If you’re a farmer or food manufacturer, don’t drive the food-safety bus off the cliff.
That was the message that Seattle food-safety attorney Bill Marler, publisher of Food Safety News, shared with his audience of more than 500 people, many of them small-scale farmers and local-food advocates, during his keynote presentation, “Producing Food Can Be a Risky Business,” at the Nov. 3 Focus on Farming 2011 in Everett, WA.
Along with that advice, came admonitions for farmers to keep a vigilant eye on farming practices and places on their farms or processing facilities that would allow potentially deadly foodborne pathogens such as E. coli, Salmonella, or Listeria to contaminate their food.
“What you do impacts all of us,” Marler said, emphasizing that farmers and food manufacturers play a “vital role” in food safety. To put it another way, they are, in fact, in the driver’s seat of the food-safety bus.
As an attorney who represents people who have become ill — sometimes with life-long health problems — or families who have lost a loved one,  Marler knows firsthand that foodborne illness outbreaks aren’t just about statistics. They’re about “real people.”
“I see this in a much more real way,” he said, referring to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention statistics that point to an estimated 48 million cases of human illnesses, 125,000 hospitalizations and up to 3,000 deaths each year caused by foodborne pathogens.
With that much said, he showed the audience a heartrending video featuring a mother and father who lost their 7-year-old daughter, Abby Fenstermaker, to E. coli caused by contaminated hamburger. Unable to contain his grief, the father told of when the decision to pull Abby off life support was made, he asked the doctor to open the shades so his once lively and fun-loving daughter could go outside to play. She died two minutes later, the mother said through her tears.
After several moments of silence, Marler interjected a somber note of warning: “The thing about E. coli is that it doesn’t really care” about how big or small a farm is or what food it contaminates — anything from sprouts to hamburger. Bottomline: that’s why it’s so easy for a farmer or manufacturer to get into legal trouble.
Setting the stage for some courtroom dramas with smoking guns, Marler told the audience that in every foodborne illness outbreak he’s been involved in — large or small — in the past 20 years, there were always opportunities to turn the bus around before it went off the cliff.
Case in point. Twenty years ago, when undercooked hamburgers, contaminated with E. coli and served in Jack-in-the-Box restaurants, sickened 650 people, put 50 children in the hospital with acute kidney failure, and killed four, Marler won legal battles against the fast food chain, in large part, by showing that the company had been warned that “the bus was headed for a cliff.” 
First a short look back: In early 1992, Washington state had begun requiring hamburgers to be cooked to an internal temperature of 155 degrees — instead of 140 degrees. Marler told of a red warning flag that Wendy Cochinella, a company shift leader in Bellingham, WA, had waved in front of the bus.
Filling out a form for the suggestion box in June 1992 — 7 months before the Jack-in-the-Box E. coli outbreak — the shift leader said that she thought regular patties should cook longer because they were not getting done (at the lower temperature), and customers were complaining. In describing the benefit of making the change to cook them longer, she said the company’s burgers would be “done and edible.” Marler said that when this suggestion was faxed to headquarters, testing was done, and it became evident that there was a difference between how the chain’s old and the new grills cooked the burgers. Even so, the company didn’t require the burgers to be cooked for more than two minutes on the older grills.
Long story short, the old grills, of which there were many at the time, weren’t thoroughly cooking the burgers.
“The bus went off the cliff,” Marler said. Another bus story: In 1996, juice and food-bar producer Odwalla got a warning that its bus was headed for a cliff. This time it came from none other that the U.S. Army. After trying to sell its apple juice to the Army for its bases, the company was advised that inspectors had reviewed deficiencies in the plant’s sanitation and decided they couldn’t assure that the juice would be suitable for military consumers.
“You would think that if Odwalla couldn’t sell the juice to the U.S. Army, it would think whether it should sell it to pregnant women and children,” Marler said. That fall, Odwalla’s unpasteurized juice sickened 80 people and killed a two-year-old toddler.
When Marler launched a lawsuit against the company, he discovered that before the outbreak, Odwalla officials had debated over whether the juice should be tested for bacteria. But the fear was that if they did test the juice, they might come up with a body of information that could fall into “the wrong hands.”  The conclusion came down to: Let’s not test. We don’t want to know.
 ”The bus went off the cliff,” Marler said.
Pointing out that “these things happen,” Marler said that when they do happen, it’s because of a number of errors, most of them having to do with things that people could have corrected.
With that as a “courtroom” introduction to the important role that people in the food business can play in averting foodborne-illness catastrophes, Marler dove into the controversy over whether food from small, local farms is safer than food from corporate ag.
The recently passed Food Safety Modernization Act includes an amendment that grants most small-scale producers an exemption from many of the bill’s requirements, such as inspections.
