Lots of rice is eaten in the U.S., report researchers from Dartmouth College’s Children’s Environmental Health and Disease Prevention Center.  The average American consumes about a half cup of rice daily. Asian Americans eat about two cups and Hispanic Americans somewhere in between. But, according to the Dartmouth investigation, much of that rice is tainted with arsenic.

The study, funded by the government and published in the current Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, collected urine samples from 229 women six months into their pregnancy. 

The results of that testing, according to an analysis of the research by Consumer Reports, indicated that consuming slightly more than half a cup of cooked rice per day resulted in a total urinary arsenic concentrations pretty much equal to consuming a liter of water containing the maximum amount of arsenic allowable in public drinking water.

The consumer group says “exposure to arsenic in the womb has been linked to problems ranging from low birth weight and infant mortality to hampered immune function and increased death rates from lung cancer later in life.”

The USDA’s Agricultural Research Service says the structure of rice plants and the way they grow — submerged in water — leads to absorption of arsenic at a far higher rate than other plants.

The Dartmouth researchers are among many public health experts who say that stringent limits must be established by government regulators for levels of arsenic considered acceptable in food. 

Consumption of arsenic, which is often naturally occurring, has long been a public health problem, but studies are now showing that more and more consumers are being exposed to the poisonous heavy metal.  

This fall alone, the Environmental Protection Agency and the World Health Organization warned again that tens of millions of people are being exposed to dangerous levels of arsenic from their municipal water supply or private wells.  

In September, TV physician Dr. Mehmet Oz commissioned an analysis of apple and grape juice and found alarming levels of arsenic. The television star said that some samples had total arsenic levels above the EPA drinking water standard of 10 parts per billion.  

The reaction to Oz’s assertion was instantaneous, loud and brutal, even within the medical community. His findings were first sloughed off as a phony publicity gambit. The FDA discredited it. Dr. Richard Besser, the medical editor for ABC News, called Oz’s claims “extremely irresponsible” and said it was like “yelling fire in a movie theater.”

However, last week there was widespread crow-eating going on when a Consumer Reports investigation, which included additional laboratory testing, found the findings reported by the daytime TV star were accurate. FDA promised to reexamine the arsenic levels in juice and Oz appeared live on the ABC evening news with Besser on the ABC, who apologized for his criticism.

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Andrew Schneider also writes for coldtruth.com and thefoodwatchdog.com. This post first appeared Dec. 7, 2011 on thefoodwatchdog.com.

Since September, agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations and the U.S. Customs and Border Protection have seized more than 5 million pounds of intentionally mislabeled Chinese honey at customs warehouses near 11 U.S. ports or being shipped to honey packing operations. 

According to U.S. Attorney Robert O’Neill, of the Central District of Florida, the lengthy investigation of the honey smuggling resulted in a grand jury issuing indictments against three individuals for smuggling honey from China into the U.S. 

The illicit honey came from more than 120 large ocean-going shipping containers unloaded at large and small ports throughout the country.  Each metal box was packed with 64 steel drums each holding 644 pounds of honey.

Investigators told Food Safety News that field agents expect to seize additional shipping containers of honey, which could result in additional indictments. 

The indictment detailed precise instructions for personnel at shipping warehouses to cover or remove labels on the drums and shipping documents, which fraudulently claimed the contents were Rice Fructose Syrup or other similar products. The bogus labels were replaced with new labels saying “amber honey.” The switch, according to investigators, was to avoid paying about $2.5 million in anti-dumping duties. 

The duty or tariff of an extra $1.20 a pound was assessed against Chinese honey by the U.S. Commerce Department in December 2001 to stem the flood of cheap, government- subsidized honey being dumped on the U.S. market to the detriment of American beekeepers.

O’Neill says the three men – Chin Shih Chou, 48, from Taiwan; Qiao Chu, 25, from China, and Wei Tang Lo, 48, from Hacienda Heights, Calif. – were arrested after a grand jury charged the trio with smuggling honey from China. If found guilty, each could face a maximum penalty of 20 years in federal prison.

Investigators say the illicit honey was consigned to several major packers, but the indictment named only Groeb Farm in Belleview, FL, and Glorybee Foods in Eugene, OR.

In previous stories by Food Safety News, all the U.S. honey packers interviewed said they never buy Chinese honey.  They loudly insisted that that the hundreds of million pounds of sweet nectar from bees being shipped into the U.S. each year is pure and natural and originates any place but China. 

Federal investigators say their arrest record proves that’s not the case and the dozen or more criminal indictments that have been made in the last five years all involved Chinese honey.    

The largest of the busts happened in Sept. 2010 when 11 individuals and six corporations were indicted on federal charges for allegedly participating in an international conspiracy to illegally import honey from China that was mislabeled as coming from other countries to avoid antidumping duties.

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Andrew Schneider also writes for coldtruth.com and thefoodwatchdog.com

The safety concerns raised by this rapidly evolving technology have yet to be fully understood, said a report issued today by As You Sow, a nonprofit organization dedicated to increasing environmental and social corporate responsibility in publicly held companies.

As “food and food packaging companies explore the use of nanomaterials to enhance products, they need also attend to potential risks introduced,” the study said. 

The organization said the study can help food companies develop safeguards on how to identify the presence of nanomaterials in products.

The report, “The Sourcing Framework for Food and Food Packaging Products Containing Nanomaterials,” has an almost indecipherable title. But it shines a much-needed light on an area that the food industry appears reluctant to discuss.

As Food Safety News reported in June, the highly competitive food industry is disinclined to talk too much about its interest in using nanomaterials. However, it’s vividly apparent at technical gatherings and conferences that food producers and processors are hiring scientists and engineers to craft the manmade nanoparticles to make food more flavorful, longer lasting on store shelves, bacteria resistant and easier to track, trace and monitor for spoilage.

As You Sow says the guidelines were created with food companies including Kraft, McDonald’s, Whole Foods, Yum! Brands, and Pepsi.

Evaluating nano safety

Some of the industrial and consumer-product applications using nanoparticles border on the magical. But a growing number of solid scientific studies have, in the minds of many public health experts, justified hoisting caution flags as they repeatedly show that many nanoparticles are small enough to penetrate the skin, lungs and pass through the vital blood-brain barrier. The potential for lung cancer – especially from the inhalation of carbon nanotubes – has also surfaced in some studies. 

Nano is from the Greek word for dwarf and a nanometer is a billionth of a meter, or a total of one sliver if you were to cut the period at the end of this sentence into 50,000 slices. 

“Consumers should be concerned that these tiny chemicals may already be in foods and food contact materials, without being publicly disclosed,” says Jennifer Sass, senior scientist and nano authority for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

“Consumers can’t even make informed choices when they don’t know where these chemicals are, what they are, or how toxic they are. It’s an outrageous violation of the public trust that companies are refusing to identify on the label the ingredients or food contact materials that are nano-sized, and FDA is letting them get away with it,” Sass said.

The report said that because of their small size, the “intentionally engineered” nanomaterials are able to go places in the body that larger particles cannot, and it warned:

• New “nanofood” products should only be used if safety testing ensures that there are no negative impacts on human health or the environment. 

• Current regulatory controls are inadequate to assess or ensure safety.

• The scientific consensus is that there is a lack of knowledge regarding how nanomaterials interact at the molecular or physiological levels and their potential impacts on health and the environment.

Is FDA doing enough?

Michael Passoff, senior strategist and co-author of the study, said the uncertainty and lack of transparency on the application of nanomaterial poses unnecessary risks for consumers, workers, companies, and investors. 

“The FDA is not doing nearly enough,” Passoff told Food Safety News, and added that federal regulators have so far ignored nano-food despite calls for reform by the Government Accountability Office. 

The FDA allows too much control over the use of nanomaterial to remain with the food manufacturers, the report said.

The agency permits food producers using nanoparticles “to determine what safety testing they should be conducting and how transparent they should be in disclosing the results of safety tests, and if they should inform consumers that they are eating these products,” Passoff said.

Many in the industry express frustration at FDA’s failure to even establish an official regulatory definition of “nanotechnology,” “nanoscale,” “nanoparticles,” or other related terms.

FDA also has not weighed in on the other parameters that health experts believe can affect the toxicity of nanoparticles.  They include shape, electrical charge, the ratio of surface area to volume, or other physical or chemical properties.

FDA has long permitted the food industry, based solely on its own testing, to declare a food additive as GRAS, or “generally regarded as safe.”

The GRAS designation has been controversial. Nano-foods take that worry to a new level, food safety advocates said.

“FDA’s approach to regulating nanotechnology allows engineered nanomaterials to enter the food supply as GRAS substances without FDA’s knowledge,” the report’s authors said. 

