or eggs or other insect parts
My understanding is most do but it’s the subject of occasional controversy.
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.
Fuck mosquitos. I kill them with a passion. I would estimate I have been bitten a few million times. They’re numbing protein doesn’t work on me and I’m allergic to it. Nothing like feeling your body is on fire.
Yes.
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.
and local honey helps with allergies so I ate it.
I don’t think this can be true, to be honest
Yeah, wasn’t too sure about this one. But allergies have been getting worse every year and there is no harm in trying it. Also, it does make sense on a superficial level, bees pollinate and make honey. So eating honey builds up your immunity to the pollen bees carry?
I am not a bee guy, just a guy that doesn’t like allergies.
I totally see how the conjecture can feel intuitive, yeah. That’s probably why it’s spread.
I feel you on the allergies, I suffer from them too.
According to Wikipedia, honey does have anti-bacterial properties but can also cause allegic reactions depending on the immune system.
I’m thinking it could loosely help with inflammatory responses, maybe? But that may be a stretch and it’s definitely a case by case basis regardless.
I think the conjecture is that it’s supposed to contain local pollens, and hence be somewhat similar to hyposensitization, where you subject the body to the allergen in controlled doses to successively lessen the allergy response.
Honeybees don’t drink from the kinds of plants that people are typically allergic to, however - they drink from flowering plants, while the common allergies are from wind-borne pollens (trees and grasses).
Even then, the dosage is not right for provoking a hyposensitization response.
See https://www.aaaai.org/tools-for-the-public/conditions-library/allergies/honey
I am vegan, because I want to minimize animal suffering. if insects have the ability to suffer is highly debated. honestly I think they could just be different enough for us to not recognize their intelligence, like we do/did with fish. I will eat honey when offered, but would not buy my own. tldr: I wouldnt reject it. but I would also not but it myself.
I’m not vegan or even vegetarian, but I respect this. I’m doing the same thing with meat now. I don’t reject it (and really enjoy it), but I don’t buy it myself so everything we make at home is vegetarian! I’m working on it.
and thats all everyone should do. working on it and keeping it in mind. I think we (also me until some years ago) consume mindlessly.
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 believe insects can suffer too so yes
walking or driving must be paralyzing for you.
“honey, I’m home!”
shocked gasp “I want a divorce!”
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’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.
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.
I would be more interested in knowing if commercial honeybee pollination is vegan ok or not, and the same with buying boxes of bumble bees to pollinate inside greenhouses.
I suppose they should probably avoid products that use shellac as well.
- hard candy
- chocolate
- gum
- ice cream
- popcorn
- pretzels
- cookies
- cakes
- pies
- vitamins and supplements
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.
But they kill elephants for ivory!
I never herd of frugivore. My guess is you have vegetarian so its using the same thing.
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.
I am now 5 years cancer free and with all my bits, thanks in large part to immunotherapy. This involved infusing live bacteria into rude locations. So, my survival and quality of life were predicated on killing millions of bacteria. What do vegans think of that?
I’m sure all but the most “radical” vegans would do the same in your situation. Btw, congrats! And damn, isn’t medicine cool AF?