Pointing out that the bacteria and viruses of today are “bigger, stronger, and faster” than when he was growing up on a farm,  Marler urged farmers to identify the possible hazards on their farms and in their manufacturing operations and to stay up-to-date and tuned into “science” when they make decisions about food-safety practices. Doing nothing can put their customers in harm’s way.
And that’s where one of the risks of farming — the threat of lawsuits — comes into the picture.
 ”. . . it won’t be any fun if I catch you,” he warned.
With that blunt message, he urged the farmers to adopt a culture that makes food safety part of “absolutely everything you do.”
“It’s has to be the first thing you think of in the morning,” he said. ” Believing your food is safe, isn’t enough.”
He said he gets a lot of e-mails from small-scale local ag folks who really believe that because they’re small and local that their food is inherently safe.
 ”Safer, maybe,” he said, “but not inherently safe.”
That’s why he becomes so frustrated when he hears mantras such as “Know your farmer,” and “If you can look your farmer in the eye, you know the food is safe.”
“To me, that’s not a satisfatcory answer,” he said.
And while he was quick to say that the vast majority of foodborne illness outbreaks in the United States have been linked to mass-produced food or locally produced food that had been mingled with other foods or processed, he also said that the reason so many outbreaks have been traced to “big ag,” could be that the cause of the illnesses was easier to pinpoint due to the number of people sickened.
“Perhaps local, sustainable, organic, non-GMO (genetically modified organisms) ag does in fact sicken less people,” he said. “But the reality from a bacteria or virus’s perspective is that local food can become contaminated between the farmer you know and the fork you put in your mouth just as easily as the food you eat in a chain restaurant. Bacteria and viruses simply don’t make that distinction.”
In that same vein, Marler advised local-food consumers to trust their local farmer, but also verify that the farmer is following food-safety standards.
Looking to the future, especially in reference to small-scale agriculture’s goal to be sustainable, Marler said that the farmers need to be proactive when it comes to food safety.
“Without food safety, local, sustainable, organic, non-GMO agriculture will remain a niche and that’s no future at all,” he said.
Did his message to the farmers and local food advocates come in muffled or loud and clear?
Whatever the answer to that question, the audience responded to his talk with a robust round of applause.
And in comments to the audience following his talk, local farmer Linda Neunzig, agricultural coordinator for Snohomish County, and the person who invited Marler to speak at the conference, thanked him for “sharing what we need to do.”
“None of us wants to get people sick,” she said. “It can’t be ‘it can never happen to me.’ It’s what can we do to make sure it never happens to me.”  In an interview with produce grower John Postema, also co-owner of Flower World, after the talk, Postema described food safety as a “very loaded issue.”
For him, the question is what is the acceptable level of risk that society wants to bear.
“If you insist on ‘no risk,’ we will all starve to death,” he said.
Although he went through training for Good Agricultural Practices, he said he’s not GAP-certified because he was told he needed to fence in 80 acres to keep out the wildlife.
“There’s no way that can be done,” he said, referring to birds flying over the orchard and small critters such as rabbits.
As a grower who sells his apples to schools, he said he firmly believes that if you shorten the time and distance between farmer to table, there’s less risk. 
But even so, he also thinks it’s important that small-scale farmers follow food-safety practices.
For him, the takeaway message from Marler’s talk came down to this: “Protecting ourselves (from lawsuits) and protecting our customers go hand in hand.”
As for the “voice of the future,” two FFA high school students who listened to Marler’s talk, quickly agreed they had learned a lot.
“I need to buy a meat thermometer and make sure I wash the fruits and vegetables we buy,” said Katryna Castor, a comment that was quickly seconded by her fellow FFA member Kathryn Dunham.
Dunham, who lives on a hobby farm with a few cows and a garden, said she also learned that you have to be very careful about food safety when you’re producing food.
“Just because we grow it at home, it’s not automatically safe,” she said.  Legal issues
It all comes down to who’s going to pay,  said Marler.  ”You can say ‘I hate lawyers, there shouldn’t be any lawsuits, lawyers shouldn’t get any money for these people,’ ” he told the group. “But the reality is someone has to pay.”
For him, there’s a societal question in this: Who should be accountable for the bills? The farmer, the manufacturer, the taxpayers, the family? Someone has to pay or absorb them.
Responding to a question about liability from Becky Elias, food-safety staff member with the Washington State Department of Agriculture, after the meeting, Marler told her that while doing food-safety planning and getting GAPs certification lessens the chances that you’ll get someone sick, it wouldn’t protect you from a lawsuit. That’s why you need product liability insurance should you get sued. By doing that, you’re protecting yourself as an individual.
 More legal-related information from Marler is available here. Click through the Power Point pages to get to the parts about strict liability, negligence, and criminal liability.   