“Because GRAS notification is voluntary and companies are not required to identify nanomaterials in their GRAS substances, FDA has no way of knowing the full extent to which engineered nanomaterials have entered the U.S. food supply as part of GRAS substances,” Passoff told the daily news safety online publication. 

“In contrast to FDA’s approach, all food ingredients that incorporate engineered nanomaterials must be submitted to regulators in Canada and the European Union before they can be marketed.”

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Andrew Schneider also writes for TheFoodWatchdog.com and Coldtruth.com

on holidays as a way to share our favorite recipes and love of food,

and also to take a little break from writing about the potential risks

in what we eat.

Always, but especially at

Thanksgiving, we’re grateful for the many people who work hard to

provide us with fresh, wholesome and safe food.

Just like last year,

in addition to the turkey, our virtual Thanksgiving 2011 potluck

includes a choice of two soup starters – Gretchen’s Thai Butternut

Squash soup and Andy’s Gorgonzola and Celery Soup. Helena has

contributed homemade herb chard stuffing., Dan is offering pumpkin

applesauce muffins, Alli is bringing herb-roasted winter veggies, Suzanne

has made apple-blackberry pies and Cookson has suggested coconut-milk

pumpkin pie.

Thank you for reading Food Safety News. Have a happy and food-safe Thanksgiving.

Andy’s Gorgonzola and Celery Soup

This gorgonzola and celery soup is a favorite on Capitol Hill that food historians say goes back at least a half-century. I usually serve it warm but the French physician from whom this recipe was adapted served it chilled during Washington’s scalding summers. Because of the egg yolks used in this recipe, it must be cooked thoroughly before chilling. If you’re planning to serve it chilled, reduce the amount of cheese by a little less than half. 

Gorgonzola and Celery Soup

Serves 8

Ingredients:

– 3 med. shallots, roasted

– 2 heads garlic, roasted

– 4 tbsp olive oil, extra virgin

– 4 cups celery, chopped fine

– ½ cup onion, sweet, minced

– 1 large leek (white part only), chopped fine

– 8 cups chicken or vegetable  stock

– 2 1/2 cups whole milk or cream

– 3 tbsp fine flour (thickening agent)

– 1 tsp celery salt

– 1/4 tsp pepper, white

– 1 tsp nutmeg, ground

– 5 each egg yolks

– 1 tbsp Maggie seasoning

– 10 ounces gorgonzola, crumbled in 1/2-inch pieces

optional:

– ¼ cup prosciutto, ribboned, crisped 

Instructions: 

Cut the tops off garlic heads and shallots, drizzle with olive oil, wrap in foil and bake at 400-degrees for 45 minutes.

Add olive oil to a heavy pot over medium heat. When hot, add garlic squeezed from heads and shallots removed from skins and (add slivered prosciutto)

Stir. 

Add finely chopped celery and leek, stir well, cover and cook over medium heat until soft, about 8 to 10 minutes.

Add flour and  seasonings, stir and add chicken stock, bring to light boil, cover and simmer 15 minutes.

Remove from heat and puree with in-pot blender.

In a bowl, whisk egg yolks with milk; add two ladles of hot soup, add crumbled cheese and mix well and whisk egg mixture into pot. Heat, but do not allow to boil again. 

When soup thickens slightly, serve garnished with a few celery leaves or prosciutto baked until crisp. 

When reheating leftover soup, do not boil again.      

Source:

A friend from Vietnam who was living in Washington.

The results show that the pollen frequently has been filtered out of products labeled “honey.”

The removal of these microscopic particles from deep within a flower would make the nectar flunk the quality standards set by most of the world’s food safety agencies.

The food safety divisions of the  World Health Organization, the European Commission and dozens of others also have ruled that without pollen there is no way to determine whether the honey came from legitimate and safe sources.

In the U.S., the Food and Drug Administration says that any product that’s been ultra-filtered and no longer contains pollen isn’t honey. However, the FDA isn’t checking honey sold here to see if it contains pollen.

Ultra filtering is a high-tech procedure where honey is heated, sometimes watered down and then forced at high pressure through extremely small filters to remove pollen, which is the only foolproof sign identifying the source of the honey. It is a spin-off of a technique refined by the Chinese, who have illegally dumped tons of their honey – some containing illegal antibiotics – on the U.S. market for years.

Food Safety News decided to test honey sold in various outlets after its earlier investigation found U.S. groceries flooded with Indian honey banned in Europe as unsafe because of contamination with antibiotics, heavy metal and a total lack of pollen which prevented tracking its origin.

Food Safety News purchased more than 60 jars, jugs and plastic bears of honey in 10 states and the District of Columbia.

The contents were analyzed for pollen by Vaughn Bryant, a professor at Texas A&M University and one of the nation’s premier melissopalynologists, or investigators of pollen in honey.

Bryant, who is director of the Palynology Research Laboratory, found that among the containers of honey provided by Food Safety News:

•76 percent of samples bought at groceries had all the pollen removed, These were stores like TOP Food, Safeway, Giant Eagle, QFC, Kroger, Metro Market, Harris Teeter, A&P, Stop & Shop and King Soopers.

•100 percent of the honey sampled from drugstores like Walgreens, Rite-Aid and CVS Pharmacy had no pollen.

•77 percent of the honey sampled from big box stores like Costco, Sam’s Club, Walmart, Target and H-E-B had the pollen filtered out.

•100 percent of the honey packaged in the small individual service portions from Smucker, McDonald’s and KFC had the pollen removed.

•Bryant found that every one of the samples Food Safety News bought at farmers markets, co-ops and “natural” stores like PCC and Trader Joe’s had the full, anticipated, amount of pollen.

And if you have to buy at major grocery chains, the analysis found that your odds are somewhat better of getting honey that wasn’t ultra-filtered if you buy brands labeled as organic. Out of seven samples tested, five (71 percent) were heavy with pollen. All of the organic honey was produced in Brazil, according to the labels.

The National Honey Board, a federal research and promotion organization under USDA oversight, says the bulk of foreign honey (at least 60 percent or more) is sold to the food industry for use in baked goods, beverages, sauces and processed foods.  Food Safety News did not examine these products for this story.

Some U.S. honey packers didn’t want to talk about how they process their merchandise.

One who did was Bob Olney, of Honey Tree Inc., in Michigan, who sells its Winnie the Pooh honey in Walmart stores.  Bryant’s analysis of the contents of the container made in Winnie’s image found that the pollen had been removed.

Olney says that his honey came from suppliers in Montana, North Dakota and Alberta. “It was filtered in processing because North American shoppers want their honey crystal clear,” he said.

The packers of Silverbow Honey added: “The grocery stores want processed honey as it lasts longer on the shelves.”

However, most beekeepers say traditional filtering used by most will catch bee parts, wax, debris from the hives and other visible contaminants but will leave the pollen in place.

Ernie Groeb, the president and CEO of Groeb Farms Inc., which calls itself “the world’s largest packer of honey,” says he makes no specific requirement to the pollen content of the 85 million pounds of honey his company buys.

Groeb sells retail under the Miller’s brand and says he buys 100 percent pure honey, but does not “specify nor do we require that the pollen be left in or be removed.”

He says that there are many different filtering methods used by beekeepers and honey packers.

“We buy basically what’s considered raw honey. We trust good suppliers. That’s what we rely on,” said Groeb, whose headquarters is in Onsted, Mich.

Why Remove the Pollen?

Removal of all pollen from honey “makes no sense” and is completely contrary to marketing the highest quality product possible, Mark Jensen, president of the American Honey Producers Association, told Food Safety News.

“I don’t know of any U.S. producer that would want to do that. Elimination of all pollen can only be achieved by ultra-filtering and this filtration process does nothing but cost money and diminish the quality of the honey,” Jensen said.

“In my judgment, it is pretty safe to assume that any ultra-filtered honey on store shelves is Chinese honey and it’s even safer to assume that it entered the country uninspected and in violation of federal law,” he added.

Richard Adee, whose 80,000 hives in multiple states produce 7 million pounds of honey each year, told Food Safety News that “honey has been valued by millions for centuries for its flavor and nutritional value and that is precisely what is completely removed by the ultra-filtration process.”

“There is only one reason to ultra-filter honey and there’s nothing good about it,” he says.

“It’s no secret to anyone in the business that the only reason all the pollen is filtered out is to hide where it initially came from and the fact is that in almost all cases, that is China,” Adee added.

The Sioux Honey Association, who says it’s America’s largest supplier, declined repeated requests for comments on ultra-filtration, what Sue Bee does with its foreign honey and whether it’s u
ltra-filtered when they buy it. The co-op markets retail under Sue Bee, Clover Maid, Aunt Sue, Natural Pure and many store brands.

Eric Wenger, director of quality services for Golden Heritage Foods, the nation’s third largest packer, said his company takes every precaution not to buy laundered Chinese honey.

