Sugar Sugar

[Sakkarin Profile]

Sugar Sugar
By the Archies, 1968

Sugar, ah honey honey sugar sugar
You are my candy girl
And you got me wanting you
Honey Sugar, ah sugar sugar
You are my candy girl
And you've got me wanting you

Oh sugar, pour a little sugar on it honey sugar
Pour a little sugar on it baby

Sounds like they filled the Tesco Honey jars with Golden Syrup by mistake...
Or maybe the bees fancied a week off and made the substitution.

"Tesco pulls honey off shelves amid purity concerns"

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-50551385

[Badger's Mate Profile]

Maybe they'll claim it is a means of allowing vegans to enjoy the great taste of honey, much like Unilever said that it was making Bovril from yeast extract for the benefit of vegetarians.

[scullion Profile]

i wonder if there's a possibility that the bees had been fed a lot of syrup over winter (a normal occurrence if all the honey has been taken from the hive and a sparse or cold winter follows) and the bees, not consuming it all, had laid it down in the comb. it would then dilute the resulting honey when it was taken off the next summer.
the honey that is made from rape looks very pale and is quite tasteless compared to other honey - could have been that?
however, i doubt that those two scenarios would effect tesco's own brand honey as i would imagine that they get it from a mass producer in a warmer climate (unless they get it from eastern europe of course).

the other possibility is that it's a conspiracy by vegans who are against the exploitation of bees! - the softer (sweeter) edge to animal rights protesters‽

[Badger's Mate Profile]

Around here, a jar of local honey will cost at least a fiver, maybe more.

Surely a jar of honey for £1.35 should be raising questions in the mind of the consumer. Rather like buying a chilled 'beef' lasagne for pennies and then being surprised that it hasn't got any beef in it.

Indeed there's another honey example. Wasn't there a report a while back pointing out that more Manuka honey was sold in the UK than was actually produced globally?

[Gillthepainter Profile Website]

Tescos seems to be the named and shamed supermarket on many occasions.
Might be the way of testing that is at fault tho on this occasion.

I'm pretty lucky too, I paint with 2 ladies who own beehives. Yip, £5 per jar, but one lasts me about a year.

I'm also pretty lucky that if something like this is amiss, it doesn't affect my health.
But some people are in desperate need of accurate consumer information. It's frightening.

[Sakkarin Profile]

Here's the 2014 Independent article on that Manuka story - only 1,700 tonnes are produced, but UK consumption was supposedly 1,800 tonnes, and total worldwide consumption 10,000 tonnes. Does not compute, maybe someone misplaced a decimal point. I wonder if we still consume more than is actually produced?

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-styl ... 77344.html

Had to laugh, it says "Steens employs more than half a billion bees".

I had a vision of that almighty bee queue on a Friday night as they waited for their pay packet...

[Joanbunting Profile]

I live in the land of honey - no milk-no cows! Many of our neighbours, an, on a larger scale farmers have hives. Up on the plateau among the lavender fields there are hundreds. Down here the hives are mostly for Accacia or toutes fleurs.

I buy a comb once a year - a real treat and it costs €7.50. Even in the supermarket local honey costs at least €6.00. Of course it's not cheap because honey is very labour intensive - on everyone's part!

[Badger's Mate Profile]

UK consumption was supposedly 1,800 tonnes, and total worldwide consumption 10,000 tonnes. Does not compute, maybe someone misplaced a decimal point.

I suspect that the numbers are right - I'll bet that some has never seen any Manuka, and some are blends that contain Manuka, like my previously used example of olive oil spread. Advertised by sprightly aged 'Italians' in a rustic setting, marketed for its olive-ness, but is in fact a rapeseed oil spread with a bit of olive oil added.

[Sakkarin Profile]

Well I suppose with a little added actual ingredient it is still better than those truffle oils that have never seen a truffle!

Or 99p "balsamic vinegar".

It does amaze me, in Tesco there's a whole aisleful of cooked meats labelled as "ham" and "beef" which when you examine the labels are all "chopped and reformed" gunge, similarly in the freezer section virtually all the chicken products are made of reclaimed meat.

I used to buy a rather good inexpensive Polish smoked ham, but it disappeared off the shelves a few weeks back. It has now been replaced with a different manufacturer's "Polish Ham", but I didn't realise that the product is now made out of abbatoir slurry until I got home, nasty mushy stuff.

[dennispc Profile]

Part of our coffee group are friends from Brixham, they’ve got about 25 hives - sell their honey at £5 a pot, amazing how different it is from year to year, always good though. Whatever the qualities of Manuka, they claim their’s is similar.