More than three-fourths of the honey sold in U.S. grocery stores isn’t exactly what the bees produce, according to testing done exclusively for Food Safety News.
The results show that the pollen frequently has been filtered out of products labeled “honey.”The removal of these microscopic particles from deep within a flower would make the nectar flunk the quality standards set by most of the world’s food safety agencies.
The food safety divisions of the  World Health Organization, the European Commission and dozens of others also have ruled that without pollen there is no way to determine whether the honey came from legitimate and safe sources. In the U.S., the Food and Drug Administration says that any product that’s been ultra-filtered and no longer contains pollen isn’t honey. However, the FDA isn’t checking honey sold here to see if it contains pollen.
Ultra filtering is a high-tech procedure where honey is heated, sometimes watered down and then forced at high pressure through extremely small filters to remove pollen, which is the only foolproof sign identifying the source of the honey. It is a spin-off of a technique refined by the Chinese, who have illegally dumped tons of their honey – some containing illegal antibiotics – on the U.S. market for years. Food Safety News decided to test honey sold in various outlets after its earlier investigation found U.S. groceries flooded with Indian honey banned in Europe as unsafe because of contamination with antibiotics, heavy metal and a total lack of pollen which prevented tracking its origin.
Food Safety News purchased more than 60 jars, jugs and plastic bears of honey in 10 states and the District of Columbia.
The contents were analyzed for pollen by Vaughn Bryant, a professor at Texas A&M University and one of the nation’s premier melissopalynologists, or investigators of pollen in honey. 
Bryant, who is director of the Palynology Research Laboratory, found that among the containers of honey provided by Food Safety News: 
• 76 percent of samples bought at groceries had all the pollen removed, These were stores like TOP Food, Safeway, Giant Eagle, QFC, Kroger, Metro Market, Harris Teeter, A&P, Stop & Shop and King Soopers.
• 100 percent of the honey sampled from drugstores like Walgreens, Rite-Aid and CVS Pharmacy had no pollen.
• 77 percent of the honey sampled from big box stores like Costco, Sam’s Club, Walmart, Target and H-E-B had the pollen filtered out. 
• 100 percent of the honey packaged in the small individual service portions from Smucker, McDonald’s and KFC had the pollen removed. • Bryant found that every one of the samples Food Safety News bought at farmers markets, co-ops and “natural” stores like PCC and Trader Joe’s had the full, anticipated, amount of pollen. 
And if you have to buy at major grocery chains, the analysis found that your odds are somewhat better of getting honey that wasn’t ultra-filtered if you buy brands labeled as organic. Out of seven samples tested, five (71 percent) were heavy with pollen. All of the organic honey was produced in Brazil, according to the labels.
The National Honey Board, a federal research and promotion organization under USDA oversight, says the bulk of foreign honey (at least 60 percent or more) is sold to the food industry for use in baked goods, beverages, sauces and processed foods.  Food Safety News did not examine these products for this story.
Some U.S. honey packers didn’t want to talk about how they process their merchandise.  One who did was Bob Olney, of Honey Tree Inc., in Michigan, who sells its Winnie the Pooh honey in Walmart stores.  Bryant’s analysis of the contents of the container made in Winnie’s image found that the pollen had been removed. Olney says that his honey came from suppliers in Montana, North Dakota and Alberta. “It was filtered in processing because North American shoppers want their honey crystal clear,” he said.  The packers of Silverbow Honey added: “The grocery stores want processed honey as it lasts longer on the shelves.”
However, most beekeepers say traditional filtering used by most will catch bee parts, wax, debris from the hives and other visible contaminants but will leave the pollen in place. Ernie Groeb, the president and CEO of Groeb Farms Inc., which calls itself “the world’s largest packer of honey,” says he makes no specific requirement to the pollen content of the 85 million pounds of honey his company buys.
Groeb sells retail under the Miller’s brand and says he buys 100 percent pure honey, but does not “specify nor do we require that the pollen be left in or be removed.” He says that there are many different filtering methods used by beekeepers and honey packers. ”We buy basically what’s considered raw honey. We trust good suppliers. That’s what we rely on,” said Groeb, whose headquarters is in Onstead, Mich.
Why Remove the Pollen?
Removal of all pollen from honey “makes no sense” and is completely contrary to marketing the highest quality product possible, Mark Jensen, president of the American Honey Producers Association, told Food Safety News. “I don’t know of any U.S. producer that would want to do that. Elimination of all pollen can only be achieved by ultra-filtering and this filtration process does nothing but cost money and diminish the quality of the honey,” Jensen said.
“In my judgment, it is pretty safe to assume that any ultra-filtered honey on store shelves is Chinese honey and it’s even safer to assume that it entered the country uninspected and in violation of federal law,” he added.  
Richard Adee, whose 80,000 hives in multiple states produce 7 million pounds of honey each year, told Food Safety News that “honey has been valued by millions for centuries for its flavor and nutritional value and that is precisely what is completely removed by the ultra-filtration process.”
“There is only one reason to ultra-filter honey and there’s nothing good about it,” he says.
“It’s no secret to anyone in the business that the only reason all the pollen is filtered out is to hide where it initially came from and the fact is that in almost all cases, that is China,” Adee added.
The Sioux Honey Association, who says it’s America’s largest supplier, declined repeated requests for comments on ultra-filtration, what Sue Bee does with its foreign honey and whether it’s ultra-filtered when they buy it. The co-op markets retail under Sue Bee, Clover Maid, Aunt Sue, Natural Pure and many store brands.
Eric Wenger, director of quality services for Golden Heritage Foods, the nation’s third largest packer, said his company takes every precaution not to buy laundered Chinese honey.

