Honey

I rarely judge someone for ignorance unless it is wilful. I pretty harshly judge people who cannot assimilate new information. Over time I think I might be evolving from INTP->INTJ as I age. I used to have more patience and would try to encourage people to learn and adjust.

Or they don't care because they're using it in a colloquial sense and 90+% of people they talk to would understand their intended usage, so they resent being lectured on semantics rather than responding to the meaning behind their words.

I've deleted so many half written comments thinking "If this is what they think, do I really want to deal with the absolute garbage response I'll inevitably get back?"

I'm referring to arguments I've had in person against native English speakers. If they were online arguments, the ability to use mobile data to show someone a citation wouldn't be a new development.

I think "exploitation" is the wrong word to be used. I'm not vegan, so I really have no bearing on this, but exploitation doesn't equal harm.

This post for example is about bees. They're being exploited (in that we're using them to get resources), but is it harmful? I have trouble saying yes. It seems somewhat ideal for them. They get to go about their lives like normal, though usually in a place with a lot of flowering plants, and they get taken care of. Occasionally honey is gathered from them, but this doesn't actually harm any bees.

I think vegans follow dogma too much. They should consider their reasons for themselves, and consider what food sources fall into that. The dogma is useful for quick communication and sharing of information, but I would suspect honey farming is a lot better for the living things involved than even a lot of plant farming, which requires large swathes of land to be dedicated to farming, which certainly isn't good for native species and arguably plants can feel too.

This is probably a hot take but I have the opinion that nature isn't any more merciful than we are. Existence is suffering and every animal ends up as feed for another.

Is it better to be raised in horrid conditions in a farm, or to spend every moment of your life scavenging for food, running for your life, while probably infested with parasites just to be torn to pieces, alive, by a wolf or other predator?

Humans at least have the decency to sedate or knock unconscious our food. Wild animals have to experience being eaten alive.

Yeah exactly, people arguing whether dragon fruit or some shit is a "super food". The super food is right in front of us, potatoes (and onions).

What other food has been so vital to our survival that its disappearance could ravage a population (Irish potato famine)

No offense to dragon fruit, blue berries or whatever exotic fruit, but if they went extinct, not that much could change.

Potatoes OP must nerf

I'd say the issue is that if honey isn't vegan because you're causing harm to bees, isn't most of modern vegetable agriculture at least equally harmful to bees & other insects due to all the pesticides being used?

Or is it just if we directly involve bees, it's bad, but if we inflict greater harm in a less direct way, it's acceptable?

I mean bees are producing way more than they are using. We just shouldn't take it all.

don't eat anything that casts a shadow

Anyone who doesn't exclusively survive on naturally dried up lichen ain't no real vegan in my book!

Personally I’m not sure the gate keeping you’re observing is all that much of an issue. I think it’s useful to remember many vegans are also public advocates for veganism. It’s important to them that people generally know what they mean when they advocate for veganism.

However, the definition of all words are always in flux. It’s not uncommon to see people call themselves vegan when a more apt description of their lifestyle would be plant based, flexitarian, vegetarian, etc. As such, I think edge cases like your friend take on an outsized importance that goes beyond the morality of your friend eating honey.

Basically, the goal may not be the social exclusion of your friend which is what I think is usually the problematic aspect of gatekeeping.

Beekeeping family here: who the fuck clips bee wings?

also - does this distinction matter? Is someone who runs 100m dash vs an ultra marathon runner both runners? When I run for the bus I'm also running. Sonic the Hedgehog also runs. They have distinctions in context that make sense - but they are all running.

not even all vegans who don't use honey agree on whether or not a vegan can use honey

Exactly this, veganism is ethical choice, and ethics is not science. You can't 'prove' that something is acceptable, nor vice versa. There are guidelines and discussions but that's pretty much it.

So this is really not about whether bees are animals or not.

If my bank accepted vomit as mortgage payments, they could smack my ass and call me bulimic, I don't care what y'all do with my vomit, let's talk about pool house options and a second car.

I'd be cool with creaming their coffee twice a week if it meant I got my house for no money.

Idk....how much vomit?

I don't think many would accept their gardens being pilfered either, though they might be more accepting if that's how they paid rent.

