The question of Honey adulteration in nineteenth-century Britain and America
In May 2023 I gave an online talk about honey adulteration and faked honey in the 19th century to the Institute of Historical Research’s Food History Seminar. This is a thread of research that I’ve been doing as part of Honeybee Histories and one that is still very much a work in progress.
Therefore, in today’s essay, I thought I would share a video of the talk, along with a few thoughts about it and (for paying subscribers) a copy of the original transcript.
Why focus on honey adulteration?
As a lead to the Food History seminar event, I posted several essays about honey adulteration on Honeybee Histories; first a post about how persistent faked honey is in worldwide markets (“A Honey Scandal”, 12 Jan 2023), and then a trip into the very distant past, with a look at adulterated honey in classical texts of ancient Greece and Rome (“Pure and adulterated honey in the Classical texts”, 9 February 2023). These two posts juxtapose the issue of illegally producing and selling honey which isn’t honey at all or is strongly diluted with a cheaper substance. The issue is pertinent today, as there continue to be scandals that show that the honey we buy in jars is often diluted with cheaper sugars. The post where I looked at classical writers such as Pliny the Elder and Apicius, confirms that similar issues were just as persistent thousands of years ago. Indeed, the issue is a continual one. A similar post could have been written for any time period, in most countries.
So how did I come to such a topic?
This thread of research began a year earlier when I picked up a book by James Harvey Young. I have no idea now how I came to find that book or why I spent the best part of a month intensely reading it. The title didn’t exactly scream to me a connection to my Bee-focused research. Harvey’s book, published in 1989, is called Pure Food: Securing the Federal Food and Drugs Act of 1906, and was published by Princeton University Press.
Within it is a well-researched account of the various political and social ups and downs of the nineteenth century, which led to the US Congress eventually legislating to ensure that food brought within the US was truly what it appeared to be. Before then, meat might be tainted or older than it appeared, or could possibly be something else entirely; bread might contain flour impregnated with plaster of Paris, chalk, or alum; and honey might be made more of artificially created glucose syrup than from any product created by a Honeybee.
As an example, in my talk, I discussed an article published in the American Bee Journal in 1875 (vol. 11, issue 9, pp. 207-8) by Charles Dadant. Here he argued that the proliferation of adulterated honey was undermining the market for pure honey in America and in its sales abroad:
“For a great many years the American honey dealers have mixed honey with some other sweets. As they need honey for these mixture, they buy early in the season all the honey they need. Let us suppose that a honey dealer buys one hundred thousand pounds of honey; he mixes it with three hundred thousand pounds of some kind of syrup, molasses or glucose, and makes four hundred thousand pounds. Now these three hundred thousand pounds of created honey come in competition with the pure honey remaining in the hands of the producers, and hinders or prevents its sale, the more so because the honey dealer has a margin of seven or eight cents per pound to help its sale.”
Much of the argument around tackling the problem of adulterated honey was about the market, and especially about how these cheaper faked honeys were undermining the prices honest beekeepers could ask for their pure products. In addition, there was a lot of discussion around educating the population about what Honey really is and should taste like. There was much misunderstanding around the tendency of honey to crystalise or candy. Indeed, many people preferred to believe that faked honey was the real deal, as it tended not to crystalise (which was preferred for eating).
Harvey’s 1989 study of the Pure Food Law in the US, led me to examine the nineteenth-century beekeeping journals, including the American Bee Journal cited above. This, and the British Bee Journal, ended up being the focus of my research into honey adulteration in the 19th century.
In the earlier stages of this research, I posted a two-part essay on Honeybee Histories about the US situation (“Honey, Strained or in the Comb – Part 1 [24 March 2022] and Part 2 [7 April 2022]) and a follow-up which focused on the work of Charles A. Browne (“Charles A. Browne”, 21 April 2022). More recently, I did a follow-up, which looked at an article from 2013 that discussed George W. Mason’s 1900 report on food adulteration and considered whether things have really changed all that much (“The Pure Food Law Revisited”, 4 May 2023). In essence, there have been big improvements, but there is still a long way to go.
Thus, we arrive at the presentation that I gave to the Food History Seminar in May. There were some interesting questions asked. One of which was: does the ‘honey’ angle offer anything new or important to the wider discussion about Pure Food Laws? I don’t think that I answered very well. I essentially dismissed the importance, suggesting that it was just a small thread in a larger discussion, mostly focused on the meat and dairy industries. This, I feel, was a mistake.
Honey adulteration formed a vital part of Mason’s report into food adulteration in 1900 and a large portion of Wiley’s testimony. The evidence suggests that it was one of the most widely adulterated products on the US market at the time. Yet, the focus of discussion around the Pure Food Law in the US and the acts brought to the British Parliament in the nineteenth century, suggest that Honey is rarely discussed by historians investigating this topic.
There is much to learn from bringing this thread into focus. It adds to the picture of how modern food processing advancements increased the opportunities for faking products. The artificial creation of glucose as a cheap sugar more-or-less seems to have wiped out other forms of adulteration in the marketing of honey. Adding clay pipe or flour to honey mostly vanished once glucose became available. This tells us that illegal practices made use of modern techniques and products and that they would latch on to the cheapest option available to them. Not particularly surprising, but useful to know, nonetheless. Such changes are important to understanding human health, the market economies, and how laws were eventually changed during the formative century of Western industrialization.
Bonus Content: Transcript of the talk
As an additional bonus, I have included here the transcript of the talk along with copies of the slides for illustration. If you are a paid subscriber to Honeybee Histories you should automatically get access to this. If you are currently viewing Honeybee Histories for free, then please consider a paid subscription. Your subscription helps me to dedicate time to researching and writing these essays and in return I’ll be including these ‘bonus’ elements as a thank you.