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I was a teenage beekeeper. And a geeky one at that.
I knew that one bee, in her brief lifetime, collected nectar enough for only a half teaspoon of finished honey. I knew that she and her sisters together flew more than 50,000 miles, dropping in on about 2 million flowers to produce just one of the one-pound glass jars that I filled with glowing liquid amber at midsummer and again in late autumn. And I loved reading about bee behavior as much as I loved inhaling the distilled essence of summer in freshly extracted honey.
And so, even though I had long ago hung up my bee veil near a stack of old hive parts, I was distressed to learn that the tale of honey has recently become more sticky than sweet.
On the global front, there's been a lot of buzz about "honey laundering." This accurate neologism refers to the way in which millions of pounds of Chinese honey have been making their way into the United States labeled as originating from other countries, and often contaminated with the banned antibiotic chloramphenicol, which can cause fatal aplastic anemia.
Misrepresenting the country of origin is an illegal way around the high tariffs imposed on Chinese honey, and this past spring, after years of investigation, U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald issued a complaint alleging the fraudulent import of "Chinese honey falsely declared as originating in South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand on behalf of and for the benefit of a German company and its worldwide affiliates, including an American subsidiary that operated in Chicago."
In that half-sentence alone, you begin to get a notion of the hopelessly tangled global food web. Attempting to put a stop to the fraudulent imports, federal officials seized drums of honey at a Philadelphia distribution center and arrested a Taiwanese executive of a California-based honey import company for allegedly conspiring to evade U.S. import duties for the Chicago office of a German food distributor. This action and others, however, are but a drop in the honey supply. A report on honey by Andrew Schneider, an investigative journalist for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, found that: "Tens of thousands of pounds of honey entering the U.S. each year come from countries that raise few bees and have no record of producing honey for export." China is the world's largest honey provider, producing some 660 million pounds each year. Much of that ends up mislabeled or unlabeled on U.S. store shelves, and one reason is price.
Schneider found that Chinese honey is often less than half the price of other honey. In the radio program "Living on Earth," he explained that: "The going [wholesale] price for good honey, from Canada, for example, might be a buck sixty a pound ... If all of a sudden, as a honey packer, you're being offered 300,000 pounds of honey at 50 cents a pound, wouldn't you think ... a bit about why you're getting such a great price."
But the influx of cheap honey has made it easy for honey-packers not to "think," and hard for local honey producers to compete. And there's a double stinger for small-scale U.S. beekeepers wanting to bottle and sell their honey locally: state and local health departments and the laws they enforce.
The fight for local honey
In many states, including Illinois where I live, honey is defined as a processed food item and therefore must be extracted and bottled in a facility inspected by the local health department. Building and maintaining such a facility is prohibitively expensive for most small-scale beekeepers. They generally extract honey as I used to -- in a driveway or on a porch -- and they are breaking the law if they attempt to sell that honey to the public.
Wayne Field, who has been tending bees near Chenoa, Ill., for more than 50 years, said that the health department inspector who visited him didn't even know that honey is a proven antibacterial and anti-fungal substance.
Mike Sabo, who with his 10-year-old daughter Astrid, keeps bees near Belleville, Ill., had heard complaints from beekeepers, consumers and market managers about the difficulty of buying or selling local honey legally. Because Astrid wanted to be able to sell her honey, Mike attended the annual meeting of the Illinois State Beekeepers Association (ISBA) last winter.
After listening to many beekeepers express their frustration with rules limiting their ability to sell honey, he decided to act. He moved that ISBA members work with legislators to craft a bill allowing small-scale beekeepers to bottle and sell their honey without interference. His motion got him appointed chairman of the ISBA legislative committee.
"Then," he said, "I got hip deep in it."
Light amber early-season honey produced on
Prairie Fruits Farm, Champaign, IL.
Sabo and other beekeepers, like their bees, turned out to be a hard-working, tenacious and savvy group. They foraged over a wide territory, enlisting support from the Illinois Department of Agriculture, urban and rural legislators, local consumers, food businesses and market managers in a multi-pronged effort to pass what became known as "the honey bill."
The beekeepers knew when to be calm and when to press their points. Every time a committee met on the legislation, Sabo was there with half a dozen other beekeepers from the state. Although they faced strong opposition from Illinois Department of Public Health officials, who warned that the honey bill would create a dangerous precedent, the beekeepers never backed down.
"At a time when consumers are looking for fresh, safe, locally produced products, we do not need unnecessary barriers between local producers and local consumers," said Sabo's wife, Sharon. "We do not need laws that make it easier to buy imported products of questionable safety than wholesome products that support the local economy."
During testimony, Mike Sabo brought up the issue of tainted honey imports, pointing out that imported honey is not subject to health department inspection even though "that's where all the problems are." It seemed unfair that "it's the local producers who have to jump through hoops an order of magnitude more difficult than the large producers or international importers."
From January to June of this year, the beekeepers diligently pushed the honey bill forward, until this July when they tasted sweet success as Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn signed their bill into law.
Illinois is among the first states to take on this issue. Only Illinois and Mississippi have health-inspection exemptions for small-scale honey producers. A few other states, including Kansas, Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, Oklahoma and Wisconsin have other exemptions for honey producers who sell their honey directly to consumers.
But the problem of potentially tainted imported honey seems to be a long way from being solved without federal inspection standards or even a definition of what honey is. In most states, where there is no "pure honey" standard, producers can dilute honey with corn syrup or sugar water, and still call it honey.
