A far cry from the innocent image of Winnie the Pooh with a paw stuck in the honey pot, the international honey trade has become increasingly rife with crime and intrigue. In the U.S., where bee colonies are dying off and demand for imported honey is soaring, traders of the thick amber liquid are resorting to elaborate schemes to dodge tariffs and health safeguards in order to dump cheap honey on the market, a five-month Seattle P-I investigation has found.
The business is plagued by foreign hucksters and shady importers who rip off conscientious U.S. packers with honey diluted with sugar water or corn syrup — or worse, tainted with pesticides or antibiotics.
Among the P-I’s findings: Big shipments of contaminated honey from China are frequently laundered in other countries — an illegal practice called “transshipping” — in order to avoid U.S.import fees, protective tariffs or taxes imposed on foreign products that intentionally undercut domestic prices.
In a series of shipments in the past year, tons of honey produced in China passed through the ports of Tacoma and Long Beach, Calif., after being fraudulently marked as a tariff-free product of Russia. 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.
The government promises intense scrutiny of honey crossing our borders but only a small fraction is inspected, and seizures and arrests remain rare.
The feds haven’t adopted a legal definition of honey, making it difficult for enforcement agents to keep bad honey off the shelves.
Many Mayo recipes do call for a bit of Mustard == certainly not the amount dolloped out on this website.
In fact, “Good Eats” which more than any other show, specializes in the chemistry of cooking and Alton Brown adds a bit of Mustard==all to help emulsify the oil and egg. Many recipes do not use mustard stating that is what the egg yolk with an addition of lemon juice/vinegar is better at doing.
Whatever–the directions are easy, but I’m missing some elusive “something” to make it pleasurable and to use fewer eggs. From the Epicurous website from an unrelated thread, I got the idea it might be the fact I use eggs directly from the refrigerator.
So many variables.
Totally Off Topic—
Mr. Fusion, bobbo, I left something for you here at #165 and #168.
And now, back to our regular programming.
WTF? #12 Frank cites a Wall Street Journal article about Chinese drywall poisoning homes in South Florida and my mind boggled! How can it possibly be cheaper to ship heavy, relatively fragile, damaged-by-water-or-even-heavy-humidity drywall ten thousand or fourteen thousand miles from China to South Florida than to use American-made stuff?
It seems to me that even if the stuff were free on the docks, shipping that distance should cost more than the stuff sells for here. Am I that far off?
#21, bobbo,
Many Mayo recipes do call for a bit of Mustard == certainly not the amount dolloped out on this website.
HEY, c’mon now, who doesn’t like a little mustard? I’m a brown mustard kind myself.
[off topic]
#24, Mr. Fusion, exactly right! What would real homemade mayo be without some spicy mustard?
There use to be a lot of bees here in San Diego county, including the lovely bumblebee. Now you be lucky to find a few. Many things play a part, much of it around my area has been housing development where canyons are destroyed and rivers made extincted.
Bee’s were so plentiful in the early 80′s that we, as kids, could go out to a park and get some nice raw honey. Yes, it can be dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing but that’s beside the point
As in the movie “Bee” less bees = less pollination = less plants 
I actually have a friend in China who has a sister starting at a university studying Bees. Sadly, she is only using that subject to get into the university and hopefully will change later on.