Why are they lying about food ?

[Stavros Dimou]

I always wondered that but hadn't writ about it on a forum until now to see other people's opinions.
I have noticed something that really makes me wonder.
When I visit the super market and I buy local Greek products like e.g. honey,I know it will taste like honey. But because local honey is too expensive I often buy imported because its cheaper.
The thing is...
That when I buy foreign "honey" it isn't honey. It doesn't taste like honey at all.
Most products named "honey" that I buy and are products from other countries is just some mix of glucose syrup (also known as corn syrup in US) with some kind of added color.
It is less thick than real honey,way too sweeter,and it doesn't have that distinct flavor real honey has.I've tried plain glucose syrup in the past,and its taste and texture is unforgettable.
As I have also tried real honey too. I can dinstict these two.

Now I wander... Are all "honey" products that are being sold in other countries like that ? Syrups that look like honey but are actually made by humans instead of bees ?

p.s. of course its not only honey,there are also products named "yogurt" that instead of being made by yeast are made with gelatin,etc.

 

[Greg White]

Can't say I've seen them do that with honey where I'm from.

Worst complaints people have in the US about our food is either where it's from(usually because China has some strange farming methods) or not telling us what's in it on the front label(usually involving 'pink slime' since it's not called that on the ingredients list).

 

[TehCookie]

I don't eat honey, but you usually have a choice between 100% real stuff and fake when it comes to foods like that. Either that or it could be the pasteurization and preservatives that make it taste different if you're buying fresh local stuff.

 

[Treeinthewoods]

Different flowers do result in different tasting honey.

But still, I do agree that imitation honey (like KFC's "honey sauce") are indeed inferior to the real thing.

 

[KoudelkaMorgan]

I hate food lies too.

Like when they say something is wasabi, its really just horseradish and food coloring.

"Sweetened with honey" it says on the box, and on ingredients is lists corn syrup or sucralose, with honey down at the bottom as an afterthought.

If it says it has pomegranate, acai, or some other "healthy" fruit juice on the label you can bet that its mostly apple/grape juice or blueberries. With just enough of the fruit on the label to cover their asses legally.

Vitamin Water promotes the lie that its is in any way a healthy drink. Its not. Its sugar water with a decent ad team.

Redbull also pretends its good for you. Its not. Its made from crap that many other countries have banned as poison for years.

"Diet" sodas etc. say things like "sugar free" as if they are true. Your body treats artifical sweeteners the same as cane sugar, i.e. it produces insulin and metabolizes it the same way. Studies also allude to people that injest lots of said mystery sweeteners tend to have a harder time losing weight. Mostly due to the mistake that they can drink it like water and it is free from calories and sugar to its ok. That is the biggest load of bullshit food companies want you to believe right there.

It may be true that high fructose corn syrup isn't inherently bad for you, but given that its in about 80% of ALL products and usually in a grossly inflated amount, its certainly isn't making this country any healthier either.

But the lie that tops my own personal list of food shenanigans is when it comes to sushi. 90% of the sushi you see in supermarkets is exclusively rolls, with a tiny bit of imitation crab, or more commonly "krab" stuck in there to meet the seafood requirement amidst the gag-inducing rice and avocado nugget that they think sushi is. Which means its Alaskan Pollock. Now I don't like real crab at all, but who is the smartass that decided its perfectly okay to call something crab, and its really a bland fish? Its not even evolutionarily near the advertised protein.

I may as well sell imitation ground beef that is really ground up cockroach because it has just as much truth to it as these assholes are getting away with.

I used to be able to get unagi nigiri, and inari, at my local Fred Meyer. These days its only krab rolls.

 

[DoPo]

Different flowers do result in different tasting honey.

Yes, indeed - one of the more famous ones (as in, I've heard it mentioned) is acacia honey. And I know that some beekeepers do feed their bees with specific stuff to increase honey production. I'm pretty sure glucose syrup is one of them. These also result in changing what the honey tastes like. So yeah, you can have mass produced honey by bees, not people.

there are also products named "yogurt" that instead of being made by yeast are made with gelatin,etc.

I know. Ewww.

 

[DanielBrown]

Hardly any honey is real. Consider how damn much each store has, then the fact that one bee only gathers a tiny, tiny amount in it's lifetime it wouldn't work. QI did something about this once.

Almost everything is fake. Ever since I found out how they make crab sticks I haven't been able to eat them. Haven't really dared to look anything else up since, or I'd be unable to eat.

 

[Smooth Operator]

It's not necessarily all fake but still massively diluted because real honey still has quite a high value meanwhile corn/corn products have been driven so far down in price they are practically worthless and their tasteless syrup can be used as a filler in everything.

And obviously if they only give you half the honey they can sell it twice, moar profits!

I know that our regional honey maker actually went the same way, same as juice makers, syrup makers, beer, milk, yogurt, ... all their products got oddly thin over the years so they can bag more profits.

 

[GrimTuesday]

I used to be able to get unagi nigiri, and inari, at my local Fred Meyer. These days its only krab rolls.

Ewww who shops at Fred Myers if they can help it? BTW, Hi fellow Pacific Northwester, what part of Oregon are you from.

