(Soy)milkshake Moments wrote:

They're very good points, xiola and Mugwump23. I can see that the definition I quoted from the UK Vegan Society website is not very relevant to this discussion, because they certainly are not trying to make a definitive list of products which vegans do not eat on that page.

However, the argument based on the definition of the word 'vegan' seems totally insignificant to me, because of the fact that the meaning of words change depending on how they are used and mean different things to the original definition.

I'm still not quite convinced about the argument against vegans consuming honey though. Presumably if vegans refuse to eat honey and other products produced by bees, we doing this so that we are not supporting the bee product industry in order to reduce cruelty and/or exploitation of bees, which we consider animals. So you are implying that it would be ideal if no one ate honey and people did not keep bees at all?

Here is another point to consider... I recently saw this quote in a vegetable, herb and flower seed catalogue: "Almost a third of human food depends directly or indirectly on the pollination services of bees." This lead me to question the ideal of completely eliminating the bee industry, so I did a bit more research on the internet to see how valid this quote really is. I've read various websites and articles which have reinforced this statement, so I think it's quite likely to be accurate. A lot of plant agriculture depends very heavily on honey bees as pollinators, so it would just not be practical or desirable to eliminate beekeeping altogether. But on the other hand, using European honeybees rather than native pollinators for agriculture in places like the US and Australia can also have detrimental effects on the native ecosystems. It is obviously a pretty complex issue, but I think we can conclude that at least for now, it would not be a good idea to eliminate (or try to eliminate by boycotting consumption of bee products) the bee industry.

So then should vegans not consume honey because it is an animal product, but still show support the bee industry for the sake of food production? What do you think?

[edit] Oops! Just correcting a grammatical error!

"Pollination
In many countries bees' services are bought for pollination purposes resulting in the bees (and their hives) being transported hundreds or thousands of miles. The food industry is now looking to artificially managed honeybees to provide to pollinate crops because wild bees and other insects (who would naturally pollinate crops) have been and are being destroyed by housing development, industrial pollution, pesticide poisoning, intensive farming practices, destruction of hedgerows, etc. The use of honeybees for pollination is now big business especially in places like New Zealand and America. However, even in the UK commercial beekeepers move hives (to find sources of nectar for honey production, and for pollination). Pollination fees are a very important component of the commercial beekeepers income. Commercially reared bumblebee colonies are now also extensively used to pollinate some glasshouse crops, particularly tomatoes."

http://www.vegansociety.com/html/animal … n/bees.php

I guess we start getting into the whole environment/bee keeping debate and whether farmed bees are more or less "free" than "wild" bees. Also, the above implies that tomatoes should also be considered as ethically dodgy too! The issue about language and situational ethics also throws up some interesting debates too. If we're all post modernists now and language structures our experience of social reality, then an argument could be made that it's more not less important to define the meaning of a word in its historical and social context, as otherwise the word gets colonised and hijacked by other interest groups with differing agendas. Does the position "vegan" become a brand or is  it a valid ethical and political category in and of itself? Then the question becomes who "privileges" one definition over the other and that is where it all gets very erm.... mind melting!

The simple answer I guess is that we do the best we can. Whoever "we" are and whatever "the best" is.

happyok wrote:

bothering wrote:

and boy is agave ever tasty.

exciting. i just bought some last night.

so you just use it as you would honey?
what else?

Yes, just like honey. I use it in baking sometimes if I can afford it. I like to mix it with brown rice syrup in honey cake type recipes. I also like it with peanut butter and bananas.

Skeksi wrote:

One of my favorite sammiches that I eat every day is peanut butter/banana/and agave nectar.

Add some brown rice syrup to that shiitake!

Cool! You have to try it! And you owe me one!

I dodged the "Can I eat honey?" question because I've always thought it's gross.  Even in trace amounts, the taste is infectious and really, really unappealing to me.  So I don't.

I don't think one can (in good faith) call themselves vegan and eat honey.  I think the word for an otherwise vegan person who eats honey is apian?  Not sure... anyway, again, for me, the reason the word exists is to make our lives easier... if I go out to a restaurant and a waiter thinks X is ok for a vegan because "they know a vegan who ate it" it effects me.  It's easier to say "I'm vegan" than "I abstain from meat, dairy, eggs, honey, wool, leather, silk, fur and all other animal products in any amount." 

So really, I don't care if a vegan eats honey - just don't tell people that it's ok to eat honey if you're a vegan! 

