In both the popular imagination and ad campaigns, honey is the epitome of a wild food. After all, bees can’t be herded and overfed like cattle, or immobilized like broiler chickens if they are to continue making the sweet substance. As reported here last year, bees are “a key to global food security” due to their critical importance in food chains worldwide. In fact, honey seems to be a bellwether of global food insecurities.

The “wild” nature of even cultivated honey is both one of its major selling points and the source of many of its problems. A Guardian article recently reported that a European Union court on September 6 ruled that honey containing traces of pollen from genetically modified (GM) corn must also be labeled as GM produce. The ruling comes as a result of beekeepers in Germany discovering traces of corn pollen from a nearby field of Monsanto corn crops. The nature of bee biology and honey production throw the current discourse surrounding globalization and its effect on the permeability of local and global boundaries in a more literal light. After all, bees can’t be herded according to national borders.

Honey and national security are an odd combination, but one of undeniable importance. Colony Collapse Disorder continues to plague hives, causing mass bee die-offs. Last year, although there were rumors that the root cause of the disorder had been found, it is still unclear how much pesticides play a role. As a result, over the last decade these bee die-offs and other environmental factors have increased the price of domestic honey and, as with so many other products, have opened the door to cheaper Chinese imports. This imported honey, however, is often tainted by antibiotics fed to the bees, heavy metals from storage containers, or adulterated with “filler” products such as barley malt and jaggery. The sale of Chinese honey in the United States has been made nearly impossible by staggeringly high tariffs.

A recent Food Safety News (FSN) investigation, however, discovered that “a third or more of all the honey consumed in the U.S. is likely to have been smuggled in from China.” Such a thing can occur because of a number of factors–the cheaper price of Chinese honey and the lack of a legal definition of “honey” among them. Chinese manufacturers pass honey through countries such as Russia, India and Australia in order to disguise the honey’s true country of origin.

One company, True Source Honey, LLC, has taken steps to halting this process. Formed by representatives from four North American honey marketing companies and importers, Golden Heritage Foods, LLC, Burleson’s Inc., Odem International, and Dutch Gold Honey, the company works to accredit honey sources and thereby build a base of trustworthy companies. The pledge signed by accredited companies includes these three tenets, honey must be:

• Ethically sourced in a transparent and traceable manner from known beekeepers and brokers;
• Moved through the supply chain in full accordance with U.S. law and without circumvention of trade duties; and
• Carry truthful labeling as to its source, has been tested to ensure quality, and has been handled in a safe and secure manner from hive to table

However, zero North American packers, five importers, and four beekeeping companies have passed the accreditation process and are now “True Source Certified.” Of course, the American founders of True Source Honey have a vested interest in keeping cheap international competition controlled. Yet I think, in looking at True Source Honey’s web site, what is most surprising is not the comparatively few companies that have gone through its accreditation process, but rather the hundreds of news stories on the site about the company’s milestones, busts of honey launderers, meetings of big players in the honey industry about the issue.

Just this week, FSN reported that 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 FSN. FSN reports: “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.”

In a culture plagued by food industry horror stories and bad news, why hasn’t the problem of honey laundering made more of an impact on national media outlets over the course of the past ten years?  Why have they been, with a few exceptions, relegated to local news pieces replete with honey jokes, such as one CityPages blog post that states, “Minnesota beekeepers are so buzzing mad about ‘honey laundering’ that they’re holding a press conference about it today at the State Fair.”

Perhaps one of the reasons honey laundering hasn’t received more national attention is because the problem sheds unwelcome light on so many of the problems faced by current national food security. Honey reveals how something so simple as a name (what one can legally call “honey”) unites issues of international relations, economics at both the global and domestic levels, and biology (how honey is naturally made, and what can be done to bees in order to produce more of it).

Worth considering is the fact that the U.S. often views China as an economic and social threat–while the U.S. is in the process of forging a new, deeper alliance with India. Chinese honey cannot be imported into the U.S., for example, while Indian honey still is (in fact, according to the earlier FSN report, nearly all of honey imported to the U.S. comes from India). Yet Indian honey has already been outlawed in the E.U. because of its equally high level of antibiotics.

