I’m not a vegan, but the current state of beekeeping is pretty shit. Taking the honey and replacing it with sugar water on top of the stresses of monoculture and killing varied flora with herbicides creating food deserts and using market conditions to race to the bottom on pollination contracts just results in a whole bunch of dead hives. Like you can both support sustainably practiced beekeeping and find the production of industrial honey to be a horror show.
Regardless of whether you are vegan, vegetarian, carnivore, or other, if you aren’t horrified by industrial food production, you should be. This goes for industrial fish trawling & fish farming, industrial chicken cow and pig processing, honey I guess, even factory plant growing e.g. alfalfa almonds and corn (ruins the land and wastes water)
It’s so pervasive it’s hard to avoid everything.
This is the correct response. Small-scale hobbyist beekeeping is awesome for humans, bees, and nature, and we absolutely positively need it. Industrial beekeeping, in which bees are carted across the continent to pollinate the fields of the highest paying industrial farmer may still be tolerable to the bee but far less so for nature. Many people don’t appreciate the nuance. Apis mellifera almost certainly won’t go extinct as long as beekeepers are around. But that’s not what we talk about when we say the bees are dying…
Apis mellifera isn’t native to the Americas and neither are a lot of the plants they pollinate. They crowd out the native bees and destroy their habitat. Small-scale beekeepers working in populated spaces aren’t the problem though. And they rescue swarms that would otherwise be exterminated. Plus they’re more likely than the average person to know about their local natives and support them, by making carpenter bee homes or whatever.
Industrial honey is just another facet of my distain and complaint of industrial agriculture as a whole. Almost every vegan argument I’ve ever encountered has been in reaction to the horrors of the industrial process
This is what will lead me to the full change in diet. I’m at the mitigation and small changes phase. I really don’t have ethics issues with animals as food (farming & hunting meat isn’t bad when suffering is inherent to existence, and to deny this is to deny given order), but we exist in a capitalist hellscape that has zero shame or remorse for exploiting making perverse anything once natural for profit.
farming & hunting meat isn’t bad when suffering is inherent to existence, and to deny this is to deny given order
But it isn’t necessary (at least in most cases), and we have the intelligence to make better decisions simply because they are better.
Unless I misunderstood your comment, “when suffering is inherent to existence” could be used for things like burglaries as well.
Hard agree. I’m no vegan as a fully understand that a) humans are omnivorous mammals who thrive on a mixed diet and b) eons of selective breeding has created creatures that are designed for food and goods and wouldn’t survive in the wild in their current state without either much suffering or outright death of the species. The monocultures created for large industrialized farms are a blight for the environment as well.
I champion local small scale farms with permaculture and local plants as much as possible while reducing meat consumption in general (at least here, meat is usually at every meal so reducing it to one a day if not every few days would be a huge shift). I also recognize not everyone wants nor cares about going vegetarian or vegan but would accept the reductions in meat use and focusing on buying local if it was made more readily available
I wouldn’t say “need”. European honey bees are a foreign invasive species. They displace the native pollinators. IMO hobbyists are worse because they are damaging the native bees without reason unlike industrial farmers that need the bees to produce the food we all eat.
And the reality is the vast majority of hobbiest bee keepers do it as a tax dodge. In most states, if you put a hive on your yard, you get to classify your house as a farm and pay virtually no property taxes.
European honey bees are a foreign invasive species
But… I am European?
Europeans used to be pretty invasive, too!
Sadly they still are in some areas of the world.
Particularly the middle east.
The whole debacle can be easily avoided by just eating the bees directly.
Pssshhhh!!! Maybe you set your sights that low. You can eat your bee’s, I’ll only be eating A’s!
The whole debacle can be easily avoided by just eating the
beesflowers directly.
i got banned from a vegan comm for saying that bees tend to leave hives if they’re not satisfied with the conditions, a fact that’s just verifiably true.
Those extremists would be very upset if they could recognize reality
Reality is a social construct defined by the dominant ethnic group and manipulated by the Epstein class to control us.
…I miss the days when radical statements sounded far off and crazy. Now they just sound like statements of undeniable truth.
I agree with you on the fact, but willingness to stay does not equal informed consent.
Informed consent does not exist in the animal world and I’m very saddened that that’s a sentence I had to type.
You cannot apply human standards to animals, they do not understand contract law…again, a sentence I’m just very sad I had to type because they didn’t understand that.
I’ve tried to have this discussion SO many times, and every time I’m treated like there’s nothing I love more than raping goats and torturing pigs.
That cow that lives on the hobby farm, spends its days roaming fields and eating flowers, then gets milked in the evening and petted with genuine love and affection, is not worse off because the farmer didn’t create a formal contract in order to obtain it’s consent to be milked.
It gave its consent by walking to the milking station, and waiting to be milked.
“Nuh uh! That’s not consent! It didn’t learn English and say the words ‘I consent to being milked,’ therefore milking it is evil!”
You just gotta stop giving a damn what dipshits think.
Post your initial message so that some passerby might glean some insight and then move on.
The opinions of people whom I will never ever see nor interact with ever again means less than nothing. They can think I’m the biggest fucking idiot in the world, doesn’t matter to me, I’ll sleep just fine.