I don't like how food companies use big complicated words to hide what is actually, because they know that if it were writen in a way that a layman could understand it, it would damage their bottom line. If you have to do that, it probably means that you are doing something that is bad for the consumers.

 

[Playful Pony]

Yea, where I live the cheaper stuff tends to be the fake stuff (though strangely, not always). There was a particular uproar when people found out (trough the media) that "fishcakes" weren't actually made of fish, despite the name. I don't see the big problem though, particularily in my city. We have an open fish market that sell freshly catched seafood every single day, including proper fishcakes. If they want fish, don't buy the cheap supermarket stuff! Also, it said on the back of the packet that it wasn't real fish, didn't exactly require a lot of hardcore investigative reporting...

Of course I understand a lot of people are on a budget and need to save money, but I guess it depends on how important to you it is that it's the real thing. If you can really notice the taste diference maybe you should get the real honey and just skimp on some other part of your meal that isn't so important? =p

 

[Beat14]

Hardly any honey is real. Consider how damn much each store has, then the fact that one bee only gathers a tiny, tiny amount in it's lifetime it wouldn't work. QI did something about this once.

Almost everything is fake. Ever since I found out how they make crab sticks I haven't been able to eat them. Haven't really dared to look anything else up since, or I'd be unable to eat.

I think I've seen that episode a long time ago and also came away thinking, I'll pass on finding out anything more about what I eat. The one I remember was peanut butter and other produce having loads of insect parts in. Added protein right! :/

I still eat it to this day, often, but I can't say that's what I'm thinking of when I do.

edit: sorry if I'm informing you on something about peanut butter you don't want to know

 

[Joccaren]

Different flowers do result in different tasting honey.

This. I went to a local honey farm a few years back, bought a set of 8 different types of honey. They all taste quite different.
And it is very possible to get real honey from a supermarket around here too. I live in Australia, and at least where I live honey is real.

 

[UltraPic]

Hardly any honey is real. Consider how damn much each store has, then the fact that one bee only gathers a tiny, tiny amount in it's lifetime it wouldn't work. QI did something about this once.

How can they sell it as honey then ?, plenty of places get busted for selling syrup as honey (counterfeit honey exists ).

 

[Alfador_VII]

In the UK if it says honey on the jar, it has to be honey.

I just checked my supermarket-bought Pure Natural Honey, and the ingredients list just says "a blend of EU and non-EU honeys"

But it's definitely bee product only

 

[Rylee Fox]

It's all about the money. All any company cares about (most of them, not all of them) is how much money they can get and how fast they can get it. The more garbage they sell you the more money they get. It's cheaper for them to use fake food at the normal food price because they get more profit that way. Most companies will scam you every chance they get in order to make money, and most of the time they can do it legally. Funny how if you do the same to them you are suddenly jailed. Something is clearly wrong here.

If you haven't guessed, I really do not like big companies.

 

[Yan007]

I live in China right now. I could write a whole BOOK about food lies: Fake protein powders, fake milk, fake eggs, fake grapes, fake rice, lead contaminated napkins and chopsticks and recycled cooking oil used in restaurants or sold as brand new in the supermarkets. I had all of that before and even more. Even some brands of bottled water are known to be bad for you because of the plastic used for the bottle and its chemicals breaking down into the water.

 

[Exterminas]

I don't know what "other countries" you mean, but you can rest assured that we have real honey in Europe as well.

This is largely a US-Problem, since the laws for tagging food don't seem to be as strict in your country as they are in parts of Europe. On this side of the pond there are very specific definitions for the names of products. For example, we have about six different terms for yogurt with fruit in it, depending on how much and what kind of processed fruits it contains.

 

[masticina]

Always check the ingredient list

America is known as one of the biggest failures in this. They even have laws that allow some products to carry the name of something they replace. Hell even their chocolate seems to contain less actual cacao. You know Cacao.. the main ingredient of chocolate. Yeah they found a replacement of that.

Luckily I don't have to deal with this I am in europe And though our food also contains allot of I don't even know what the F is written there.

One thing though, those fruit yoghurts.. check the back and find that they only contain 2% of actual fruit. Seriously?

 

[asinann]

Hardly any honey is real. Consider how damn much each store has, then the fact that one bee only gathers a tiny, tiny amount in it's lifetime it wouldn't work. QI did something about this once.

How can they sell it as honey then ?, plenty of places get busted for selling syrup as honey (counterfeit honey exists ).

This is America where I could bottle baby poop with coloring in it to make it look like honey and sell it as honey as long as I tossed a couple drops of honey in it.

 

[Zykon TheLich_v1legacy]

Isn't Greece part of the EU? Thought that was illegal, we have some pretty strict labelling laws. E.g. my local supermarket sells beefburgers, but also "American style patties" i.e. "we aren't allowed to call these beefburgers because there isn't enough beef in them" and considering how wide the definition of "beef" is... Crabsticks are called seafood sticks because it's just mushed protein of oceanic origin.

As others have said, honey tastes different depending on what the bees have been making it with. Could be that there is a minimum natural honey content and the rest is made up of cheap crap. Anyway, I think that's your answer, it's not that honey sold in other countries is all syrup, it's that the cheap stuff is generally of poorer quality. Lots of nice expensive local honeys in the shops where I live, or you could buy the cheap goo.