“We are well aware of the tricks being used by some brokers to sell honey that originated in China and laundering it in a second country by filtering out the pollen and other adulterants,” said Wenger, whose firm markets 55 million pounds of honey annually under its Busy Bee brand, store brands, club stores and food service.
“The brokers know that if there’s an absence of all pollen in the raw honey we won’t buy it, we won’t touch it, because without pollen we have no way to verify its origin.”
He said his company uses “extreme care” including pollen analysis when purchasing foreign honey, especially from countries like India, Vietnam and others that have or have had “business arrangements” with Chinese honey producers.
 Golden Heritage, Wenger said, then carefully removes all pollen from the raw honey when it’s processed to extend shelf life, but says, “as we see it, that is not ultra-filtration.
“There is a significant difference between filtration, which is a standard industry practice intended to create a shelf-stable honey, and ultra-filtration, which is a deceptive, illegal, unethical practice.”
Some of the foreign and state standards that are being instituted can be read to mean different things, Wenger said “but the confusion can be eliminated and we can all be held to the same appropriate standards for quality if FDA finally establishes the standards we’ve all wanted for so long.” Groeb says he has urged FDA to take action as he also “totally supports a standard of Identity for honey. It will help everyone have common ground as to what pure honey truly is!”
What’s Wrong With Chinese Honey?
Chinese honey has long had a poor reputation in the U.S., where – in 2001 – the Federal Trade Commission imposed stiff import tariffs or taxes to stop the Chinese from flooding the marketplace with dirt-cheap, heavily subsidized honey, which was forcing American beekeepers out of business. To avoid the dumping tariffs, the Chinese quickly began transshipping honey to several other countries, then laundering it by switching the color of the shipping drums, the documents and labels to indicate a bogus but tariff-free country of origin for the honey.
Most U.S. honey buyers knew about the Chinese actions because of the sudden availability of lower cost honey, and little was said. The FDA — either because of lack of interest or resources — devoted little effort to inspecting imported honey. Nevertheless, the agency had occasionally either been told of, or had stumbled upon, Chinese honey contaminated with chloramphenicol and other illegal animal antibiotics which are dangerous, even fatal, to a very small percentage of the population. Mostly, the adulteration went undetected. Sometimes FDA caught it.