And because the U.S. does not require honey labels to show a country of origin, shoppers have no way of knowing where a bottle of honey comes from. You may see a container of commercial honey labeled "processed in Iowa," but that tells you nothing about where the honey came from before it was bottled in Iowa.
Working like bees, for bees
Mike Sabo was satisfied with the outcome of the ISBA effort he spearheaded -- an exemption for Illinois beekeepers who produce or sell less than 500 gallons of honey a year in a local market -- but not surprised. He already knew that people, like bees, can work effectively as a group to protect themselves. And he knew that they could extract honey safely, as humans have done for thousands of years without a health department looking over their shoulders.
Now he and others -- honey producers and consumers alike -- are ready to be part of the local solution to international honey-laundering. It's easy to join them: Shop at stores that buy directly from beekeepers, or find local beekeepers (see localharvest.org), and you'll be fighting international crime while supporting local beekeepers and relocalizing a piece of the global food system.
The battle for local honey
Local honey for sale in central Illinois.
Credit: Terra Brockman
Bee hives at Prairie Fruits Farm in Champaign, Ill. ensure good pollination for all the peach, pear, and apple trees. Credit: Terra Brockman
Wayne Field, a beekeeper for more than 50 years, pauses near his truck before driving some of his hives to a new location where the bees will gather nectar and pollen and make honey.
Credit: Terra Brockman
Wayne Field tends to his bees in Chenoa, Ill..
Credit: Terra Brockman
Local honey for sale in central Illinois.
Credit: Terra Brockman
Bee hives at Prairie Fruits Farm in Champaign, Ill. ensure good pollination for all the peach, pear, and apple trees. Credit: Terra Brockman
Wayne Field, a beekeeper for more than 50 years, pauses near his truck before driving some of his hives to a new location where the bees will gather nectar and pollen and make honey.
Credit: Terra Brockman
Wayne Field tends to his bees in Chenoa, Ill..
Credit: Terra Brockman
Terra Brockman is an author, a speaker and a fourth-generation farmer from central Illinois. Her latest book, "The Seasons on Henry's Farm" was a finalist for a James Beard Award.
Photos, from top:
Wayne Field takes a break from tending his bees to sell some of his comb and extracted honey from his home near Chenoa, Ill.
Honey produced on a farm in Champaign, Ill.
Credits: Terra Brockman
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What wasn't mentioned in the article is the "reason" the health department figures the sale of locally produced, uninspected honey is "dangerous" - funny - they couldn't come up with anything at the hearings to support that statement, either... Not surprising - but all too common.
The health department entered the hearings with a "because we say so" attitude and nothing to back up their position. The lawmakers had virtually no choice - no proof to the contrary, the truth won out for a change. In the meantime, the officials at our wonderful department of health were surprised, bewildered, and not a little bit bitter at their loss.
You can be sure the subject will be broached again as soon as they can hire a cheap spin doctor for the cause. Most government employees of these departments research only from what their higher-ups send down, and much of that is research conducted by the self-same companies that want their version of a law passed or rule announced. It only gets worse as you head to the federal level - at least in the states the payroll isn't paid to the tune of more than 65% by the companies and industries being regulated!
Sharon, Mike, Astrid and all of the wonderful people who worked to get the honey bill passed deserve multitudes of praise and our undying gratitude. They are a voice for truth in a din of misinformation, outright lies and marketing.
I have to laugh at anything that boastfully says "USDA Inspected," "FDA Approved," or has a country of origin label - the phrases are not only meaningless, but highly misleading.
The garbage that passes for food at most stores is insane, but its all government approved! Interesting in light of the fact that FDA has jurisdiction over mislabeled foods, USDA administers the COOL program and "animal food" inspections and testing... They should be made subject to their own rules!! Wonder how these agencies would like to face their up-to-$1M fines and jail time for their abject failures - and on the consistent basis with which they HAVE failed in the past decade??
I don't much respect state or federal laws when it comes to buying my food, and consequently have not had to return any salmonella/listeria/e coli or other related nastiness to local stores. I don't buy from "egg farms," "chicken farms" or any of the other factory driven models. I am, consequently, not on a first name basis with the triage nurse in the local hospital, either.
Anyone that believes what they see on "Dirty Jobs" when Mike Rowe visits these dairies with no human contact and torches on udders, thousands of birds trapped in small buildings, or hundreds of hogs in a single barn is normal needs their head examined. Put any animal - human or otherwise - into a closed room with someone who has merely been exposed to a disease - any disease - and you wind up with an epidemic. We eat animals raised this way as a matter of course. People still wonder why we have things like bird flu??
People need to demand a complete and permanent stop to the madness surrounding our food options - and we need to do it en masse, and NOW. Your neighbor is going to be far more careful with the food he sells you because he eats it himself. It will be far more nutritious, NOT adulterated, NOT diseased, labeled so that you understand what is in it, and of a higher and fresher content than ANYTHING the "state" allows to be sold by the likes of Safeway and Jewel.
Go into your local grocery and demand local food. Write, call and otherwise make your opinions known to your COUNTY, state and federal officials.
NO! Buy local, trade over the fence and grow what you can. That is the ONLY way to ensure wholesome, safe, nutritious, unadulterated food. Drive a couple miles and visit with the man that provides your meat and eggs.
GrannySue (Sue Diederich)