Rant on - The Bowdlerizing of the American Palate
The Wine critic Robert Parker was critical of the Bordeaux wine establishment for making industrial wines with little flavor and no authenticity. Last year CBS News magazine, 60 Minutes aired a segment on the Mafia’s involvement in the adulteration of olive oil with deodorized oils like sunflower combined with industrial chlorophyll. These examples have a common thread – Americans are educating themselves and realizing the importance of the food we eat, where it comes from and how it affects our health.
The honey industry is facing its own demons. Repeating what I have said before in the “Our Honey” section of our KillerBeesHoney.com site, fully eighty percent of American grocery store honey is smuggled in from China. Corn syrup, illegal antibiotics, and heavy metals adulterate Chinese honey. The entire EU has banned it for a reason. Yet the FDA lets Americans ingest 300 million pounds of tainted Asian honey every year.
Big Agro honey makers in the U.S.A. fair little better. As professional pollinators, they are more interested in renting their bees to Almond growers in California or citrus growers in Florida. Their bees pollinate crops and orchards that have been treated with harmful toxins like neonicotinoids and then bring these chemicals back to the hive.
I call this the Bowdlerizing of the American palate for a reason. Most honey packers and that’s what they do - package honey without sourcing other peoples “honey,” are masking the offensive and downright vulgar ingredients of their products. That is also why KillerBeesHoney.com goes to great length to educate customers about our honey and body care products.
This is the first rant of many you will hear from your beekeeper regarding the lack of moral clarity and leadership from our food industry. I will also be promoting organizations like True Source Honey and the North Carolina State Beekeepers Association. They are but two of many groups leading the charge to authenticate honey and engage the American public in the importance of transparency in sourcing honey. We not only applaud these efforts but also financially assist their struggle to educate and inform the public. Our ultimate goal is to not only sell the best artisanal honey in America but promote the goodness and benefit of real honey. One flying pollinator at a time.
Regarding the above photo, my closest neighbors live a half a mile away from our apiary. They are a quiet, self-reliant, Christian couple. We introduced ourselves to them when we moved our bees to their new digs. I wanted to observe their gardening practices. We brought with us a bottle of our Killer Bees wildflower honey. To say they were stunned by its pure texture and taste would be an understatement. Now we gather several times a season to trade honey for organically grown vegetables. They say they have an overabundance of produce. Of course, having several million pollinators visiting your garden every day doesn’t hurt.