Not just vomit but a snowball train of vomit.

What if the hives are rent controlled?

Here in Brazil we have Meliponiculture, farming honey from native stingless bees.

Do you think there are no vegans in Europe?

Yeah, some vegans draw the line at the animal kingdom. (Plants, algae, mushrooms - these are all living things as well, but one has to eat something.) Some vegans I know do eat honey though. It depends on what feels like animal exploitation to the person.

Bees are a symbol of labour. You couldn't make them work harder if you tried. European honey bees collect far more nectar than they will ever eat, it's like they're planning for fimbulwinter

So what exactly is the problem with using honey?

Can't eat bread or drink alcohol, because that'd be making yeast our slaves!

honey bees are bad for pollinators

Hm? What do you mean?

From this paper:

A. mellifera appears to be the most important, single species of pollinator across the natural systems studied, owing to its wide distribution, generalist foraging behaviour and competence as a pollinator.

This is a genuine question btw.

even though the sheep is harmed in the process

This is such a funny typo

so they're vegan

I've always wondered if vegetables from a farm that uses horse-drawn tills instead of tractors would be vegan... It's a real question, but everyone I ask thinks that I'm trolling.

I mean I think it can be boiled down pretty simply: cause the least harm to living things that you can personally manage, according to your definition of harm. Having impossible goals isn't necessarily a bad thing. If your impossible goal is to make a billion dollars ethically, and you get to 50 million being 95% ethical, you could still consider that a win, even though you didn't reach your impossible goal.

Even the simple goal of "always being a good person 100% of the time" is probably impossible to achieve over an entire lifetime while meeting every person's definition of it. That doesn't mean it's useless for someone to strive for that within their definition of "good person".

In fact I'd say the vast majority of meaningful, non trivial goals could be considered "impossible".

ethical vegans (and not people who eat plant-based for nutritional reasons, and often get conflated with people doing it for ethics reasons) generally agree on one very simple rule:

To reduce, as much as possible, the suffering inflicted upon animals.

That's it.

Where that line is drawn of course depends on your personal circumstances. Some people require life-saving medicine that includes animal products, and are generally still considered vegan.

I'd like to see what about this confuses you and your epistomology [sic, and that word doesn't mean what you think it means]

It's easy to judge down from that high horse of i-dont-care.

I'm no vegan (nor vegetarian), but the mission of an animal-rights-activist (that is also logically vegan in consequence) is surely to minimize any harm (s)he knows of. It's very simple. The limits of a dietary or fashin-trendy vegan is not so clear. As they usually don't really have spent a lot of time reflecting about it, but just follow some basic idea they've found somewhere. And maybe try to "adapt" it a lil.

Also your plant-argument was had like 30yrs ago already. Makes you sound super-intelligent, having figured out their major flaw all on your own :-)

The goal is not impossible. The goal is (or probably just should be) to minimize suffering if its existence is not unbeknownst to us. That's really a very basic logic that doesn't require much computing power.

What a word salad. Your comment can be applied to anything because people are different lol. All my friends who are dads have different ideas on how to be a dad. Fascinating. It helps to understand the goal of a parent. All my friends with jobs define success in different ways. It’s like they’re all making it up as they go along. Fascinating. It helps to understand the goals of a worker.

It’s ok to set “impossible” goals if you view them as directions rather than destinations.

Fascinating huh?

Reacting to stimuli like the colour of light is irrelevant. My phone camera would fall into the same category, then. A light switch reacts to getting pressed and turns on a light, it's reacting to a stimulus.

What matters is sentience, which plants cannot possess, since they don't have a central nervous system. And even if they did, a diet that includes meat takes more plants, since those animals have to be fed plants in order to raise them.

They all make it up as they go along. It's very similar to religious beliefs in the way it is personal. Each has their own set beliefs on where to draw the line of what is vegan and what is not

The extent to which we are tied to every living thing on Earth means that many vegans have set impossible goals.

Regarding these two, is this any different from human rights? Where people draw the line regarding slave labour, child labour, which type of humans they care about (considering racism, homophobia, trans phobia, ableism etc). I'm sure lots of people have impossible goals regarding human rights, but working to get as close to those as possible is still sensible.