“We are well aware of the tricks being used by some brokers to sell honey that originated in China and laundering it in a second country by filtering out the pollen and other adulterants,” said Wenger, whose firm markets 55 million pounds of honey annually under its Busy Bee brand, store brands, club stores and food service.

“The brokers know that if there’s an absence of all pollen in the raw honey we won’t buy it, we won’t touch it, because without pollen we have no way to verify its origin.”

He said his company uses “extreme care” including pollen analysis when purchasing foreign honey, especially from countries like India, Vietnam and others that have or have had “business arrangements” with Chinese honey producers.

Golden Heritage, Wenger said, then carefully removes all pollen from the raw honey when it’s processed to extend shelf life, but says, “as we see it, that is not ultra-filtration.

“There is a significant difference between filtration, which is a standard industry practice intended to create a shelf-stable honey, and ultra-filtration, which is a deceptive, illegal, unethical practice.”

Some of the foreign and state standards that are being instituted can be read to mean different things, Wenger said “but the confusion can be eliminated and we can all be held to the same appropriate standards for quality if FDA finally establishes the standards we’ve all wanted for so long.”

Groeb says he has urged FDA to take action as he also “totally supports a standard of Identity for honey. It will help everyone have common ground as to what pure honey truly is!”

What’s Wrong With Chinese Honey?

Chinese honey has long had a poor reputation in the U.S., where – in 2001 – the Federal Trade Commission imposed stiff import tariffs or taxes to stop the Chinese from flooding the marketplace with dirt-cheap, heavily subsidized honey, which was forcing American beekeepers out of business.

To avoid the dumping tariffs, the Chinese quickly began transshipping honey to several other countries, then laundering it by switching the color of the shipping drums, the documents and labels to indicate a bogus but tariff-free country of origin for the honey.

Most U.S. honey buyers knew about the Chinese actions because of the sudden availability of lower cost honey, and little was said.

The FDA — either because of lack of interest or resources — devoted little effort to inspecting imported honey. Nevertheless, the agency had occasionally either been told of, or had stumbled upon, Chinese honey contaminated with chloramphenicol and other illegal animal antibiotics which are dangerous, even fatal, to a very small percentage of the population.

Mostly, the adulteration went undetected. Sometimes FDA caught it.

In one instance 10 years ago, contaminated Chinese honey was shipped to Canada and then on to a warehouse in Houston where it was sold to jelly maker J.M. Smuckers and the national baker Sara Lee.

By the time the FDA said it realized the Chinese honey was tainted, Smuckers had sold 12,040 cases of individually packed honey to Ritz-Carlton Hotels and Sara Lee said it may have been used in a half-million loaves of bread that were on store shelves.

Eventually, some honey packers became worried about what they were pumping into the plastic bears and jars they were selling. They began using in-house or private labs to test for honey diluted with inexpensive high fructose corn syrup or 13 other illegal sweeteners or for the presence of illegal antibiotics. But even the most sophisticated of these tests would not pinpoint the geographic source of the honey.

Food scientists and honey specialists say pollen is the only foolproof fingerprint to a honey’s source.

Federal investigators working on criminal indictments and a very few conscientious packers were willing to pay stiff fees to have the pollen in their honey analyzed for country of origin. That complex, multi-step analysis is done by fewer than five commercial laboratories in the world.

But, Customs and Justice Department investigators told Food Safety News that whenever U.S. food safety or criminal experts verify a method to identify potentially illegal honey – such as analyzing the pollen – the laundering operators find a way to thwart it, such as ultra-filtration.

The U.S. imported 208 million pounds of honey over the past 18 months. Almost 60 percent came from Asian countries – traditional laundering points for Chinese honey. This included 45 million pounds from India alone.

And websites still openly offer brokers who will illegally transship honey and scores of other tariff-protected goods from China to the U.S.

FDA’s Lack of Action

The Food and Drug Administration weighed into the filtration issue years ago.

“The FDA has sent a letter to industry stating that the FDA does not consider ‘ultra-filtered’ honey to be honey,” agency press officer Tamara Ward told Food Safety News.

She went on to explain: “We have not halted any importation of honey because we have yet to detect ‘ultra-filtered’ honey. If we do detect ‘ultra-filtered’ honey we will refuse entry.”

Many in the honey industry and some in FDA’s import office say they doubt that FDA checks more than 5 percent of all foreign honey shipments.

For three months, the FDA promised Food Safety News to make its “honey expert” available to explain what that statement meant.  It never happened. Further, the federal food safety authorities refused offers to examine Bryant’s analysis and explain what it plans to do about the selling of honey it says is adulterated because of the removal of pollen, a key ingredient.

Major food safety standard-setting organizations such as the United Nations’ Codex Alimentarius, the European Union and the European Food Safety Authority say the intentional removal of pollen is dangerous because it eliminates the ability of consumers and law enforcement to determine the actual origin of the honey.

“The removal of pollen will make the determination of botanical and geographic origin of honey impossible and circumvents the ability to trace and identify the actual source of the honey,” says the European Union Directive on Honey.

The Codex commission’s Standard for Honey, which sets principles for the international trade in food, has ruled that “No pollen or constituent particular to honey may be removed except where this is unavoidable in the removal of foreign matter. . .”  It even suggested what size mesh to use (not smaller than 0.2mm or 200 micron) to filter out unwanted debris — bits of wax and wood from the frames, and parts of bees — but retain 95 percent of all the pollen.

Food Safety News asked Bryant to analyze foreign honey packaged in Italy, Hungary, Greece, Tasmania and New Zealand to try to get a feeling for whether the Codex standards for pollen were being heeded overseas. The samples from every country but Greece were loaded with various types and amounts of pollen. Honey from Greece had none.

You’ll Never Know

In many cases, consumers would have an easier time deciphering state secrets than pinning down where the honey they’re buying in groceries actually came from.

The majority of the honey that Bryant’s analysis found to have no pollen was packaged as store brands by outside companies but carried a label unique to the food chain. For example, Giant Eagle has a ValuTime label on some of its honey. In Target it’s called Market Pantry, Naturally Preferred  and others. Walmart uses Great Value and Safeway just says Safeway. Wegmans also uses its own name.

Who actually bottled these store brands is often a mystery.

A noteworthy exception is Golden Heritage of Hillsboro, Kan. The company either puts its name or decipherable initials on the back of store brands it fills.

“We’re never bashful about discussing the products we put out” said Wenger, the company’s quality director. “We want people to know who to contact if they have questions.”

The big grocery chains were no help in identifying the sources of the honey they package in their store brands.

For example, when Food Safety News was hunting the source of nine samples that came back as ultra-filtered from QFC, Fred Myer and King Sooper, the various customer service numbers all led to representatives of Kroger, which owns them all. The replies were identical: “We can’t release that information. It is proprietary.”

One of the customer service representatives said the contact address on two of the honeys being questioned was in Sioux City, Iowa, which is where Sioux Bee’s corporate office is located.

Jessica Carlson, a public relations person for Target, waved the proprietary banner and also refused to say whether it was Target management or the honey suppliers that wanted the source of the honey kept from the public.

Similar non-answers came from representatives of Safeway, Walmart and Giant Eagle.

The drugstores weren’t any more open with the sources of their house brands of honey. A Rite Aid representative said “if it’s not marked made in China, than it’s made in the United States.” She didn’t know who made it but said “I’ll ask someone.”

Rite Aid, Walgreen and CVS have yet to supply the information.

Only two smaller Pacific Northwest grocery chains – Haggen and Metropolitan Market – both selling honey without pollen, weren’t bashful about the source of their honey. Haggen said right off that its brand comes from Golden Heritage. Metropolitan Market said its honey – Western Family – is packed by Bee Maid Honey, a co-op of beekeepers from the Canadian provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia.

Pollen? Who Cares?

Why should consumers care if their honey has had its pollen removed?

“Raw honey is thought to have many medicinal properties,” says Kathy Egan, dietitian at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass.  “Stomach ailments, anemia and allergies are just a few of the conditions that may be improved by consumption of unprocessed honey.”

But beyond pollen’s reported enzymes, antioxidants and well documented anti-allergenic benefits, a growing population of natural food advocates just don’t want their honey messed with.

There is enormous variety among honeys. They range in color from glass-clear to a dark mahogany and in consistency from watery to chunky to a crystallized solid. It’s the plants and flowers where the bees forage for nectar that will determine the significant difference in the taste, aroma and color of what the bees produce. It is the processing that controls the texture.

Food historians say that in the 1950s the typical grocery might have offered three or four different brands of honey.  Today, a fair-sized store will offer 40 to 50 different types, flavors and sources of honey out of the estimated 300 different honeys made in the U.S.. And with the attractiveness of natural food and the locavore movement, honey’s popularity is burgeoning. Unfortunately, with it comes the potential for fraud.