People who would be angered by this aren’t reachable, ya just gotta block em.
I have to imagine that those people are virgins, because no one is signing a 17-page contract prior to getting it on.
Consent is allowed to be simple as long as it’s obvious and real. I shouldn’t need a law degree to suck a dick.
Exactly, feed them sugar and they’ll happily stay, that’s not saying it’s good for them. Plus all the monoculture on which they often feed is detrimental to their survival as a species. It’s funny to me how in this capitalist world, there is a living being that is somehow not immorally exploited.
Exactly, feed them sugar and they’ll happily stay
Guess I’m a bee.
Good news: we’ve found ways to satisfy them with the conditions while also killing the hives.
that makes sense.
completely fair, and a response that would hawe been greatly appreciated at the time.
The fun part is that this doesn’t even tell me which side of the honey debate you’re on.
I did assume vegans would be majority against honey consumption.
Not a vegan but I am surprised to learn there is a debate amongst vegans about honey.
I’ve known people who called themselves vegan and still ate fish, there are basically no rules
I’m not at all, vegan as a personal trait is a bit of a broad church these days.
There’s the people that are mostly motivated by the not-killing-animals thing
Then there’s the ones doing it predominantly for environmental reasons
Then you’ve got the ones doing it for various health reasons
Then you’ve got people doing it predominantly for cost reasons (fewer here, given vegan is still treated as a luxury aspect in a lot of food categories)
Those groups do not have to overlap in views at all. It’s entirely expected for there to be disagreement and purity test drama given that IMO
Yeah, I’m not in any vegan groups but I’ve seen (what is hopefully) a vocal online minority of those who use the label for killing-is-wrong reasons come off as angrier at folks using it for any other reason than they are at folks who do consume animal products, and insisting that the other camps should use “plant-based (diet)” instead.
yeah the fda classifies it as a meat product.
That’s just a myth spread around the internet.
Their actual definition is:
Reference materials in the public domain define honey as “a thick, sweet, syrupy substance that bees make as food from the nectar of plants or secretions of living parts of plants and store in honeycombs.” FDA has concluded that this definition accurately reflects the common usage of the term “honey
a definition is not a classification though. how do they categorise it?
As “Honey, jams, jellies, fruit butter, molasses”
ah, neat!
The right side
The real debate is with figs.
And don’t get me started on mushrooms
I’m really interested now
Mushroom aren’t classified as either plants nor animals, with some arguing they’re much closer to animals. I’m not a vegan or vegetarian myself, but that’d be an interesting point to consider.
Huh, I’ve not heard any vegan talk about that. In fact mushrooms are a staple in many of the vegan foods I’m aware of
Not some. They are taxonomically more related to animals than plants. Just a fact.
We’re also technically eating their peepees.
I avoid honey because european honey bees are an invasive species, devastating populations of native bees and threatening their existence, endangering plants who have specific pollinator relationships, where that pollinator is now threatened. They are helping facilitate ecological collapse. We are not the same.
It feels like there’s a whole debate about honey I’m unaware of, but isn’t the point of veganism avoiding anything made by animals? If yes, why is honey an exception?
Most of are agreed that the point of veganism is to reduce nonhuman suffering. Following absolute rules for no reason is silly. The point is the ethics.
But the other vegans have the wrong opinion about whether eating honey causes suffering.
Ahh thanks. But wouldn’t that make you a vegetarian?
(Not trying to be confrontational or disagreeing with your point, asking out of genuine curiosity)
No. If someone ate no animal products besides honey that doesn’t make them not vegan, it means they don’t share the opinion that honey causes animal exploitation. I do not wish to register an opinion there, I’m just saying what the rationale is.
I’m actually not a vegetarian. I’m a kangatarian.
Kangaroos have evolved over the past 60,000 years to breed in such numbers that their population can sustain hunting by humans. They have no other natural predators, unless you count parasites. Dingos in some places, but not many. The result is that if humans don’t hunt kangaroos, they over-breed. Destroy the local habitat, threatening endangered species, then starve. Some kangaroos must die at human hands for the good of everything else, including the other kangaroos.
So the government uses drone surveys to analyse the population, and then tells people how many kangaroos need to die. Each kangaroo in the quota can either be hunted, or culled. Culled kangaroos will be shot, and their bodies will rot in a ditch. Their meat will benefit nobody. If they’re hunted, then at least some good comes of it. If a kangaroo survives the initial shot, hunters will stun and then kill it. I’m unsure whether the same regulations apply to cullers.
So, I eat kangaroo meat. All kangaroo meat is hunted, there’s not a single kangaroo farm in the world. At least, not the western idea of a farm. Every kangaroo I eat lived a free life in nature, and then died for the good of the ecosystem. No animal slavery.
And I propose a bigger question than honey: is kangaroo meat vegan?
No. An animal died for it, it isn’t vegan. Simple as.
I chose a whole food plant based diet for health reasons, and honey just isn’t good for my body.
I chose to plant pollinator friendly plants in my yard because I think bees are cool and I love watching them do their thing.
