Are You Sure That's Honey? - Mara Grunbaum

LEFT: ©D. HURST/ALAMY; RIGHT: ©JAY B. SAUCEDA (2); POLLEN: ©SCIENCE PICTURES/PHOTO RESEARCHERS, INC.
From inside a little lab in
Texas, Vaughn Bryant
fights crime. He uses
forensic science to catch
impostors that secretly slip
past authorities. But these impostors
aren’t hardened criminals or
international terrorists—they’re jars
of sweet, sticky honey.
Bryant, who works at Texas A&M
University, is America’s only
melissopalynologist, a scientist who
studies the pollen in honey. He uses
pollen to identify honey that was
imported illegally, didn’t come from
where its label says it came from, or
isn’t the pure honey it claims to be.
Bryant is one of a handful of
scientists who are on the lookout
for counterfeit foods—foods that
aren’t what they say on the label.
Misrepresented honey is only one
type of this fraud. Counterfeiters
might add red dye to chili powder
to make it look fresher than it really
is, or dilute milk with water so they
can fill more cartons to sell. Olive oil
is often labeled as extra-pure when
it’s actually mixed with other oils
or contaminants. And sushi billed
as expensive tuna might be cheap
mackerel instead.
Some kinds of food fraud are
against the law. Others aren’t, but
they still cheat consumers out of
what they think they’re paying for.
That’s why people like Bryant are
trying to put a stop to the practice.
“We’re ‘fake food’ detectives,”
says John Spink, associate director
of the Anti-Counterfeiting and
Product Protection Program at
Michigan State University. Spink
says food fraud has been on the rise
in recent years. Many counterfeit
products are imported from other
countries, where regulations aren’t
as strict as they are in the U.S.
Sometimes food manufacturers
buy imported ingredients they don’t
know are fake and those ingredients
end up in the food they produce.
FINDING THE FAKE: HONEY
Bryant stores
2 pollen samples
from thousands of
different plants in
a file cabinet in his
laboratory.
HIDDEN THREATS
Fraudulent food can be
dangerous. The environmental group
Oceana recently tested fish from
sushi restaurants in Los Angeles
and found that most of it was not
Where did your
1 honey come
from? Vaughn
Bryant, shown
here visiting a bee
colony, investigates
honey’s origins
back in his lab.
Each type of pollen
3 looks different under
a microscope. Comparing
pollen in honey to those in
his file helps Bryant figure
out the honey’s origins.
what the menu claimed. Nearly all of
the “white tuna” sushi they bought,
for example, turned out not to be
tuna at all, but escolar, a species of
mackerel. The U.S. Food and Drug
Administration (FDA) recommends
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