I was permanently banned from the Reddit sub without recourse for posting this despite not breaking any rules. I’m slowly making the migration over thanks to such encouragement.
At least it’s labelled. Better than China sneaking sugar syrup into the supply chain without being open about it.
https://www.theguardian.com/food/2023/mar/26/uk-honey-fails-authenticity-test
I’m confused there are no packaging standards in the US. Is the first ingredient the largest? How do you know if there’s no percentage given?
There are some standards. The ingredients are listed in descending order of size (ie the first is the largest).
They can get around this in a few ways (though this isn’t really relevant here), such as for example preserves having this ingredient list: blueberries, sugar, corn syrup. Even though the amount of blueberries is technically larger than both sugar and corn syrup, sugar and corn syrup (still basically sugar) can add up to much more than the amount of blueberries. By including multiple types of sugar they can sort of hide the fact that the largest ingredient is some form of sugar
I was permanently banned from streaming (had thousands of followers at the time) for animal abuse after asking another streamer if they milk their goats, then I was permanently site banned for harassment after arguing with them about it. Don’t give me an excuse to get started.
Have you tried Owncast for self-hosted FOSS fediverse streaming? You literally can’t get banned on it because you host your own stream, same with self-hosting a lemmy instance. Like, other streaming instances can defederate from you, but you can never be banned off your own stream.
Name checks out.
Yeah with a name like that they’re going to be judged more harshly.
Once I noticed the name I blocked them. Something is wrong with them to think a name like that is okay, and I don’t care to find out what that is.
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That is absolutely revolting.
If you sell at farmer’s markets, I appreciate people like you, because it’s where we always buy our honey. And we have yet to regret it because it always tastes better than store bought honey. Especially if you like monofloral honey, which I do.
What is your favourite bee?
Did you know the symbol of my city is a worker bee?
Welcome to the fediverse!
Hear hear!
I got a shock random permaban in one of my preferred niche subs from someone obviously having a bad day and projecting it outwardly. It made me sit up and ask why I was putting up with so much nonsense and abandoned reddit that very moment. I had been dipping my toes into Lemmy but this made me dive in head first.
It happens here too. There are certain people. They are indecent. And they want to control the conversation.
The main difference here being if a community has crappy mods you can not only start your own better one, you can start it on another whole server where said crappy mods have no power. Bonus if the server’s general vibe happens to be a better fit for what you want to build.
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Yeah. The rest of us are just indecent and happy to let the conversation go whatever way it goes.
Welcome to Lemmy, you don’t need to go back to reddit. It gets better here everyday.
Also - do I just put a letter with Kelly Honey Farms in the mail and hope it gets there? A full address would be nice.
The full address is right there below it
Lol I’m an idiot.
It’s okay we all have our dumb days.
They say on the bottle that it’s a blend so I don’t think this is that infuriating. Though if I saw “Texas Honey Blend” I’d assume it’s cut with crude oil.
Welcome to the Fediverse!
It’s a blend of honey and high fructose corn syrup, what in the ever living fuck is high fructose corn syrup doing in honey? Oh, making more profits by cutting it.
Death to high fructose corn syrup
I can see it being useful if you’re making candy. Different sugars crystallize differently, so it’s not uncommon to mix corn syrup and sugar to get the right ratio.
But they’re also making “pancake syrup” that is corn syrup dyed and flavored to approximate maple syrup which is a crime against nature.
If you’re mixing things up in the kitchen, typically you try to be somewhat precise with ratios.
The difference in this case being that because the actual ratio of the blend is unknown, you don’t actually know how it would crystallize. Technically they could even change up the ratio week to week based on the price of high-fructose corn syrup so you wouldn’t even get consistency from it.
Even brands like log cabin who claim to use “no high fructose corn syrup” are just corn syrup and sugar. There are people who go their entire lives eating pancake syrup and table syrup on their pancakes, and die never having tasted actual maple syrup.
I can see it being useful if you’re making candy. Different sugars crystallize differently, so it’s not uncommon to mix corn syrup and sugar to get the right ratio.
Nobody making candy would every use this pre-blended product; they’d want to combine the two different sugars themselves so they could control the ratio.
Yeah, I was commenting on the notion of mixing honey with corn syrup generally, not this shit.
Though I’m sure there’s a bunch of old ladies in Texas who have recipes on old, yellowed card stock that call for this.
Isn’t that what the cheap syrup has always been? IHOP basically built their whole company on it.
Hot take, but it’s not a bad technology. It’s just heavily overused because US farm subsidies.
Eh, too much fructose and your body stops processing it. Fructose doesn’t actually trigger your body to use it, and if you don’t have enough other sugars present, it causes problems. Not an issue in moderation, but high-fructose syrup is used in so many things that it’s a real concern.
