or eggs or other insect parts
“honey, I’m home!”
shocked gasp “I want a divorce!”
Used to be vegan for 5ish years.
It is a grey area and personal preference. Are you vegan for morality, health, global sustainability, etc…
It depends why someone is vegan (diet, not movement).
I was vegan for health reasons, and local honey helps with allergies so I ate it.
not all vegans are the same but personally i use agave over honey
Mezcal? Sold
Depends who you ask. I know a guy who’s vegan because he likes animals. I asked him about honey and he said “fuck insects”.
But opinion differs because bees are pretty much free to go about their lives and we just steal the honey every now and then. It’s not hurting them and not keeping them confined, so…
Others put the line at no hurting animals ever. I don’t ask about fleas or mosquitos or tapeworms though.
bees are pretty much free to go about their lives and we just steal the honey every now and then. It’s not hurting them
I don’t think this is entirely true. Honey bees are basically factory farmed, we don’t just go into the woods and steal honey. They are ecologically problematic as they compete with native bee species. I’m not an expert but look up how bees are being exploited for almond pollination in California for instance.
That’s a valid position, but it applies equally to most kinds of land use. Agave plantations are not less ecologically problematic. Agriculture has an impact.
And animal agriculture uses even more land than eating plants directly. We have to eat something to survive and eating plants has the least impact.
For most animals yes, but bees (the topic at hand) are different because their land use overlaps with other kinds rather than displacing it. The competition with native insects is a real problem but not necessarily more of a problem than honey alternatives.
My understanding is most do but it’s the subject of occasional controversy.
I have never met a vegan who was okay with honey but I have had plenty of non vegan mother fuckers constantly bring this up as if its this huge edge case point of conflict. Its made and taken involuntarily from animals. It ain’t that hard to figure out.
I saw a post once that actually argued bees are aware of the arrangement and generally willingly tolerate the deal. We can tell they know the deal because they produce extra honey to account for the keeper’s cut, and we know they willingly tolerate it because if they found it intolerable, bees are perfectly capable of fucking right off and leaving you with an empty hive.
yes. the reason the term vegan came about was because of the looseness of vegetarian. vegetarian would inply no eggs or insect unless it had a rider. like lacto/ovo vegetarians will ingest milk and eggs. honey was usually not to much of an issue. so vegan started being used for people who don’t eat animals or anything that came from an animal like honey or milk. There is a thing called fruitarian that theoretically will only eat the parts of the plant that the plant made to be eaten. Like fruits. Steve jobs was into it before he died. I think he thought it would cure or help his cancer or something.
Strict vegetarian used to be the term for not eating any animal products. Vegan denoted lifestyle, not just diet. A vegan would not have leather shoes of wool sweaters.
I feel like someone strict enough to not eat honey is going to be thinking about their clothing choices though. I mean I was not a part of the subculture honestly but from an outside perspective that is what it felt like to me.
fruitarian
It’s interesting to me that they went with that name, since there’s already a name for eating fruit (frugivory)
Frugivore implies a biological cause for the diet primarily consisting of fruit. Humans are biological omnivores regardless of if we choose to limit our diet of other reasons. They don’t use frugivore for the same reason that vegetarians don’t use herbivore.
I never herd of frugivore. My guess is you have vegetarian so its using the same thing.
Yes.
I know a vegan who has ex-battery hens as pets. She’s against taking eggs away from them because it may cause distress, but often they’ll lay an egg wherever they happen to be, and walk away. Those ones are fair game because the chickens have abandoned them, and they need to be collected before they rot in any case.
That’s stupid because chickens don’t give a shit about their eggs. It’s a good idea to feed them egg shells to give them back some nutrients but you have to smash the shells up because if they recognise the eggs as food they will enthusiastically eat their own freshly laid ones.
Also, there’s a distinct difference between normal and brooding behavior. A broody hen gives a shit about her eggs (well, not specifically her eggs just the concept of sitting on and hatching eggs) but if they aren’t fertilized it rapidly becomes a problem. And they’ll lay another in a day or two regardless.
I find this one interesting. I knew a farmer who only had hens and so all of the eggs were unfertilized.