Concocting a sweet-tasting syrup out of cane, corn or beet sugar, rice syrup or any of more than a dozen sweetening agents is a great deal easier, quicker and far less expensive than dealing with the natural brew of bees.

However, even the most dedicated beekeeper can unknowingly put incorrect information on a honey jar’s label.

Bryant has examined nearly 2,000 samples of honey sent in by beekeepers, honey importers, and ag officials checking commercial brands off store shelves. Types include premium honey such as “buckwheat, tupelo, sage, orange blossom, and sourwood” produced in Florida, North Carolina, California, New York and Virginia and “fireweed” from Alaska.

“Almost all were incorrectly labeled based on their pollen and nectar contents,” he said.

Out of the 60 plus samples that Bryant tested for Food Safety News, the absolute most flavorful said “blackberry” on the label. When Bryant concluded his examination of the pollen in this sample he found clover and wildflowers clearly outnumbering a smattering of grains of blackberry pollen.

For the most part we are not talking about intentional fraud here. Contrary to their most fervent wishes, beekeepers can’t control where their bees actually forage any more than they can keep the tides from changing. They offer their best guess on the predominant foliage within flying distance of the hives.

“I think we need a truth in labeling law in the U.S. as they have in other countries,” Bryant added.

FDA Ignores Pleas

No one can say for sure why the FDA has ignored repeated pleas from Congress, beekeepers and the honey industry to develop a U.S. standard for identification for honey.

Nancy Gentry owns the small Cross Creek Honey Company in Interlachen, Fla., and she isn’t worried about the quality of the honey she sells.

“I harvest my own honey. We put the frames in an extractor, spin it out, strain it, and it goes into a jar. It’s honey the way bees intended,” Gentry said.

But the negative stories on the discovery of tainted and bogus honey raised her fears for the public’s perception of honey.

She spent months of studying what the rest of the world was doing to protect consumers from tainted honey and questioning beekeepers and industry on what was needed here. Gentry became the leading force in crafting language for Florida to develop the nation’s first standard for identification for honey.

In July 2009, Florida adopted the standard and placed its Division of Food Safety in the Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services in charge of enforcing it.  It’s since been followed by California, Wisconsin and North Carolina and is somewhere in the state legislative or regulatory maze in Georgia, Virginia, Maryland, Ohio, New York, Texas, Kansas, Oregon, North Dakota, South Dakota, West Virginia and others.

John Ambrose’s battle for a national definition goes back 36 years. He said the issue is of great importance to North Carolina because it has more beekeepers than any other state in the country.

He and others tried to convince FDA that a single national standard for honey to help prevent adulterated honey from being sold was needed. The agency promised him it would be on the books within two years.

“But that never happened,” said Ambrose, a professor and entomologist at North Carolina State University and apiculturist, or bee expert. North Carolina followed Florida’s lead and passed its own identification standards last year.

Ambrose, who was co-chair of the team that drafted the state beekeeper association’s honey standards says the language is very simple, “Our standard says that nothing can be added or removed from the honey. So in other words, if somebody removes the pollen, or adds moisture or corn syrup or table sugar, that’s adulteration,” Ambrose told Food Safety News.

But still, he says he’s asked all the time how to ensure that you’re buying quality honey.  “The fact is, unless you’re buying from a beekeeper, you’re at risk,” was his uncomfortably blunt reply.

Eric Silva, counsel for the American Honey Producers Association said the standard is a simple but essential tool in ensuring the quality and safety of honey consumed by millions of Americans each year.

“Without it, the FDA and their trade enforcement counterparts are severely limited in their ability to combat the flow of illicit and potentially dangerous honey into this country,” Silva told Food Safety News.

It’s not just beekeepers, consumers and the industry that FDA officials either ignore or slough off with comments that they’re too busy.

New York Sen. Charles Schumer is one of more than 20 U.S. senators and members of Congress of both parties who have asked the FDA repeatedly to create a federal “pure honey” standard, similar to what the rest of the world has established.

They get the same answer that Ambrose got in 1975:  “Any day now.”

—————-

See “Top Pollen Detective Finds Honey a Sticky Business” on Food Safety News.

“Nothing,” he said, and switched the slide for another.

“Again, nothing,” he said after about 40 seconds, and substituted another glass slide with a smudge in its center.

“OK. We’ve got clover. Some nice cherry, plum and rose.”

Moving the slide a bit, the professor of anthropology and director of Texas A&M’s palynology research laboratory added:
 
“I see some blackberry, a couple of birch. Looks like a good Northwest collection.”  

Bryant was not looking at the makings of a dessert or a salad. He was analyzing some of the more than 60 samples of honey that Food Safety News bought in grocery stores, at farmers markets and in big box, natural food and drug stores across the country.

The results of Bryant’s analysis, which Food Safety News paid for, found that more than 75 percent of honey sold in the U.S. has had its pollen filtered out.

The food safety divisions of the World Health Organization, the European Commission and dozens of others have ruled that without pollen there is no way to determine whether the honey came from legitimate and safe sources.

Food Safety News asked Bryant to look for pollen because that’s what palynologists do. But Bryant is also a melissopalynologist, which means he also specializes in the study of pollen in honey.

The professor entered the sticky world of honey in 1976, when he was asked by the Office of Inspector General of the U.S.Department of Agriculture to examine domestic honey purchased by the federal government as part of its farm subsidy program, so U.S. beekeepers would have a stable outlet for their honey.

He refined the analytical protocol he would use as he went along, diluting small amounts of honey, then washing them in various acids, some very volatile. Then he heated, washed, centrifuged, rewashed, treated with more acid, heated and centrifuged them one last time. The acids destroys everything in the honey but pollen.

He inspected a wide range of government-supplied samples and, in 94 percent of the cases, found pollen that was linked to nectar sources from the U.S. But 6 percent of the samples showed that foreign honey, mostly from Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, was being sold back to the government fraudulently.

Today, half of Bryant’s work involves forensic pollen studies; another 25 percent involves archaeological sites and the rest is pure pollen and honey research.

There are 250,000 different plants just in the United States that can be used by a honey bee, Bryant said. He can easily identify hundreds of the more common pollens on sight. In his lab, two walls are covered with huge charts of enlarged grains of pollen. In the next room, another wall holds cabinets that contain a $2 million collection of slide-out trays cataloguing 20,000 modern pollen samples from around the world, mostly donated by oil companies.

Since much of his work may involve honey products transshipped from China he has worked hard to get samples and reference material on Asia honey and pollen.

“So I’ve got every Chinese pollen book that I can get my hands on that shows me the pollen types that exist in China and neighboring countries, such as Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia and Taiwan,” he said.

This type of pollen analysis at the few labs in Europe that offer it can run $1,200 per sample or more according to honey packers who use the service. Bryant often charges far less than $100 for his basic pollen identification.  That’s “barely enough to cover chemicals and supplies,” especially when he’s doing it as a service for mom-and-pop-sized beekeepers and honey packers, he said.

His customers are honey importers who want to know whether they’re really getting what they’re paying for from foreign suppliers and beekeepers who send him samples, so they can track what their bees are harvesting and what they can accurately say on their honey’s labels.

The 71-year-old professor also does forensic work for several federal investigatory agencies mostly involved with anti-terrorism and anti-smuggling efforts. He refuses to discuss any of this work for those clients.

“I am concerned about the import of unsafe products and about the government’s apparent apathy towards trying to put a stop to the illegal importation of honey,” Bryant said.

“I feel my efforts are helping to fight this battle.”

Sometimes his pollen analyses are just fun.

Bryant was asked to analyze the honey produced and served by the White House to determine where the bees are sourcing their pollen. Bryant concluded that the White House honey is classified as a unifloral clover honey, but also contains minor amounts of nectar from other nearby sources, including dogwoods, honeysuckles and magnolia.

Pollen and history

About 70 years ago, before radio-carbon dating, Bryant explained, archaeologists were originally using pollen collected from their artifacts to attempt to confirm the age of their discoveries. Geologists started collecting fossil pollen from deep underground looking for sediment in various strata, dried up lake beds and other geological sites that have repeatedly been shown to be likely sites of oil and gas reserves.

Pollen specialists have been recruited by leading museums and art galleries to authenticate the source of furniture, painting and sculptures.

One of the earliest well-publicized studies was of the microscopic grains of pollen collected from the Shroud of Turin in the mid-70s by botanist and Swiss criminologist Max Frei. Frei’s analysis had identified pollen spores of 58 different plants, many that originated only in and around the site of the crucifixion.

Forensic palynology – the identification of ancient and modern pollen to solve crimes – developed slowly.
 
