Michael T. Roberts

You know, we were a small farm and almost everybody back then did.

But there was a group of folks that would buy the produce and they would label their produce, no pesticides applied.

I remember seeing their labeling and I thought, that's not right.

That was my first experience at seeing fraud up front.

One of the big problems of adulterated honey is what's called immature green or high moisture honey.

You're actually harvesting the honey too early and it has a lot of moisture and

But you want to get it to the market quickly, and so you get this green honey, immature honey.

And then they use these vacuuming process, and they remove the moisture enough to sell it on the market.

And then they use oftentimes what's called resin technology that was perfected by the Chinese, and that removes a lot of the color, the contaminants, the antibiotics.

And other things that get into the honey, a lot of syrups are used to mix with the honey, to blend it, to make it go further.

So you get this syrupy mixture called syrup-diluted honey.

So it's a whole lot of different ways to adulterate honey.

Honey, olive oil, vinegars, spices.

I would also say vitamins, even though I can't quantify that.

That's just my own personal opinion.

Some of this is really hard to quantify because it's hard to gather data on fraud.

But anything that's a specialty good that's been imported and it has a large enough quantity

has some fraud issues.

The New York Attorney General's Office years ago identified fish as a product that's most susceptible to fraud.

We have fun in my class at UCLA.