The great British honey scandal
The Slow Newscast
Alice Sandelson
4.6 • 894 Ratings
🗓️ 26 August 2025
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
For nearly a decade beekeepers around the world have been saying that there’s something very wrong with the honey industry. Prices are down, and so is production, but there’s more honey being sold than ever before. So what exactly is in that jar in your kitchen cupboard? An investigation by The Observer reveals a global honey fraud that begins in China and ends with allegations of adulterated jars on UK supermarkets shelves
Reporter: Jon Ungoed-Thomas
Producer: Ada Barumé
Artwork: Lola Williams
Sound design: Dominic Delargy
Executive Producer: Matt Russell
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Transcript
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| 0:53.3 | It's made out of a mixture of crops and secondary jungle and some of the primary forest. |
| 1:00.5 | I don't know the floor particularly well, so this was quite a shock to me. |
| 1:06.1 | A honey sommelier talks me through some tasting notes. |
| 1:09.3 | A highly acidic nose, which tastes a bit like the |
| 1:12.2 | smell of old plimpsils. It's already telling me that it's got some some very unique characteristics. |
| 1:18.7 | So if I put some into this palette, you will see it's very thick, very dark, very shiny. It's exactly |
| 1:26.9 | what you would expect from that smell. It's got a lot of |
| 1:32.8 | other things to talk about. In my original tasting notes I described this as having a |
| 1:38.6 | combination notes of wet nappy, i.e. sort of ammonia-like quality and burnt robber. |
| 1:44.9 | So you can see whether you agree with me. |
| 1:48.2 | We're sitting in the upstairs of Sarah Wyndham Lewis's honey barn, |
| 1:51.9 | and on the table between us is an array of jars from around the world. |
... |
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