One of the earliest cases of using technology to catch a criminal was in 1959, when Austrian police tried to tie a suspect to a man reported missing while on a trip along the Danube River, Bryant said.
 
The missing man’s body had not been recovered but police believed the suspect had a motive for the crime. Mud found on the suspect’s boots was analyzed by a palynologist from the University of Vienna. He identified several common tree pollens but also a unique fossil grain of hickory — a precise mixture of pollen that was only found in one small area along the Danube. The revelation of this information by police so spooked the suspect that he confessed and showed police where he had buried the body.

Scientific and criminology journals show that detection and identification of pollen has been used in cases ranging from kidnapping, rape, homicide, smuggling, counterfeiting, wildlife violations, terrorism and a litany of other themes in waiting-to-be-written crime novels.  

Bryant continues to run his mostly one-person CSI operation but he says the government needs to do more.

“We must get our government to test samples — not just the paperwork on imported honey – but actually look at the honey itself,” he said.

He also believes the government must impose “truth in labeling” for honey. 

“Most other countries do this, so why don’t we?” he asked.

“If people were certain they
were buying what is on the
label, I suspect they might be willing to pay premium prices. Right now it is a crap shoot.You may or may not get what it says on the label and that’s wrong.”

———–

See “Tests Show Most Store Honey Isn’t Honey” at Food Safety News.

Ingredients:

2 lbs. shrimp, large, peeled, deveined

½ cup olive oil

2 Tbsp lemon juice

2 Tbsp lemon zest

2 cloves garlic, minced

5 sprigs rosemary, fresh

1.5 Tbsp tarragon, fresh

6 sprigs thyme, fresh

3 Tbsp dill, fresh, chopped

½ tsp sea salt

¼ tsp pepper

Optional:

1/3 cup preserved lemon, chopped

1 pinch red pepper flakes

Instructions:

Preheat oven to 375-degrees. 

Coat a 9 X 13 oven-proof baking dish with oil.

Layer the shrimp in the baking dish.

Mix herbs, garlic, salt and pepper, lemon zest and juice or preserved lemons. 

Drizzle onto the shrimp. Mix gently, but well.  

Bake 6 or 8 minutes until they’re pink and cooked through. Avoid over-cooking.

Toss with chopped dill and serve.

Serves 6.

Notes:

Shrimp, like chicken, can be considered a blank canvas to the would-be culinary artist and any palette of spices, sauces or seasonings can be used. I sometimes marinate the shrimp in some preserved lemons and lots of garlic. The fresh herbs in this recipe offer a favorable taste. Use large shrimp, at least 26 to 30 count. Serve over rice, orzo, Israeli couscous, Italian Farro or other grains.

The Food Safety News crew is taking a day off from writing about food to take time to simply enjoy it.  In keeping with our holiday tradition, we’re sharing some of our recipes in another virtual potluck: from Suz’s cabbage salsa to Cookson’s squash salad, from Dan’s pasta to Andy’s prawns, from Helena’s ciabatta to Gretchen’s cookie bars. Have a restful Labor Day.

And the flow of Chinese honey continues despite assurances from the Food and Drug Administration and other federal officials that the hundreds of millions of pounds reaching store shelves were authentic and safe following the widespread arrests and convictions of major smugglers over the last two years.

Experts interviewed by Food Safety News say some of the largest and most long-established U.S. honey packers are knowingly buying mislabeled, transshipped or possibly altered honey so they can sell it cheaper than those companies who demand safety, quality and rigorously inspected honey.

“It’s no secret that the honey smuggling is being driven by money, the desire to save a couple of pennies a pound,” said Richard Adee, who is the Washington Legislative Chairman of the American Honey Producers Association.

“These big packers are still using imported honey of uncertain safety that they know is illegal because they know their chances of getting caught are slim,” Adee said.

Food safety investigators from the European Union barred all shipments of honey from India because of the presence of lead and illegal animal antibiotics.  Further, they found an even larger amount of honey apparently had been concocted without the help of bees, made from artificial sweeteners and then extensively filtered to remove any proof of contaminants or adulteration or indications of precisely where the honey actually originated.

An examination of international and government shipping tallies, customs documents and interviews with some of North America’s top honey importers and brokers documented the rampant honey laundering and that a record amount of the Chinese honey was being purchased by major U.S. packers.

Food Safety News contacted Suebee Co-Op, the nation’s oldest and largest honey packer and seller, for a response to these allegations and to learn where it gets its honey. The co-op did not respond to repeated calls and emails for comment. Calls and emails to other major honey sellers also were unreturned.

EU Won’t Accept Honey from India

Much of this questionable honey was officially banned beginning June 2010 by the 27 countries of the European Union and others. But on this side of the ocean, the FDA checks few of the thousands of shipments arriving through 22 American ports each year.

According to FDA data, between January and June, just 24 honey shipments were stopped from entering the country. The agency declined to say how many loads are inspected and by whom.

However, during that same period, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported that almost 43 million pounds of honey entered the U.S. Of that, the Department of Commerce said 37.7 million pounds came from India, the same honey that is banned in the EU because it contained animal medicine and lead and lacked the proper paperwork to prove it didn’t come from China.

“There are still millions of pounds of transshipped Chinese honey coming in the U.S. and it’s all coming now from India and Vietnam and everybody in the industry knows that,” said Elise Gagnon, president of Odem International, a worldwide trading house that specializes in bulk raw honey.

The FDA says it has regulations prohibiting foods banned in other countries from entering the U.S. However, the agency said last month that it “would not know about honey that has been banned from other countries …”

Adee called the FDA’s response “absurd.” He said the European ban against Indian honey is far from a secret.

“Why are we the dumping ground of the world for something that’s banned in all these other countries?” asked Adee, who, with 80,000 bee colonies in five states, is the country’s largest honey producer.

“We’re supposed to have the world’s safest food supply but we’re letting in boatloads of this adulterated honey that all these other countries know is contaminated and FDA does nothing.”

The food safety agency said it’s doing the best it can with existing resources and will do more when the newly passed Food Safety Modernization Act is up and running.

Where Is Our Honey Coming From?

The U.S. consumes about 400 million pounds of honey a year – about 1.3 pounds a person. About 35 percent is consumed in homes, restaurants and institutions. The remaining 65 percent is bought by industry for use in cereals, baked goods, sauces, beverages and hundreds of different processed foods.

However, the USDA says U.S. beekeepers can only supply about a 48 percent of what’s needed here.  The remaining 52 percent comes from 41 other countries.

Import Genius, a private shipping intelligence service, searched its databases of all U.S. Customs import data for Food Safety News and provided a telling breakdown:

– The U.S. imported 208 million pounds of honey over the past 18 months.

– About 48 million pounds came from trusted and usually reliable suppliers in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Uruguay and Mexico.

– Almost 60 percent of what was imported – 123 million pounds – came from Asian countries – traditional laundering points for Chinese honey. This included 45 million pounds from India alone.

“This should be a red flag to FDA and the federal investigators. India doesn’t have anywhere near the capacity – enough bees – to produce 45 million pounds of honey. It has to come from China,” said Adee, who also is a past president of the American Honey Producers Association.

Why Is Chinese Honey Considered Dangerous?

Chinese honeymakers began using various illegal methods to conceal the origin of their honey beginning in about 2001. That’s when the U.S. Commerce Department imposed a stiff tariff – as much as $1.20 a pound — on Chinese honey to dissuade that country from dumping its dirt-cheap product on the American market and forcing hundreds of U.S. beekeepers out of the business.

About the same time, Chinese beekeepers saw a bacterial epidemic of foulbrood disease race through their hives at wildfire speed, killing tens of millions of bees. They fought the disease with several Indian-made animal antibiotics, including chloramphenicol. Medical researchers found that children given chloramphenicol as an antibiotic are susceptible to DNA damage and carcinogenicity. Soon after, the FDA banned its presence in food.

“We need imported honey in this country.  But, what we don’t need is circumvented honey, honey that is mislabeled as to country of origin, honey that is contaminated with antibiotics or heavy metal,” said Ronald Phipps, co-chairman of the International Committee for Promotion of Honey and Health and head of the major honey brokerage firm CPNA International.

Heavy Metal Contamination

The Chinese have many state-of-the-art processing plants but their beekeepers don’t have the sophi
stication to match. There are tens of thousands of tiny operators spread from the Yangtze River and coastal Guangdong and Changbai to deep inland Qinghai province.  The lead contamination in some honey has been attributed to these mom-and-pop vendors who use small, unlined, lead-soldered drums to collect and store the honey before it is collected by the brokers for processing.

The amount of chloramphenicol found in honey is miniscule. Nevertheless, public health experts say it can cause a severe, even fatal reaction — aplastic anemia — in about one out of 30,000 people.

