Over the years, I’ve always put honey in my diet – I consider it a super food in fact. I have a few special recipes I use that include honey. Word has it that if you have allergies and you eat the local honey at the beginning of the season, you will become immune from the local pollen which affects those allergies. This is well known and it works very well.
Not long ago, an acquaintance sent me some information from a viral email about the Honey we eat; “Does Honey Contain Botulism? Honey may contain botulism spores which can lead to botulism poisoning. There are some areas in the US where the possible contamination of honey with botulism spores is higher due to the soil. Soil contains botulism spores/bacteria and the flora that bees use to feed on grows in that soil. Honey is mostly consumed in raw form and is typically not pasteurized, sterilized or radiated. Even pasteurized honey can contain botulism spores and shouldn’t be given to children under the age of 12 months.”
Now then, it seems to me that we might also want to be very weary then because more and more of our honey is coming from China, and I know they don’t give a rats rear-end about the quality of their soil. The BBC had an interesting article on the challenges with polluted soil recently, published on April 18, 2014 titled; “Report: One fifth of China’s soil contaminated,” and we import a ton of honey from China too, as per an article in Food Safety News published on August 15, 2014 titled; “Asian Honey, Banned in Europe, Is Flooding U.S. Grocery Shelves – FDA has the laws needed to keep adulterated honey off store shelves but does little, honey industry says,” by Andrew Schneider, which also noted that the EU has already banned it from China, pass on this information too.
Our local FDA checks US farmers and there will probably be local checks too at farmer’s markets, but did you know that only 2% of the cargo containers coming from China are checked. What about our FDA, do they have offices in China? Yes, two. Two offices in the whole country, folks we need to be thinking here, we need to know what’s in that honey, yes, we need to know more about all the food products for such, but listen Honey, this is one we need to watch too. Indeed, I hope you will please consider all that and think on it.