real honey, so it is also called "artificial honey". CCTV once exposed a factory that produces fructose, with a daily production capacity of up to 200 tons. This customized fructose can not be general, the indicators are developed for national standards, and the general inspection method is difficult to catch the tail, so it is very popular.
So, why do someone always make fake honey? Honey counterfeiting is endless, which is related to a variety of factors.
1, identification is difficult. As mentioned earlier, counterfeiters have passed the test by updating the counterfeiting method and changing the type of syrup raw materials, and the update speed of the detection method cannot keep up with the speed of counterfeiting, and it is difficult to "hammer the tone" on fake honey.
2, the temptation of profiteering. Honey counterfeiting mainly occurs in the supply and circulation of raw materials, and some manufacturers and beekeepers are counterfeiting at the source. Honey counterfeiting is not only convenient to operate, but also very rewarding, and the cost and price can be several times different. Depending on the offer, the quality of honey is also uneven, such as adulteration of 30%, 60% and so on.
Honey adulteration seems to have become the unspoken rule of the industry, and liquor blending, sesame oil blending, seriously affect the healthy development of the industry. Honey adulteration has the characteristics of high technical content and large scale, and it is difficult to distinguish the authenticity. However, there is one kind of honey that is considered to be "impossible to fake", that is, nest honey.
Nest honey, as the name suggests, is a honeycomb filled with honey, which maintains its pure natural properties and is not artificially processed, so there is no adulteration.
Nest honey is generally a lumpy solid and can be eaten with honey and hives. In addition to containing honey and honey, nest honey also contains pollen and propolis, and its nutritional value is higher than that of ordinary liquid honey, which is known as "the best in honey".
It is not easy to produce good nest honey, and the criterion of "edible" alone is a major difficulty. Whether a bee's hive can be used depends mainly on the raw material. Just as humans need to lay a foundation to build a house, the construction of a honeycomb also requires the preparation of a foundation, called a nest foundation. Most of the nest base materials used by beekeepers are industrially processed, and the mineral wax content is as high as 60%, and direct consumption will cause harm to the human body.
Therefore, to produce nest honey, we must first change the material of the nest foundation, and natural beeswax is the best choice. Experts such as Jian Xudong also pointed out in the "Development and Utilization of Bee Products": It is necessary to use 100% pure beeswax thin nest base to produce nest honey, and the capping rate should also reach 100%, so as to ensure the maturity of nest honey, and absolutely cannot contain harmful substances such as paraffin (mineral wax) and rosin.
It is difficult to judge the authenticity of honey products from the appearance alone, but it is not completely free of rules to follow.
The first is to look at elasticity. Really good honey is not only viscous, but also has a certain elasticity. Use chopsticks, spoons, etc. to pick out a little honey, you can see that there is a clear drawing phenomenon, and the real honey can bounce back upwards after drawing. Many fake honeys have a viscosity, but do not necessarily have resilience, according to which it can be roughly judged.
The second is to smell. Natural honey contains different floral aromas that insiders will know as soon as they smell it. Fresh honey has a pronounced floral aroma and pleasant smell, while aged honey has a lighter aroma. If it is a single nectar (such as date nectar, acacia honey), you can smell the fragrance of the honey source flower, and there is no other odor. Fake honey blended with flavor and fructose syrup smells without a pure floral fragrance and tastes uncomfortable.
The third is to look at the crystallization situation. Natural honey contains glucose and fructose, and it is normal for crystals to occur. Many people think that crystalline honey is fake honey, which is not true. Whether honey is easy to crystallize is related to the variety, mainly depends on the ratio of glucose and fructose: the higher the content of glucose, the easier it is to crystallize, and vice versa, it is not easy to crystallize.
The crystals of pure honey are greasy or fish roe-like, the texture is delicate, generally white, there is no rough sand grain feeling by hand, the crystal is melted in the mouth; if it is adulterated honey, there will be a rough friction sensation after crystallization, and the entrance will have a granular feeling of sugar block.
The fourth is to go to professional institutions for testing. Honey testing equipment is quite professional, whether it contains contaminants is currently the key solution to identify counterfeit honey, testing equipment has gas chromatography / mass spectrometer, inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer, etc., the highest accuracy.
What do you think about honey counterfeiting? Feel free to leave a message in the comments section to discuss!