European health authorities found lead in honey bought from India in early 2010. A year later, the Indian Export Inspection Council tested 362 samples of honey being exported and reported finding lead and at least two antibiotics in almost 23 percent of the test samples.

The discovery of lead in the honey presents a more serious health threat.

“The presence of heavy metals is a totally different story, because heavy metals are accumulative, they are absorbed by organs and are retained. This is especially hazardous for children,” Phipps said.

All the bans, health concerns and criticism of Indian honey hasn’t slowed the country’s shipping of honey to the U.S. and elsewhere. In February, India’s beekeepers and its government agricultural experts said that because of weather and disease in some colonies, India’s honey crop would be late and reduced by up to 40 percent.

Yet two months later, on April 15 in Ludhiana, officials of Kashmir Apiaries Exports and Little Bee Group, India’s largest honey exporters, posed for newspaper photographers in front of “two full honey trains” carrying 180 20-foot cargo carriers with a record 8.8 million pounds of honey headed for the export ports.

“They’re clearly transshipping honey from China and I can’t believe that they are so brazen about it to put it right on the front page of a newspaper,” honey producer Adee said.

Data received by FSN from an international broker in India on Friday showed that within the last month 16 shipments – more than 688,000 pounds – of honey went from the Chinese port of Nansha in Guangzhou China to Little Bee Honey in India.  The U.S. gurus of international shipping documents – Import Genius – scanned its database and found that just last week six shipments of the honey went from Little Bee to the port of Los Angeles. The honey had the same identification numbers of the honey shipped from China.

Government investigators in the U.S. and Europe and customs brokers in India told FSN that previous successful criminal investigations had proven that the Chinese honey suppliers and their brokers are masterful at falsifying shipping documents.

Each of the shipments – whether from China or India – bore an identical FDA inspection number. However, FDA’s Division of Import Operations did not respond to requests for information on how and where it issued that FDA number.

Food Safety News left several messages for the Little Bee Group to discuss the source of their honey and how they were breaking records when the rest of India’s honey producers were months behind schedule. None of the phone messages or emails were returned.

Other major Indian honey exporters insist that India gets no honey from China. However, Liu Peng-fei and Li Hai-yan of the prestigious Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences disagree. In a scientific study of the impact the global financial crisis is having on China’s honey industry, the apiculture scientists wrote that to avoid the “punitive import tariffs” Chinese enterprises “had to export to the United States via India or Malaysia in order to avoid high tariffs…”

Why Hasn’t Smuggling Stopped?

The massive honey laundering scams that plagued the U.S. for more than a decade – the transshipment of Chinese honey to a second country before being reshipped to the U.S. — were presumably given a deathblow over the past two years.

During that period, Justice Department lawyers and Department of Homeland Security and FDA investigators launched a series of indictments and arrests of 23 German, Chinese, Taiwanese and American corporate officials and their nine international companies.

They were charged with conspiracy to smuggle more than $70 million worth of Chinese honey into the U.S. by falsely declaring that the honey originated from countries other than China. That allowed them to avoid paying stiff anti-dumping charges imposed on China.

It was an impressive series of complex busts spanning three continents, and instant fodder for a great whodunit novel. But, according to some of North America’s largest producers and importers of honey, the arrests bombed as a deterrent.

“There are still millions of pounds of transshipped Chinese honey coming into the U.S.A. and it’s all coming now from India and Vietnam. Everybody in the industry knows that,” said Odem International’s Gagnon.

How Do They Get Away With It?

When it comes to honey laundering, the crooks are always trying to stay one step ahead of the criminal investigators.

For example, when customs agents discovered that China usually shipped its honey in blue steel drums, the exporters quickly painted the drums green.

It took investigators a while to learn that often — while the drums were in port or en route at sea — the Chinese shuffled drum labels and phony paperwork showing country of origin as places that didn’t have an onerous anti-dumping tariff. The Russian Honey Federation blew the whistle on the Chinese relabeling millions of pounds as coming from Russia.

After that scam became known, the felons then shipped Chinese honey to countries like Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia and even Australia. There the honey was repacked, authentic local documents were issued and the honey was shipped on to the U.S. or elsewhere.

Another favorite con among Chinese brokers was to mix sugar water, malt sweeteners, corn or rice syrup, jaggery, barley malt sweetener or other additives with a bit of actual honey. In recent years, many shippers have eliminated the honey completely and just use thickened, colored, natural or chemical sweeteners labeled as honey.

However, sophisticated analysis that will match the pollen in honey to flowers from a specific geographic region is available at just two or three laboratories around the world.  There are also simpler, less expensive tests to detect the telltale presence of commercial sweeteners and other adulterants that are more readily available.

A laboratory in Bremen, Germany, founded a half century ago by German beekeepers, can accurately scan honey samples for flower pollen.   There is only one expert in the U.S. known to analyze pollen in honey to determine where it was actually grown and that would be at the Palygnology Laboratory at Texas A&M.  The lab was created and is run by Vaughn Bryant, a forensic palynologist and Professor of Anthropology.

Melissopalynology, or pollen analysis, has been used for years by geologists seeking evidence of ancient coastal areas – often sites of major oil deposits. Scientists tracing the origins of the Shroud of Turin have identified 61 different pollens on the cloth that could only have come from around Jerusalem.

Forensic scientists have used pollen identification to help solve murder, rapes, kidnapping and at least one espionage case. Now, at least in the labs in Texas and Germany, melissopalynologists use pollen to determine – with great accuracy – the geographic area where the bees foraged for the nectar.

“If they find, for example, pollen from flowers that grow in northern latitudes – like China – but it’s found in honey ostensibly produced in tropical countries – like India, Vietnam, Malaysia and the like – you know something’s rotten or illegal,” said CPNA International’s Phipps, who also produces a quarterly, international intelligence report that monitors the country-by-country supply of honey and everyone’s exports.

To avoid detection by concerned purchasers or criminal investigators, some Chinese producers in state-of-the-art processing plants pump the alleged honey, heated and under high pressure, through elaborate ceramic filters. This ultra-filtration removes or conceals all floral fingerprints and indicators of added sweeteners or contaminants.

“The Chinese have refined methods of masking their contaminated product by ultra-filtration so their honey seems perfect. But it’s not honey anymore. There’s no color.  There’s no flavor. There’s nothing.  So you take this perfect product, which could be confused with honey, and you blend it with real Indian honey,” Gagnon said.

“Everyone avoids tariffs because government agents cannot test to prove it’s from China.”

The FDA says it has sent a letter to industry stating that the agency does not consider ultra-filtered honey to be honey.

“We have not halted any importation of honey because we have yet to detect ultra-filtered honey.  If we do detect ultra-filtered honey we will refuse entry,” said FDA press officer Tamara Ward.

“FDA is just not looking” was the answer that most honey brokers offered.  They added that the FDA doesn’t want to find it because then the agency would have to test for it, something it is incapable of doing in its existing laboratories.

Honey experts worry that new technologies will make detection of adulterants even more difficult.

At June’s conference of the Institute of Food Technologists in New Orleans, there were hundreds of Chinese vendors working in small clusters beneath bright red banners. They offered for sale almost any spice, food-processing substance or additives a food processor might want and promises of concocting anything else they could dream of. “All FDA approved,” they emphasized to potential clients.

One salesman quickly jerked back his business card when a reporter pulled out a tape recorder to capture the man’s promises offering a “nanoparticle sweetener for honey that cannot be detected.”

Does the FDA Care?

The U.S. Departments of Customs and Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement have dollar and cents issues to worry about because hundreds of millions of dollars in unpaid taxes and anti-dumping tariffs on Chinese imports are circumvented by the honey laundering.

“These honey crimes are not a Republican or Democratic, Liberal or Conservative issue.  The country is being ripped off of millions and millions,” Phipps said.

Recent news releases by the border patrol and the FDA say they have developed an anti-smuggling strategy to identify and prevent smuggled foods from entering the United States and posing a threat to national security and consumer safety.

But at the field level, investigators with the two agencies and an agent with ICE’s Commercial Fraud Unit said the cooperation is more on paper then in practice and that the FDA continues to be the weak link. They say the FDA either doesn’t have the resources to properly do the job or is unwilling to commit them.

ICE and the border patrol can and do go after the honey launderers by enforcing the anti-dumping and tariff violation laws. But protecting consumers from dangerous honey, identifying it as adulterated and therefore illegal for importation, falls to the FDA. And many of its enforcement colleagues say the food safety agency doesn’t see this as a priority.

A Justice Department lawyer told Food Safety News that the FDA has all the legal authority and obligation it needs to halt the importation of tainted honey. He cited two sections of the agency’s regulations defining when food products are considered “adulterated.”

The regulations say: “Food is adulterated if it bears or contains a poisonous or deleterious substance which may render it injurious to health” and “damage or inferiority has been concealed.”