Potatoes also do not produce starch for the purpose of human consumption; I don't see why this argument is relevant. What is special about animals that makes the things they produce off limits? I don't think it's their animaliness.

The problem I have with comparing a bee to a chicken is that while I agree that both are animals, I do not believe that they are animals of the same kind; I'm pretty sure chickens have things like feelings and desires and subjective experience, and I'm pretty sure that bees don't (there are some good evidentiary arguments to back this up). I cannot prove this, of course, but I also cannot prove a lot of things that I don't believe to be true; I live my life as though there aren't invisible pink unicorns on the dark side of the moon, even though I can't prove there aren't. Even though I desperately wish there were.

All that being said, I put a some effort into avoiding honey, as a sort of precautionary principle. But the effort is really pretty minimal. I don't want to be called an apian vegan, since that would seem to imply that I eat bees, and I only very rarely do that. But I'd be ok with melli-vegan as a term of art. Then again, nobody really objects strenuously (not anymore, anyway) when ovo-lacto-vegetarians are refered to simply as vegetarians.

But if it's really necessary to qualify my veganism, I'd prefer to be known as an ethical vegan, since this makes it clear that I don't avoid animal products for their own sake, but because it's instrumental in reducing animal suffering.

mumbles the thrax wrote:

Potatoes also do not produce starch for the purpose of human consumption; I don't see why this argument is relevant. What is special about animals that makes the things they produce off limits? I don't think it's their animaliness.

The fact that they have thoughts and feelings.

Plus, from a purely practical side, you have to eat something (and I KNOW someone will try and be devil's advocate by saying 'well then, why not make it meat/eggs/honey?' but to be honest... fork them. I'm tired)>

suzukibeane wrote:

What would it be like to live your life as thought there ARE invisible pink unicorns on the dark side of the moon?  I suppose it might be something fun I'd think about now and then, but I can't imagine I'd live my life much differently.

Well, I suppose it would mitigate against building lunar colonies in the invisible pink unicorn habitat.

For a more practical example, Irish farmers have traditionally avoided cultivating land around fairy mounds, because they didn't want to disturb the fairies. This has had at least a couple of effects: that land has gone unused for agriculture, and the fairy mounds often turn out to be archaelogical sites and have been inadvertently preserved. Beliefs about the unprovable do have consequences in how we conduct our lives, so they do seem to be important in that way, at least. And some of those beliefs, like "My god wants me to kill you!" or "Animals can't feel anything!" are downright harmful.

Vez wrote:

The fact that they have thoughts and feelings.

Right, but this isn't a fact, it's an assertion. In some cases, convincingly arguing that animals have thought and feelings and so on is easy. Humans, certainly. All other mammals. Birds. Fish, probably.

But when you get down to the animals that only have a few thousand neurons to rub together, no frontal lobes, limited capacity to react to noxious stimulus in a way that indicates that they have any sense of self, etc., this argument gets weaker. And when you get to the animals with no nervous system at all, you have an obvious case where there doesn't seem to be any reason to treat them as though they have feelings and thoughts.

So, as with any interesting continuum phenomenon, the definitions are fuzzy and it becomes a matter of where we draw the line. For me, that line exists somewhere around insects. I try not to fork with them, but if there are roaches in my apartment I don't get humane roach traps and release them into the wild. I kill them, for what is really a minor personal preference. So I don't know how I can consistently argue that bees are off limits.

Plus, from a purely practical side, you have to eat something (and I KNOW someone will try and be devil's advocate by saying 'well then, why not make it meat/eggs/honey?' but to be honest... fork them. I'm tired)>

Sure. But if someone were to think plants have feelings, this would dictate that plants can only be harmed when necessary: no picking flowers, no cutting grass, no cutting or "shaping" trees, and failing to water them would be a terrible moral crime.

But it's not like it's all that difficult to avoid honey, so if it matters to you, go for it. I just think the case against honey is weak enough that there's room for disagreement here, which is why I find edicts like, "You can't call yourself vegan if you eat honey!" galling.

This isn't terribly on-topic, but...

Yesterday, whilst riding upon my eversoearthfriendly bicycle, not one, not two, but THREE large insects ran DIRECTLY into my head.

So bikes are bug-killers too. Or maybe my head just looks like a resort vacation to bumblebees.

number3legs wrote:

This isn't terribly on-topic, but...

Yesterday, whilst riding upon my eversoearthfriendly bicycle, not one, not two, but THREE large insects ran DIRECTLY into my head.

So bikes are bug-killers too. Or maybe my head just looks like a resort vacation to bumblebees.

maybe they were suicidal.