Perhaps, as with so many other foods, people must get sick before good health takes precedence over business as usual. The honey laundering issue is not, as some have claimed, just an overreaction to competitive global market practices. It is a case study that, were the world to truly focus on it, would cause us to reconsider many aspects of how global food industries work.

Photo: LauraZimmerman

Are patrons supposed to enjoy their Whopper value meal and then attempt to undo the damage with some vitamins and powders from the King’s neighbor? This Burger King and that GNC represent two aspects of military food culture constantly at odds with each other: The need for culinary comfort in a stressful job environment and the attitude that treats the soldier’s body as a high-performance machine that requires precisely the right fuel. It’s hard to find a middle ground, at least here in the PX. But what about elsewhere on post? The commissary should offer the healthy-eating options lacking at a Burger King or a Taco Bell.

The commissary system provides a valuable service to soldiers, catering to large families, a number of different tastes and diets, and even a wide variety of ethnic foods. Although the commissaries offer military personnel food that is often cheaper than that sold by their civilian counterparts, we normally get the bulk of our groceries elsewhere. One reason for our avoidance of the commissary is that I have celiac disease, an autoimmune disorder which causes a variety of symptoms when I digest gluten, a protein that is found in wheat, barley, and rye and is present in many of the processed foods filling the commissary. Absent is the organic or “natural” section which has sprouted up in many mainstream supermarket chains on which I normally depend for gluten-free products.

On my first trip to the commissary, I didn’t expect an abundance of gluten-free options–after all, celiac disease disqualifies applicants from serving. However, I was surprised at what I did find: Sodium-filled, processed food, and lots of it.

Taken separately, a few family value packs of Hot Pockets and a few (dozen) varieties of frozen pizza are merely another snapshot of American life. What major city is without a set of golden arches? Taken together, however, the food options offered on military bases throughout the United States and across the globe paint a rather stark picture of how we truly treat our men and women in uniform.

Part of the problem facing the military food system is the problem facing the world as a whole: How to feed more people than ever before. An Army Times article quotes Army and Air Force Exchange Service (AAFES) spokesman Judd Anstey as saying, “The exchange [PX] works with market leaders that have the capabilities to provide services on a global level,” and that, “Unfortunately, some chains are unable to support an operations tempo that may call for a restaurant at Fort Bragg today, Korea tomorrow, or even Afghanistan next week. With that said, the exchange works aggressively with brand partners of all sizes to bring their products to these diverse locations and provide a taste of home to troops.”

It’s undoubtedly true. Soldiers spend about $313 million annually on fast food, so military contracts equal success for these captains of food industry. If any food were to successfully survive a trip across the Atlantic to far-off battlefields, it would certainly be the supernaturally resilient Hot Pocket.

The intersection between the United States Army and food policy has spent some time in the spotlight in recent years, particularly by way of the Mission: Readiness Report which states that 75 percent of people aged 17 to 24 are too overweight to enlist. The report has done valuable work by increasing focus on the connections between national health and national security, as well as on the unhealthy school lunches that are part of the problem.  And those who are already serving? As true representatives of the citizens they defend, these soldiers eat the same food that is fattening the rest of America.

Another set of changes in Army food policy has come from the Soldier Fueling Initiative, a program implemented in the past year, which treats soldiers as athletes requiring the proper balance of nutrients. This program, which made significant changes to menus and vending machines, is “limited to basic and advance training sites—installations where Army brass has the most control over its soldiers’ behavior,” according to an article in the Army Times. Limited in its scope, the program is also coded in the only nutritional language the army is fluent in (that of fueling and performance), a language that promotes a utilitarian and often simplified view of the properties of food.

So perhaps, in looking for a solution to these issues, we should not look forward to more “initiatives,” but backward instead. In the 1780s, George Washington’s Army Surgeon General, Dr. Benjamin Rush, noted, “[A] greater proportion of men have perished with sickness in our armies than have fallen by the sword… The diet of soldiers should consist chiefly of vegetables. The nature of their duty as well as their former habits of life, require it.”

It seems that a return to Dr. Rush’s prescription would, in many ways, do more to honor these men and women’s service than a wave of the American flag and a “Thank you for your service.” As with the society it defends, the American military deserves fresh, whole foods and, perhaps more importantly, the educational programs to healthily feed themselves and their families.