In one instance 10 years ago, contaminated Chinese honey was shipped to Canada and then on to a warehouse in Houston where it was sold to jelly maker J.M. Smuckers and the national baker Sara Lee.
By the time the FDA said it realized the Chinese honey was tainted, Smuckers had sold 12,040 cases of individually packed honey to Ritz-Carlton Hotels and Sara Lee said it may have been used in a half-million loaves of bread that were on store shelves.
Eventually, some honey packers became worried about what they were pumping into the plastic bears and jars they were selling. They began using in-house or private labs to test for honey diluted with inexpensive high fructose corn syrup or 13 other illegal sweeteners or for the presence of illegal antibiotics. But even the most sophisticated of these tests would not pinpoint the geographic source of the honey.
Food scientists and honey specialists say pollen is the only foolproof fingerprint to a honey’s source. Federal investigators working on criminal indictments and a very few conscientious packers were willing to pay stiff fees to have the pollen in their honey analyzed for country of origin. That complex, multi-step analysis is done by fewer than five commercial laboratories in the world.
But, Customs and Justice Department investigators told Food Safety News that whenever U.S. food safety or criminal experts verify a method to identify potentially illegal honey – such as analyzing the pollen – the laundering operators find a way to thwart it, such as ultra-filtration.
The U.S. imported 208 million pounds of honey over the past 18 months. Almost 60 percent came from Asian countries – traditional laundering points for Chinese honey. This included 45 million pounds from India alone.
And websites still openly offer brokers who will illegally transship honey and scores of other tariff-protected goods from China to the U.S. FDA’s Lack of Action
The Food and Drug Administration weighed into the filtration issue years ago. ”The FDA has sent a letter to industry stating that the FDA does not consider ‘ultra-filtered’ honey to be honey,” agency press officer Tamara Ward told Food Safety News. She went on to explain: “We have not halted any importation of honey because we have yet to detect ‘ultra-filtered’ honey. If we do detect ‘ultra-filtered’ honey we will refuse entry.”
Many in the honey industry and some in FDA’s import office say they doubt that FDA checks more than 5 percent of all foreign honey shipments.
For three months, the FDA promised Food Safety News to make its “honey expert” available to explain what that statement meant.  It never happened. Further, the federal food safety authorities refused offers to examine Bryant’s analysis and explain what it plans to do about the selling of honey it says is adulterated because of the removal of pollen, a key ingredient. Major food safety standard-setting organizations such as the United Nations’ Codex Alimentarius, the European Union and the European Food Safety Authority say the intentional removal of pollen is dangerous because it eliminates the ability of consumers and law enforcement to determine the actual origin of the honey.
“The removal of pollen will make the determination of botanical and geographic origin of honey impossible and circumvents the ability to trace and identify the actual source of the honey,” says the European Union Directive on Honey. The Codex commission’s Standard for Honey, which sets principles for the international trade in food, has ruled that “No pollen or constituent particular to honey may be removed except where this is unavoidable in the removal of foreign matter. . .”  It even suggested what size mesh to use (not smaller than 0.2mm or 200 micron) to filter out unwanted debris — bits of wax and wood from the frames, and parts of bees — but retain 95 percent of all the pollen.
Food Safety News asked Bryant to analyze foreign honey packaged in Italy, Hungary, Greece, Tasmania and New Zealand to try to get a feeling for whether the Codex standards for pollen were being heeded overseas.  The samples from every country but Greece were loaded with various types and amounts of pollen. Honey from Greece had none.
You’ll Never Know
In many cases, consumers would have an easier time deciphering state secrets than pinning down where the honey they’re buying in groceries actually came from. The majority of the honey that Bryant’s analysis found to have no pollen was packaged as store brands by outside companies but carried a label unique to the food chain. For example, Giant Eagle has a ValuTime label on some of its honey. In Target it’s called Market Pantry, Naturally Preferred  and others. Walmart uses Great Value and Safeway just says Safeway. Wegmans also uses its own name. 
Who actually bottled these store brands is often a mystery. 