I feel so kindred with the way you see things. You're making an observation and you're curious about the "why" of everything. I feel people often read my similar interest in a subculture as critical. Kind of like how bluntness can be perceived as rude, I guess. Do you ever have a similar response happen to you?

Veganism has and always will be just dogma. I find it quite annoying how individuals can so freely push their moral philosophy onto others. Veganism should always be a personal philosophy.

Also, there are now many vegans (considered bottom-up vegans) taking the communist route and basically advocating for revolutions in order to cease animal food production.

Chickens. Google what happens to male egg-laying chickens and you probably can figure out why it's not vegan.

Usually things aren't vegan due to the horrors of factory farming practices, even before any potential death occurs.

As for the exploitation, all living things have their own lives. Even plants seem to be able to communicate to some degree and can be stressed and stuff. Either you're OK exploiting living things to some degree or you die. The level of exploitation is what should be discussed. Is beekeeping harmful to bees? I don't know, but it doesn't seem like it.

As for it being sugar, sure. Sugar isn't bad though. Sugar is bad when consumed in the quantities the average American consumes it. It also has other properties that make it pretty good for your health. For example, I think it's good for preventing allergies because it contains pollen (I might be making this up, but it seems like I've read that somewhere).

Plus, it's just weird to want to eat the vomit of other species anyway.

Do you realize that fruit is the ovary of a plant? Life is weird. Get over it. Weird is not a word that should come into a discussion of ethics.

Don't we help bee populations by building homes for them?

Also, and I did wonder about this, what do homestock want out of life more than food, getting laid, and taking a walk or run? I think even the smarter ones like octopuses just want to get food and live until making kids.

Honey, the food of the gods by ancient opinion, is suddenly weird?

I will never like vegans.

Like all ideologies idiots stick to the rules while forgetting the actual meaning behind them. Compare how Christians act to what their Christ taught.

Sorry, is this post satire or are you talking about satire you did not recognize? NEVER seen a vegan call breast milk non-vegan and have in fact actually seen more discussion about whether vegans should be breastfeeding children at all, I.e. is it healthy to do so with their diet.

You've put the word debate in quotation marks flippantly like there's an obvious answer, but I'm pretty sure you just misunderstood a conversation rife with sarcasm or taken out of context (or straight up made it up).

True. Though marketing is a cancer in itself. But I guess that's a different discussion 😬

No he's implying that eating something just because it is "Vegan" is not understanding the point. Vegans usually don't eat stuff because it's bad for the environment or because they see animals as equal lifeforms and don't want to cause them harm. If you don't eat most animal products because of the environment then you might be ok with eating oysters on occasion. They have a similar co2 footprint as most vegetables. Similarly honey has an even smaller footprint.

My point is that there is no real way to explain what "vegan" really is, since it means different things to different people and all of these people have the best intentions. And actually there is no real need to define "vegan" either. Instead of focussing on what to call "vegan" and what not, the discussion should be about bees.

For instance, do they care if you take their honey? Are they harmed? And should I care about whether they are harmed?

Man, I have religious people in my family that say "you can't eat meat on Fridays" during lent. But then fish is 100% okay to them. Makes no sense to me.

Ever since a chicken killed my pet hamster, my name has been vengeance and Popeyes has been my hunting grounds.

You’ve summed up my position as a pescatarian quite well

I dunno but sea's got cucumbers. 🤔

I thought you were kidding but no, they do and the reason is otherwise they wouldn't fit under environmental protection laws.

Also, beavers are fish. Clearly.

But renouncing honey is very easy, while not eating plants would mean starving to death. Since veganism is about reducing harm as far as possible, unavoidable suffering doesn't make anything non vegan.

Bees can kill their queen and make a new one no problem.

This doesn't make the mutilation of the queen bee any less bad. It's still harming the bee. I am not aware if a bee has the ability to make an informed decision on whether to kill the queen and relocate, so I cannot make an informed decision about whether the bees actually want to be in their current hive.

If the colony would want to move away they would just do that.

I don't know if this is true. It's possible the bees are being manipulated into staying at their current hive in some way.