Those two factors pretty much sum up the health concerns that many have with the smuggled honey. But the honey industry and Congress can’t get the FDA to even come up with a legal definition of what honey is.

Eight years ago, America’s beekeepers and some honey packers petitioned FDA to issue an official definition of honey. Their concern was how to determine whether honey is bogus if there is no official standard to measure it against. The FDA did nothing.

Last Nov. 15, senators asked the food safety agency for the same thing. Again, nothing.

On Aug. 10, two members of the Senate Committee on Appropriations tried once more.

Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and John Hoeven (R-ND) urged the FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg to issue the official definition.

Calling the lack of regulations “a food safety concern,” Gillibrand said a national standard of identity for honey is needed “to prevent unscrupulous importers from flooding the market with misbranded honey products…”

An investigator in FDA’s import section explained the agency’s refusal to develop an official definition to FSN. “If we had an official description of honey then FDA would have to inspect everything we’re importing to ensure it’s legal. That’s the last thing we want to do,” he said, but would not allow his name to be used because he wasn’t authorized to make public statements.

How Do You Stop The Illegal Flow?

Gagnon and four other major players in the honey industry have formed a voluntary group called True Source Honey.  They hope it will eventually expand into an international, industry-wide program to certify the origin and quality of honey.

“We need an origin traceability program, a professional audit of both the exporters and the packers so those buying and selling honey can ensure its authenticity and quality,” said Gagnon, who is the group’s vice chairman.

Meanwhile, it’s rumored that the feds are increasing their surveillance of the large U.S. importers and not too soon, Adee and others say.

Adee likens the honey laundering to a huge auto chop shop, where the police occasionally arrest the low-level car thieves but others pop up to continue supplying the criminal operation, which authorities never go after.

“That’s what’s happening here,” Adee explained. “ICE and the other investigators have arrested a handful of the middle men, the brokers who supply the honey packers, but haven’t gone after the big operators buying the phony foreign honey.”

Adee and others interviewed by Food Safety News say there are 12 major honey packers in the U.S. and four or five that are involved with the bulk of illegal trade.

“We know who they are,” he said. “Everyone in the indu
stry knows. If these packers are allowed to continue buying this possibly tainted but clearly illegal smuggled honey, the importers will always find a way to get it to them.”

———-

Editor’s Note:  Andrew Schneider, a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter, writes for Food Safety News and The Food Watchdog.com

I’m not the only one who has traveled hundreds of miles to get to Zabar’s, the Manhattan Mecca for all deli lovers.

The aromas from its corned beef and pastrami; smoked salmon, sturgeon and whitefish; fish salads and pickles; and some of New York’s finest bagels, breads and pastries permeate the 20,000 square-foot edifice on Broadway and justify repeated visits.

This store is so well known that when owner Saul Zabar finally broke with tradition in the all-male bastion and permitted a woman to slice the precious Nova lox, it made national newspapers and network TV news.

But now they’ve gotten caught trying to pass off crayfish, a Cajun staple, for lobster in their popular salad. In fact, it turns out that Zabar’s has been selling the misidentified crustacean salad for about 20 years, perhaps more, Zabar told reporters.

Zabar insisted he wasn’t being dishonest and directed the multitude of journalists laying siege to the Upper West End deli to Wikipedia where, as he told the New York Times, “you will find that crawfish in many parts of the country is referred to as lobster.”

This culinary conundrum can be credited to or blamed on Doug MacCash, a vacationing reporter for the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

In his blog earlier this month, MacCash wrote: “In New York City a lucky crayfish can become lobster,” and tells of standing in the checkout line at Zabar’s where “tiny tubs of lobster salad in the refrigerator case caught my eye.”

Lobster salad on a bagel — why not? he thought.  “It was delicious, but the pink-orange tails seemed small and somehow familiar,” he wrote.

He was neither an investigative reporter nor a food writer but a sharp enough journalist to know how to read the ingredients on the label: “wild freshwater crayfish, mayonnaise, celery, salt and sugar.” It read.

“Wild freshwater crayfish? Really? At $16.95 per pound?”  he wrote.

The only other place you might see the humble freshwater crustacean at a similar price would be at a high-end French restaurant, where it’s called écrevisse.

The Louisiana Crawfish Co. will sell you a pound boiled for $6.95.

When I was in New Orleans in June, I took a friend – a food safety investigator – out for dinner. While I went for Ya Ya Gumbo, he ordered an overflowing platter of smoking hot crayfish and spent the next hour sucking the heads off the miniture lobster-looking creatures and loving every minute of it.

“It’s all about getting the real flavor from these,” he mumbled, waving a hot sauce-covered limp crayfish. “But my wife – who’s from Boston – would kick me out of the house if I did this at home,” he said.

The all-powerful Maine Lobster Council wasted no time getting Zabar on the phone.

Dane Somers, the council’s executive director and the chief protector of Maine’s finest told the owner that FDA regulations say that mislabeling food products is a big deal.

She told the Bangor Daily News that the FDA permits the use of the term “lobster” only for the Homarus species, which, she said, includes the European and American lobsters, not other lobster-like species such as langostino or crayfish.

Zabar says he is changing the name of the salad to be more transparent to consumers. When I called today, someone who said he was “just a manager” told The Food Watchdog that “it’s still being discussed – and way too much.” All he knows is that it won’t have lobster on the label “unless there’s lobster in the salad.”

By the way, those two separate spellings of the Louisiana crustacean are not a mistake. Turns out the small but tasty critters go by several names: crayfish, crawfish, crawdads and mud puppies, among the most popular.

———-

Editor’s Note:  Crawfish? Crayfish? Mud bugs? Call Them Anything But Lobster, by Andrew Schneider, was originally published at The Food Watchdog on August 13, 2011.

So we’re celebrating Independence Day 2011 by once again sharing our dishes – Mary’s farmers’ market veg dip, Cookson’s garden-fresh potato salad, Suzanne’s Aunt Sandy’s spinach and strawberry salad, Helena’s apricot-rosemary halibut, Andy’s Everyman’s Gumbo, Dan’s Fried Ice Cream Cake Sticks and Gretchen’s coconut berry lime cake.

We’re often asked if writing about foodborne illness makes us reluctant eaters. Far from it. We love good food and all the healthy choices available. To us, food freedom means the right to spend our grocery dollars with growers and producers who see safe food-handling practices not as an inconvenience or cost, but as a responsibility to protect their customers and the public health, and therefore an essential part of doing business. Independence Day is a good day to think about freedom from fear.

Have a food-safe Fourth of July.

The Food Safety News team 

EVERYMAN’S GUMBO

Adapted by Andrew Schneider

Serves 12 as main dish and 20 as soup.

The heart of this gumbo came from an Acadian who had moved back to Canada. But in August 1992, just after Hurricane Andrew bounced off Florida and slammed into Central Louisiana, he rushed back to his family home in Atchafalaya to help his old friends living in the Delta.  Those with food or live catches tossed whatever veggies, meat, seafood and spices they had left after the storm into a well-scrubbed half 55-gallon drum and made rice in the other half of the steam-cleaned drum. It may be the first time that Roux — the wonderful Cajun thickening agent — was ever blended in the bottom of a steel drum.  Knowing those fine people, it probably wasn’t. This recipe is a modification of that a great gumbo — pulled from the cuisine Africa, Spain and France. It seemed to feed everyone who showed up that soggy summer week.  

Ingredients

1.5 cups all-purpose flour

1.5 cups bacon fat, duck fat, lard, butter or oil

8 slices smoked bacon 

1.5 cup green pepper, cut in 1/2″ pieces 

3 stalks celery — cut in 1/2″ pieces

1.5 cups red pepper, cut in 1/2″ pieces

8 cloves garlic, minced

2 cups onions, cut in 1/2″ pieces

2 lbs chicken, boned in bite-size pieces

1 lb Tasso, (Cajun smoked pork) in chunks 

2 lbs. shrimp, large or jumbo, shelled *

1 lbs. blue crab meat — picked clean

1.5 lbs. crawfish tails — shelled, cleaned **

2 lbs Dungeness crab, cracked and partially shelled  

1 lbs. Andouille or other spicy smoked sausage — cut 1/4″ thick

10 cups shrimp, fish or chicken stock

2 ea bay leaf

2 tbsp thyme

2 tbsp Old Bay seafood seasoning

10 each green onions, cut in 1/2″ pieces

12 cups cooked rice

Instructions

• Make stock. If using shrimp or seafood shells or bones strain carefully, and set aside.

• Clean the shrimp, crab and crawfish and set aside.

• Cut vegetables and garlic and set aside

• Into a heavy, 12-quart stockpot or enameled Dutch Oven make roux to a medium brown as described below.  8 pieces of bacon and duck fat is my favorite base..  