A noteworthy exception is Golden Heritage of Hillsboro, Kan. The company either puts its name or decipherable initials on the back of store brands it fills.
“We’re never bashful about discussing the products we put out” said Wenger, the company’s quality director. “We want people to know who to contact if they have questions.”
The big grocery chains were no help in identifying the sources of the honey they package in their store brands. For example, when Food Safety News was hunting the source of nine samples that came back as ultra-filtered from QFC, Fred Myer and King Sooper, the various customer service numbers all led to representatives of Kroger, which owns them all. The replies were identical: “We can’t release that information. It is proprietary.”
One of the customer service representatives said the contact address on two of the honeys being questioned was in Sioux City, Iowa, which is where Sioux Bee’s corporate office is located.
Jessica Carlson, a public relations person for Target, waved the proprietary banner and also refused to say whether it was Target management or the honey suppliers that wanted the source of the honey kept from the public.
Similar non-answers came from representatives of Safeway, Walmart and Giant Eagle. The drugstores weren’t any more open with the sources of their house brands of honey. A Rite Aid representative said “if it’s not marked made in China, than it’s made in the United States.” She didn’t know who made it but said “I’ll ask someone.”
Rite Aid, Walgreen and CVS have yet to supply the information. Only two smaller Pacific Northwest grocery chains – Haggen and Metropolitan Market – both selling honey without pollen, weren’t bashful about the source of their honey. Haggen said right off that its brand comes from Golden Heritage. Metropolitan Market said its honey – Western Family – is packed by Bee Maid Honey, a co-op of beekeepers from the Canadian provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia. Pollen? Who Cares?
Why should consumers care if their honey has had its pollen removed?
“Raw honey is thought to have many medicinal properties,” says Kathy Egan, dietitian at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass.  ”Stomach ailments, anemia and allergies are just a few of the conditions that may be improved by consumption of unprocessed honey.”
But beyond pollen’s reported enzymes, antioxidants and well documented anti-allergenic benefits, a growing population of natural food advocates just don’t want their honey messed with.
There is enormous variety among honeys. They range in color from glass-clear to a dark mahogany and in consistency from watery to chunky to a crystallized solid. It’s the plants and flowers where the bees forage for nectar that will determine the significant difference in the taste, aroma and color of what the bees produce. It is the processing that controls the texture.
Food historians say that in the 1950s the typical grocery might have offered three or four different brands of honey.  Today, a fair-sized store will offer 40 to 50 different types, flavors and sources of honey out of the estimated 300 different honeys made in the U.S.. And with the attractiveness of natural food and the locavore movement, honey’s popularity is burgeoning. Unfortunately, with it comes the potential for fraud. Concocting a sweet-tasting syrup out of cane, corn or beet sugar, rice syrup or any of more than a dozen sweetening agents is a great deal easier, quicker and far less expensive than dealing with the natural brew of bees. However, even the most dedicated beekeeper can unknowingly put incorrect information on a honey jar’s label. Bryant has examined nearly 2,000 samples of honey sent in by beekeepers, honey importers, and ag officials checking commercial brands off store shelves. Types include premium honey such as “buckwheat, tupelo, sage, orange blossom, and sourwood” produced in Florida, North Carolina, California, New York and Virginia and “fireweed” from Alaska. ”Almost all were incorrectly labeled based on their pollen and nectar contents,” he said.
Out of the 60 plus samples that Bryant tested for Food Safety News, the absolute most flavorful said “blackberry” on the label. When Bryant concluded his examination of the pollen in this sample he found clover and wildflowers clearly outnumbering a smattering of grains of blackberry pollen.
For the most part we are not talking about intentional fraud here. Contrary to their most fervent wishes, beekeepers can’t control where their bees actually forage any more than they can keep the tides from changing. They offer their best guess on the predominant foliage within flying distance of the hives. ”I think we need a truth in labeling law in the U.S. as they have in other countries,” Bryant added.  FDA Ignores Pleas
No one can say for sure why the FDA has ignored repeated pleas from Congress, beekeepers and the honey industry to develop a U.S. standard for identification for honey.
Nancy Gentry owns the small Cross Creek Honey Company in Interlachen, Fla., and she isn’t worried about the quality of the honey she sells.
“I harvest my own honey. We put the frames in an extractor, spin it out, strain it, and it goes into a jar. It’s honey the way bees intended,” Gentry said.
But the negative stories on the discovery of tainted and bogus honey raised her fears for the public’s perception of honey. 
She spent months of studying what the rest of the world was doing to protect consumers from tainted honey and questioning beekeepers and industry on what was needed here. Gentry became the leading force in crafting language for Florida to develop the nation’s first standard for identification for honey. In July 2009, Florida adopted the standard and placed its Division of Food Safety in the Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services in charge of enforcing it.  It’s since been followed by California, Wisconsin and North Carolina and is somewhere in the state legislative or regulatory maze in Georgia, Virginia, Maryland, Ohio, New York, Texas, Kansas, Oregon, North Dakota, South Dakota, West Virginia and others.
John Ambrose’s battle for a national definition goes back 36 years. He said the issue is of great importance to North Carolina because it has more beekeepers than any other state in the country.
He and others tried to convince FDA that a single national standard for honey to help prevent adulterated honey from being sold was needed. The agency promised him it would be on the books within two years.
“But that never happened,” said Ambrose, a professor and entomologist at North Carolina State University and apiculturist, or bee expert. North Carolina followed Florida’s lead and passed its own identification standards last year. Ambrose, who was co-chair of the team that drafted the state beekeeper association’s honey standards says the language is very simple, ”Our standard says that nothing can be added or removed from the honey. So in other words, if somebody removes the pollen, or adds moisture or corn syrup or table sugar, that’s adulteration,” Ambrose told Food Safety News.
But still, he says he’s asked all the time how to ensure that you’re buying quality honey.  ”The fact is, unless you’re buying from a beekeeper, you’re at risk,” was his uncomfortably blunt reply. Eric Silva, counsel for the American Honey Producers Association said the standard is a simple but essential tool in ensuring the quality and safety of honey consumed by millions of Americans each year.
“Without it, the FDA and their trade enforcement counterparts are severely limited in their ability to combat the flow of illicit and potentially dangerous honey into this country,” Silva told Food Safety News.  It’s not just beekeepers, consumers and the industry that FDA officials either ignore or slough off with comments that they’re too busy.
New York Sen. Charles Schumer is one of more than 20 U.S. senators and members of Congress of both parties who have asked the FDA repeatedly to create a federal “pure honey” standard, similar to what the rest of the world has established. They get the same answer that Ambrose got in 1975:  ”Any day now.”
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See “Top Pollen Detective Finds Honey a Sticky Business” on Food Safety News.