TIL. It sounds like there’s some debate about the severity of that, from what I can see, but it is a thing.
Yeah, just about any diet will have enough other carbs to work, but if all you eat is white bread and pepsi, that will be another issue with your diet.
Plus, it says “made with real honey”. That plus it being a blend should have raised an eyebrow to investigate further.
Maybe just me personally, but if they’re gonna put “blend” on the bottle I’d be more inclined to assume it’s intended as a selling point rather than a begrudging legal requirement.
Many thanks.
If they’re gonna put “blend” on the bottle I’d assume it was honey from different kinds of flowers mixed together, not honey mixed with something else!
What in the hell? You think this is ok? A honey blend implies a blend of…wait for it… different HONEY.
Not a blend of super cheap and super unhealthy syrup.
I have news for you if you think there is a health difference between a teaspoon of corn syrup and a teaspoon of honey. They are both packed full of sugar
You are being downvoted but HFCS and honey are almost exactly chemically identical. They have to inspect honey farms to make sure it comes from bees since looking at the final product you can’t tell the difference.
Yeah they are both concentrated sugar extracts. Just because one is made by bees doesn’t make it suddenly not a heaping tablespoon of sugar you’ve just ingested. I eat plenty of honey and molasses but I don’t lie to myself and claim that they are any healthier than corn syrup or simple syrup. They are all just super concentrated fructose and glucose solutions.
I thought the “benefits” to honey were kinda more for kids >1 so they can be exposed to different types of pollen. I dunno if it actually helps with immunity to allergies in the same way, but iirc it’s similar with peanuts. Kids exposed to them young are much less likely to develop allergies to them
That makes sense at first glance, but it’s not true when you think about it for a bit. People have allergic reactto grasses and trees that broadcast spawn their pollen all over the place. Bees collect nectar from flowering plants and spread pollen around that way. Plants only choose one over the other since they are both very resource intensive mating strategies. No one is allergic to lillac, but plenty of people are allergic to ragweed.
I liked when the US National Honey Board funded a study that compared honey, cane sugar, and HFCS and found they’re all about the same (and all raised a key blood fat, a marker for heart disease).
Of course, the truth is that sugar’s sugar and you should have limited amounts of it, but when it’s as cheap as HFCS is in the States, they can stick it in everything.
There is a health difference though https://sugarscience.ucsf.edu/the-sweet-science-behind-honey.html
Trace amounts of proteins and antioxidants, but it’s still an added sugar.
But honey is natural, corn syrup has chemicals in it!
I prefer honey cause I’m no goddamn liberal hippie, so it’s important to me that animals were killed for my food.
It seems not to be as well known as I thought, but most commercial honey sold in the US is not actually honey:
But the honey industry is hiding a secret. There’s a high chance that your store-bought honey is fake. While fake honey usually includes some amount of real honey, it is often mixed with other corn, rice, or sugar cane syrup to reduce its cost. These fillers are far cheaper than raw honey and are used to produce more honey, quicker. In fact, up to 76% of honey sold in the US is not really honey, at least not entirely.
There were a bunch of stories about this several years ago after a minor controversy, but it didn’t stay in the news long, so I guess it fell out of public consciousness.
If you want real honey, you’ll want to buy from small, local dealers.
If it was a bunch of different honeys they would have listed the types on the front of the bottle, I’m sure. The word “Texas” heavily implies that it’s made out of something terrible.
This is fine, they’re telling you what’s in the bottle. I mean I don’t agree with messing up honey with corn syrup and the fact that the bottle sort of leads you to think you’re getting just honey, but that’s par for the course in a lot of processed food packaging at least in the US.
Yea, and no, that should be better regulated. Let’s not settle for something bad just because. In France this is better regulated, but still some brands play cat and mouse, finding corner cases to circumvent the rules. Honey is subject to this very frequently too.
I don’t disagree. I think how blatantly misleading packaging and labeling many foods are in the US is and it’s BS. From the meaninglessness of “organic” to “100% natural”, they don’t really tell the consumer what that means.
However, strictly in the context of the US and our food labeling laws, the honey in the image is ok, even if we understand it has some fuckery about it.
The term “organic” is actually regulated by the USDA though, unlike “natural”
I understand that. However, the average consumer likely doesn’t know what the term means. One might be led to think the produce didn’t use pesticides, or that the food is more nutritious when in fact certain pesticides are allowed and the food can have the same nutritional value as non-organic. I would say that, despite the rules, people would likely feel misled, even if the product complies with the actual rules that allow it to be labeled organic.
It’s like “cage free” chickens. Sounds like a spacious barnyard full of happy chooks? In reality it will likely be a very crammed open warehouse floor with poor conditions. Are they cage free? Sure, the condition is met for the label. But the consumer doesn’t know what it means.
