I ran across an interesting article today on a site called Food Safety News that reports that almost two thirds of the honey it tested from supermarkets and other retail outlets around the country was not, according to them, "real honey." Here's a link to the article...maybe you can discern better than I did whether their "not real honey" claim is more rhetorical than factual or not:
http://www.foodsafetynews.com/...
Regardless, the article sheds an interesting light on a product that most of us consider wholesome, safe and produced in the U.S. It seems not. Most national brands of honey, indeed most honey, comes from China.
After reading the article I went to my pantry to check my jar of honey...it was produced here in Oregon.
I encourage you to follow the link and read the article...it's a good read. But here are some highlights:
In spite of anti-dumping laws and tariffs, China has been flooding the US market for years with subsidized honey that can be imported for less money than most domestic producers can compete with.
The honey has been super-filtered to remove all traces of pollen from the product, making it impossible to determine its source or country of origin.
Chinese honey is contaminated with antibiotics and traces of heavy metals, and routinely diluted with corn syrup in order to increase their profits (yum)
Supermarkets and other retailers, when contacted by those conducting this study, were almost unanimously mum on the subject of where they obtain the honey that is sold in their stores.
I bake with honey, but I also consume a teaspoon or more of honey every day because I've read that the pollens that honey contains are a good countermeasure against various alergies. This, of course, assumes you are eating local honey, and all of the pollen hasn't been filtered out of it.
Yet one more "wholesome" food product exported into the United States by the Chinese, and one more very good reason to search out locally produced food products whenever possible.