COLLEGE STATION, Texas – Vaughn Bryant peered through the eye piece of his microscope, making infinitesimally small adjustments on the position of the slide beneath the lens.

“Nothing,” he said, and switched the slide for another.

“Again, nothing,” he said after about 40 seconds, and substituted another glass slide with a smudge in its center.

“OK. We’ve got clover. Some nice cherry, plum and rose.”

Moving the slide a bit, the professor of anthropology and director of Texas A&M’s palynology research laboratory added:
 
“I see some blackberry, a couple of birch. Looks like a good Northwest collection.”  

Bryant was not looking at the makings of a dessert or a salad. He was analyzing some of the more than 60 samples of honey that Food Safety News bought in grocery stores, at farmers markets and in big box, natural food and drug stores across the country.

The results of Bryant’s analysis, which Food Safety News paid for, found that more than 75 percent of honey sold in the U.S. has had its pollen filtered out.

The food safety divisions of the World Health Organization, the European Commission and dozens of others have ruled that without pollen there is no way to determine whether the honey came from legitimate and safe sources.

Food Safety News asked Bryant to look for pollen because that’s what palynologists do. But Bryant is also a melissopalynologist, which means he also specializes in the study of pollen in honey.

The professor entered the sticky world of honey in 1976, when he was asked by the Office of Inspector General of the U.S.Department of Agriculture to examine domestic honey purchased by the federal government as part of its farm subsidy program, so U.S. beekeepers would have a stable outlet for their honey.

He refined the analytical protocol he would use as he went along, diluting small amounts of honey, then washing them in various acids, some very volatile. Then he heated, washed, centrifuged, rewashed, treated with more acid, heated and centrifuged them one last time. The acids destroys everything in the honey but pollen.