Okay, this is the line that should not be crossed, we should evict Texas.
*eject
This is just another day in america, is it not?
Honey is a commonly faked food. At least they label it so you can avoid it.
I heard about that. I wouldn’t even buy beeswax from Amazon because I heard all the horror stories of even some of the highly rated products being cut with Paraffin, which gives me headaches. I could give you a list.
Depending on where you live, i would recommend checking out the local farmers market in the weekends. I bought iver a gallon of local honey for about $50 last summer and i am only just starting to finish it off.
And trying to get pure maple syrup and olive oil these days is also a pain, when it shouldn’t be.
Maple is often blended, and olive and avacado is straight up fraud most often.
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At least they label it so you can avoid it.
But they call it honey blend, which implies it’s a blend of honey from different sources.
This would absolutely be deemed misleading advertising here.Pretty much the same thing as the “juice cocktails” they have in the juice isle that are fruit juice and sugar water. “Made with real fruit juice!” (like ten percent).
I always squint at meat products that claim something like “made with 100% real chicken.” Yeah okay, there is chicken in there, but how much of the food consists of that 100% real chicken?
Yeah, apparently the chicken in there is a hundred percent real, even if only two percent of the product is chicken.
I’ve been buying fruit juice recently after staying away from all that sugar for a lot of years, and I’m sad to find out that most fruit juice in my grocery is corn syrup. Even with being willing to pay more, it can be difficult to find sweetened with fruit juice or even sugar
How bout thems glass bottles that’re straight juice? Often organic, and expensive. Can dilute with water and put on ice… and sweeten yourself if needed.
I’ve gotten those a few times as well. Very expensive. I’m willing to pay more but those are a lot more. It doesn’t help the they seem to want to outdo each other on how “different” the juice can be. Some of the combination are truly awful (but they’re all “superfoods”, why shouldn’t we put them together?)
Needs more this
Yeah, have to stay away from the “cocktails” and stick with 100% juice. On the other hand, even most of those have a lot of apple, pear, and grape juice added, which are all very, very sweet. There’s more sugar in apple juice than in soda, it’s just the kind of sugar that’s different.
For me, I have a weight problem so sugar is sugar: I don’t need empty calories. However my kid does not, so I care what kind of sugar he gets his calories from
Understandable, though I’m not sure there’s any agreement that fructose is healthier than sucrose.
At least in Denmark it’s illegal to use the word ‘juice’ if there’s any sugar water in it. If I see a juice on the self I can be certain it is 100% juice (maybe made from concentrate but that must be written somewhere). If it’s not then it is “nektar”
But they call it honey blend
That is illegal as the must label it with what the Honey is blended with. So in this case you’d need to have it labeled “Blended Honey with Corn Syrup” or some variation of that.
I’m not a lawyer, but it looks like you are wrong:
4: If a food consists of honey and a sweetener, such as sugar or corn syrup, can I label the food as only “honey”?
No. A product consisting of honey and a sweetener cannot be labeled with the common or usual name “honey” because “[t]he common or usual name of a food . . . shall accurately identify or describe . . . the basic nature of the food or its characterizing properties or ingredients” (21 CFR 102.5(a)). Identifying a blend or a mixture of honey and another sweetener only as “honey” does not properly identify the basic nature of the food. You must sufficiently describe the name of the food on the label to distinguish it from simply “honey” (21 CFR 102.5(a)).However they are only exempt from the declaration if it’s pure honey, so the part about not having that is clearly against the guidelines. The header on page 1 says: “Contains Nonbinding Recommendations” So it’s very fuzzy to a layman like me.
I think that interpretation cuts both ways, where the ‘blend’ could also imply that the honey is blended with something other than honey.
It sucks in the US where misleading labeling gets a free pass for being technically corrent if you squint hard enough is not considered misleading.
If they were Really Smart™ they would just lable it as a dietary supplement, then all regulation goes out the window and it’s a free-for-all!
In the USA, it’s recommended to label it as “Honey with corn syrup” (PDF: https://www.fda.gov/files/food/published/PDF---Guidance-for-Industry--Proper-Labeling-of-Honey-and-Honey-Products.pdf) but that’s just a recommendation, not a law. The FDA should get stricter about this.
The FDA should get a hell of a lot stricter in general, but decades of political fuckery has made it simultaneously rife with corruption, permanently understaffed and critically underfunded.
The FDA is pretty much in exactly the condition that Republicans want for all regulatory agencies.
I agree. This should be called a honey sauce at best.
I get it, I was banned from Reddit for saying that being progressive was a good thing. That was just dandy. I consider it a badge of honor to have pissed them off so royally.