Of course, its always possible that there’s some sort of immaculate conception and a hen will lay a fertilized egg, but I’m pretty sure that won’t happen.
Parthenogenesis is rare, but it can happen in chickens
Some do, some don’t.
Maybe but honey is far more humane than eggs.
Depend on the eggs. Farm ? Yes, most of them are unethical. Home chicken ? Not unethical, if there are no roosters.
What makes it unethical if there’s a rooster?
It has been fertilized so, if you are vegan, might qualify as murder because th egg is technically viable. No rooster, no fertilisation, no murder : ethical in principle because you can’t stop a hen from laying eggs.
But is this a wild hen roaming free, or imprisoned?
What’s unethical about roosters?
It has been fertilized so, if you are vegan, might qualify as murder because th egg is technically viable. No rooster, no fertilisation, no murder : ethical in principle because you can’t stop a hen from laying eggs.
You would have to be a life-begins-at-conception, anti-abortion kind of person, as well, for that.
It’s not an impossible or unnatural combination, intellectually, but demographically speaking, being radical in two directions at once is rare.
A vegetarian would be fine with a backyard coop. Vegans might say that your chickens are kind of like slaves - they make stuff for you, and can’t leave - and that’s bad.
You’re right on that, I can’t deny it. But then again, I had some vegans friends that had hens that were saved from the slaghterhouse. They had no barriers at all and their hens roamed free. Yes, a hen is a product of human selection, and on that aspect the line between ethical and practical is really fine and more suitable to philosophical debates, but since the hens were saved, they were better off their fate and in that regard, harvesting eggs was not an act of torture per se. But I’m not a vegan and can’t speak for them, just give an insight on a non-dicheotomic point of view.
Yes, a hen is a product of human selection
Actually, layers are pretty close to natural red junglefowl, as far as I can tell. It’s not like turkeys or cows, where they can’t really exist in the wild. Although, the wild sucks too…
I’m in the picture FWIW, as a vegetarian who’s cared for backyard hens. They seemed fine and happy, if a little bored in the winter, and were pretty great and easy-to-care-for pets. If there was any money in fixing the gender ratio problem, that bit about what happens to the male chicks would probably be solved, as well.
Turkeys do live in the wild
That’s an interesting aspect that I hadn’t considered. It brings the question of “does life begin at fertilization” into this.
They’re against domestic animals as a concept, so you’d think. The basic idea is that animals are independent beings, and benefiting from them, with the massive power imbalance in play, is wrong.
Vegetarians are just against slaughter as a practice. And then you might land in between, if you don’t like the way battery hens are treated, for example.
They’re against domestic animals as a concept, so you’d think.
Except the great many vegans who keep pets, as if that was somehow different.
I’ve wondered about the pet thing too and I am vegan.
I’ve brought it up a few times with people and most of the replies were that the pets they had were rescues or strays, so looking after them was better than not, which I kinda get. Vegans who own and ride horses are weird as fuck though and I do not understand their moral stance at all.
Personally, even though I really like playing with cats, I am deeply uncomfortable with owning a being for my entertainment,and said being relying on me for its survival. So I am not having pets.
I don’t share your principles but I have to respect them, it’s nice to see a consistent position instead of carving out self-serving allowances.
Most reject honey. There are those who don’t and there are vegans who want to strictly deny that label to those who don’t.
Eggs? That’s pretty universally rejected.
I am what I call an “involuntary vegan”. I had to go full whole food plant based due to heart health issues. One of the effects that consuming any animal products has on me is significant inflammation. That includes honey. It is bee puke afterall.
That said, I maintain bee friendly gardens wherever I can because bees rule. Honeybees are grea for the environmen and bee is good for most people, so I would never chastise anyone for having it.
Yes.
Honeybees (outside their native habitat) are outcompeting native pollinators. They are counter to restoring nature.
They became useful as pollinators in by monoculture destroyed habitats. And have been normalised to the point where we assume they are native, helpful and wholesome. Which is fucked up. But all of animal agriculture is fucked up.
There aren’t enough honeybees in the world to produce all the honey in the stores. So most of the time when people think they are consuming honey, they are more often than not eating rice syrup or other syrups. There is no way of controlingbthis since there is no fucking difference.
It’s just sugar. No magic. Just bad.