I don't think clipping the queen wings would do nothing

It would hurt the queen, which is more than I want to be involved in.

But I doubt any beekeeper colony would want to move as they are keep at a perfect environment so they can produce more honey that they would actually need to survive. Even industrial ones. It's part of basic beekeeping that bees must be in a good place so they produce the most honey

Making an assumption about what the bees want is not strong enough of an excuse for me to be ok with their exploitation. I don't believe we should have the right to make decisions for other organisms, and the bees are not able to tell us how they want to be treated, so we should not try to control them or take what they produce.

Hurt of mistreated bees would not produce honey.

This appears to also be an assumption. I do not know if it is true, so I cannot use it to make a decision

If they are mistreated the try to leave (and as stated they can just kill their Queen if she is crippled), they eat all the honey, or just die.

If this is true, there is likely to be a minimum amount of mistreatment before they take action. I do not know how much mistreatment a bee can take, so I cannot use this to make a decision.

Bees are really complicate to get advantage of. Our relationship with them need to be symbiotic to work.

I do not know if this is true. We take advantage of many animals without giving them much in return, so I am not sure if the bee-beeker relationship is actually symbiotic.

You are correct. There is more that i can and need to do. That still does not make it good to use honey.

We have no way of knowing don’t is best to be on the safe side. Veganism isn’t about awareness it’s about respect.

I dont care. In my opinion, the best way to live is to do as little harm as possible, and it appears that bees are harmed by the human collection of honey, so I will not use honey.

More than that sort of people that make these posts, no bee has ever said anything that has convinced me they have zero understanding of philosophy of consciousness.

of its* existence

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17755968/

"and other bodily fluids"

One good argument for this: A vegan diet not only minimizes animal deaths but plant deaths as well, since livestock obviously has to be fed on many, many individual plants before they can get slaughtered. So even if we for some reason prioritized saving the lives of plants going vegan would still be the way to go.

It is really tricky to genuinely discuss this topic. Many omnivores use this as a straw man argument to discredit vegans for not being fully consequential. On top of that, reasons for being vegan and where people draw the line also vary hugely.

Anyways, I would argue that eating plants and also fungi is very different to eating animal products. First of all, if you are vegan for ethical reasons (as I am) then usually the argument is that one can infer from one's own feelings onto other animals. Sure, this isn't always that easy and we will never know how other animals really feel. This includes fellow humans btw. But it is certainly very definitive that many animals feel pain, discomfort and many other emotions not unlike we feel them.

Plants and fungi on the other hand have completely different body plans. Plants are modular organisms and you simply cannot relate cutting your arm off with cutting a branch. We may deepen our understanding on plants and maybe we will find some form of conscience one day. But this is still far off and for now we can only speculate. Fungi are very different as well and we usually just eat their fruiting bodies anyways.

Secondly, as someone else pointed out, for ecological reasons and for the sheer quantity that is necessary to sustain humans, going vegan is always the better choice. Animals live on plants, too, and just use a lot of the plants' energy on their own metabolism.

There are varieties of Jainism that won't pluck fruits (will only eat what has naturally fallen) and many mainstream varieties of Jainism that won't eat any root vegetables (because digging them up would harm insects), or seeded vegetables (eating it harms the plants ability to reproduce).

Can human meat be vegan?

Beekeeping is exploitation, but don't the bees benefit from it too vs. being in the wild?

I think it’s more accurate to think of you trapping humans in your basement and leaving them a bag of groceries every once in a while. Then you go down there and take whatever they cooked with the produce. They get to eat what they make, you just get the leftovers. They also can’t leave.

What level of involvement in producing the food makes it vegan or not vegan?

It's about A) exploitation and B) harming the animal.

Pollination is done by all kinds of insects, but they are part of our ecosystem and happen to be pollinating the plants that we eat. We don't breed them, we don't kill them (pesticides, sure), we simply coexist.

Honey isn't vegan because we breed the bees, take their food and often kill the entire hive because they get sick and cannot survive winter without their honey. It's also not sustainable, because honey bees are being bred en masse and are pushing out native pollinators that are highly specialized in certain kinds of plants, causing them to go extinct.