• Quickly add chopped vegetables and garlic, stir well over medium heat for 5 minutes or until soft. Add sausage and Tasso and cook for another five minute, stirring well. 

• Add chicken and cook for 5 minutes.

• Slowly add in stock, bring to boil, lower to simmer. Cook for 60 minutes, stirring well.

• Add crab and crawfish and simmer for 15 minutes

• Add shrimp, stir, remove pot from heat and let it sit for at least 10 minutes.

• Garnish with chopped green onion and serve over a bunch of rice as a main dish, or just about a ½-cup in a bowl for a soup. 

Notes: 

Yes, for you purists, I know his recipe does not use okra, but it’s as it was made by people who grew up with gumbo.

Many, including me, prefer to use spot shrimp and cook with heads on. It adds lots of flavor. 

Some don’t think using whole crawfish is worth the effort and either use picked crawfish meat or just add more crab.  

Making your roux: Here is where you make or break almost every Cajun dish you create.

A roux is a one-to-one mixture of flour to equal amount of butter, duck fat, lard, bacon fat, or olive oil.
Put your oil in the bottom of a heavy pot over a medium heat which will hold the gumbo; add about ½ of the flour to the heated oil or butter, stir well with a wooden spoon or flat-edged wooden spatula for at least 30-seconds. When well mixed, slowly add another portion of flour and keep it up until all the flour is in the pan. You must stir the roux constantly, never leaving the pot,  not to pee, yell at the dogs or answer the door, until the roux is a dark, rich mahogany or chocolate in color.  Anticipate a wonderful aroma when the roux is nearly just perfect. The lower the heat and slower the cooking the better it will be. You could be looking at about 30 minutes depending on the heat. It seems to go faster with zydeco playing in the background. 

Nanoparticles, which could revolutionize steps all along the path from the farm to the table, were discussed openly and with passion in many of the scientific sessions of the Institute of Food Technologists annual conference.

But in the huge exhibition hall, among the thousand of displays of the newest advancements in the food industry, nano was rarely being promoted as the exciting science it may well be. Its absence was perplexing.

Food Safety News patrolled the sprawling Food Expo questioning likely users of the new technology. The enthusiastic company sales reps and scientists saw the “press” tags affixed to our convention passes and suddenly had very little to say. It was akin to not talking about the crazy aunt at the family reunion.

There were few signs among the elaborate displays that even mentioned nanotechnology. One exception was the exhibit for Southwest Research Institute, which runs 2 million square feet of laboratories in San Antonio, Texas.

“There are many areas where nanomaterial can be of an immense benefit to food development, processing, safety monitoring and packaging,” James Oxley, senior research scientist in nanomaterials for Southwest Research Institute, told Food Safety News.

Many exhibitors are actively developing exciting applications for nano particles, but they’re just not talking about it, he explained.

“The ongoing concern about possible health hazards or adverse reactions from nanomaterial has people staying pretty quiet about what they’re doing,” Oxley said.

“If the FDA provides a clearer picture of what it will and won’t accept in food and packaging, the use of nanomaterial holds great promise for a wide variety of food-related applications.”

A week before the world’s top food scientists gathered for this conference, the Food and Drug Administration issued guidance that it says outlines the agency’s view on whether products it regulates involve the application of nanotechnology.

They invite public comment on the draft guidance horribly named: “Considering Whether an FDA-Regulated Product Involves the Application of Nanotechnology.” The agency says “it represents the first step toward providing regulatory clarity on the FDA’s approach to nanotechnology.”

“Nanotechnology is an emerging technology that has the potential to be used in a broad array of FDA-regulated medical products, foods, and cosmetics,” said Carlos Peña, director of FDA’s emerging technology programs. “FDA is monitoring the technology to assure such use is beneficial.”

Meanwhile, on the same day that FDA made its nano announcement, the Environmental Protection Agency said that it will seek to determine whether nanomaterials in pesticide products can “cause unreasonable adverse effects on the environment and human health.”

There is enormous industry pressure on the government to move more rapidly on approving the use of nanomaterial. Many safety regulators and much of the public health community fear that there has been insufficient testing of the health hazards from exposure to nanomaterial.

An executive order signed by President Obama on Jan. 18. pretty much illustrates the quandary presented to all players in this enormously growing world of nanoparticles.

“Our regulatory system must protect public health, welfare, safety, and our environment while promoting economic growth, innovation, competitiveness, and job creation. It must be based on the best available science.”

What are we talking about?

Nano is derived from the Greek word for dwarf, which really tells us very little, so try this: a nanometer is a billionth of a meter, a nanoparticle is tens of thousands times smaller than the period at the end of this sentence.

The Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies — a partnership between the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the Pew Charitable Trusts — maintains a Consumer Products Inventory that offers the best-educated guess available on the commercialization of nanomaterial. PEN’s latest tally says there are currently 1,317 products, produced by 587 companies in 30 countries, containing nanomaterial.

Other than some cooking oil and chocolate flavoring, most of the products so far are not food but food-related, and involve food storage or preparation — items such as cutting boards. But those who compile the list say it is far from comprehensive.

The food industry is no different than the rest of the commercial world and thus is using in-house scientists or contracting with outside experts to see what these manmade, subatomic structures can do to enhance what they make and sell.

The scientific presentations and many of the hundreds of posters on new research findings made it clear that some companies are devoting many R&D dollars to using nano to make food seed more bug-resistant, enhance protection against pathogens, monitor spoilage or aid in traceability with food-packaging sensors or bolster flavoring and increase shelf life.

Some are already testing engineered nanoparticles to reduce bacterial growth, maintain the freshness and longevity of baked goods; keep meat juicer; eliminate disagreeable, but benign odors and reduce the amount of sugar and salt in recipes.

The rush to regulate

Regulating the use of nanoparticles, especially in food, has become an international quagmire.

“There is actually no specific definition for nanomaterials that’s widely accepted although several countries have published their own definition,” Bernadene Magnuson, Senior Scientific and Regulatory Consultant for Cantox Health Sciences, told Food Safety News.

In a session on food law and regulation, Magnuson explained to other scientists that food safety agencies in North America and overseas may require additional safety evaluations of nanomaterials with certain characteristics. 

“These include nano particles that have the likelihood to persist and bio accumulate either in the humans or in the environment; those with a high level of either chemical or biological reactivity; a complex form or structure; and/or those with the ability to undergo a complex transformation,” explained the international expert, who is also an adjunct professor in the Department of Nutritional Sciences, College of Medicine, University of Toronto.

“For oversight and regulation, however, the critical issue is whether and how such new or altered properties and phenomena emerging at the nanoscale create or alter the risks and benefits of a specific application.”

She said that safety studies will still need to be done to demonstrate lack of any potential health or environmental issues. The White House apparently agrees with her.

“Nanomaterials should not be deemed or identified as intrinsically benign or harmful in the absence of supporting scientific evidence, and r
egulatory action should
be based on such scientific evidence,” the White House said earlier this month, in a lengthy update on nano policy to the heads of all agencies, including the FDA and USDA, on the oversight of all applications of nanomaterial.

Risk assessment

The use of nanotechnology in medicine and electronics, aircraft and vehicles, has been science-fiction-like and often borders on the unbelievable.

Naturally occurring nanoparticles — completely harmless — exist in many foods and spices, even chocolate, beer and dairy products. Toxicologists and other risk assessors worry that if there are devastating hazards, they may exist with the manmade or engineered nanostructures, where atom-sized or smaller chemical structures are constructed molecule-by-molecule into something with commercial value.

The U.S. safety agencies — FDA, USDA, EPA, CDC and NIOSH — have been besieged by industry, which wants nanoparticles to be immediately approved as safe because some of the chemicals — silver, titanium dioxide, copper — have been used more or less safely for decades.

But health and safety regulators are far from convinced that these same metals and chemicals reduced to nano-scale are perfectly safe, especially when it comes to inhalation or consumption.

There have been significant peer-reviewed studies by both academic and government investigators which have shown that many nano particles are small enough to penetrate the skin, lungs and pass through the all-important blood-brain barrier.

Inhalation of carbon nanotubes — which are one of the main building blocks of many nano products and packaging — has been shown to cause cancer, much like asbestos does. However, the particles can penetrate the lungs more deeply than asbestos and appear to cause often-fatal damage more rapidly in test animals.

Nano-titanium dioxide, which is used as a whitening agent in many food and cosmetic products, has been proven to cause disease in test animals that have been exposed to high doses. One study at UCLA repeatedly showed damage or destruction of the animals’ DNA and chromosomes.

Judging by the number of fresh graduates and young scientists presenting their research during days of IFT poster sessions, it’s obvious that the use of nanomaterials will have an important place in the world of food science.

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Photos: Above, James Oxley; lower, Bernadene Magnuson.