He inspected a wide range of government-supplied samples and, in 94 percent of the cases, found pollen that was linked to nectar sources from the U.S. But 6 percent of the samples showed that foreign honey, mostly from Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, was being sold back to the government fraudulently.

Today, half of Bryant’s work involves forensic pollen studies; another 25 percent involves archaeological sites and the rest is pure pollen and honey research.

There are 250,000 different plants just in the United States that can be used by a honey bee, Bryant said. He can easily identify hundreds of the more common pollens on sight. In his lab, two walls are covered with huge charts of enlarged grains of pollen. In the next room, another wall holds cabinets that contain a $2 million collection of slide-out trays cataloguing 20,000 modern pollen samples from around the world, mostly donated by oil companies.

Since much of his work may involve honey products transshipped from China he has worked hard to get samples and reference material on Asia honey and pollen.

“So I’ve got every Chinese pollen book that I can get my hands on that shows me the pollen types that exist in China and neighboring countries, such as Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia and Taiwan,” he said.

This type of pollen analysis at the few labs in Europe that offer it can run $1,200 per sample or more according to honey packers who use the service. Bryant often charges far less than $100 for his basic pollen identification.  That’s “barely enough to cover chemicals and supplies,” especially when he’s doing it as a service for mom-and-pop-sized beekeepers and honey packers, he said.

His customers are honey importers who want to know whether they’re really getting what they’re paying for from foreign suppliers and beekeepers who send him samples, so they can track what their bees are harvesting and what they can accurately say on their honey’s labels.

The 71-year-old professor also does forensic work for several federal investigatory agencies mostly involved with anti-terrorism and anti-smuggling efforts. He refuses to discuss any of this work for those clients.

“I am concerned about the import of unsafe products and about the government’s apparent apathy towards trying to put a stop to the illegal importation of honey,” Bryant said.

“I feel my efforts are helping to fight this battle.”

Sometimes his pollen analyses are just fun.

Bryant was asked to analyze the honey produced and served by the White House to determine where the bees are sourcing their pollen. Bryant concluded that the White House honey is classified as a unifloral clover honey, but also contains minor amounts of nectar from other nearby sources, including dogwoods, honeysuckles and magnolia.

Pollen and history

About 70 years ago, before radio-carbon dating, Bryant explained, archaeologists were originally using pollen collected from their artifacts to attempt to confirm the age of their discoveries. Geologists started collecting fossil pollen from deep underground looking for sediment in various strata, dried up lake beds and other geological sites that have repeatedly been shown to be likely sites of oil and gas reserves.

Pollen specialists have been recruited by leading museums and art galleries to authenticate the source of furniture, painting and sculptures.

One of the earliest well-publicized studies was of the microscopic grains of pollen collected from the Shroud of Turin in the mid-70s by botanist and Swiss criminologist Max Frei. Frei’s analysis had identified pollen spores of 58 different plants, many that originated only in and around the site of the crucifixion.

Forensic palynology – the identification of ancient and modern pollen to solve crimes – developed slowly.
 
One of the earliest cases of using technology to catch a criminal was in 1959, when Austrian police tried to tie a suspect to a man reported missing while on a trip along the Danube River, Bryant said.
 
The missing man’s body had not been recovered but police believed the suspect had a motive for the crime. Mud found on the suspect’s boots was analyzed by a palynologist from the University of Vienna. He identified several common tree pollens but also a unique fossil grain of hickory — a precise mixture of pollen that was only found in one small area along the Danube. The revelation of this information by police so spooked the suspect that he confessed and showed police where he had buried the body.

Scientific and criminology journals show that detection and identification of pollen has been used in cases ranging from kidnapping, rape, homicide, smuggling, counterfeiting, wildlife violations, terrorism and a litany of other themes in waiting-to-be-written crime novels.  

Bryant continues to run his mostly one-person CSI operation but he says the government needs to do more.

“We must get our government to test samples — not just the paperwork on imported honey – but actually look at the honey itself,” he said.

He also believes the government must impose “truth in labeling” for honey. 

“Most other countries do this, so why don’t we?” he asked.

“If people were certain they were buying what is on the label, I suspect they might be willing to pay premium prices. Right now it is a crap shoot.You may or may not get what it says on the label and that’s wrong.”

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See “Tests Show Most Store Honey Isn’t Honey” at Food Safety News.