No matter how hard you try, in this industrialized world, some animal has been harmed by your activities. So, is true veganism even possible, in a practical rather than philosophical sense?
Ah, the spirited and rational debate of intelligent human beings
When the bees can engage in the debate, I’ll hear them out.
What’s the buzz about, I say.
Bzzzzzzz, they say back, then they dance.
Common sense goes a long way. Radicalism is always stupid.
Just eat meat once a week or month. Eat whatever in moderation.
Moderation is key.
A moderate genocide will do, local centrist claims
You’re doing a moderate genocide every time you change your diet or even the ph of your mouth. Those bacteria didn’t consent to die
Was that an argument?
Radicalism is always stupid. Moderation is key.
How often do you eat babies?
Personally, I’m radically against eating babies.
I only eat them as eggs.
I have got 3 maybe-babies lying in my fridge rn.
Everything in moderation, including moderation. You’ve got to choose what you’re radical about, lest it choose you.
So in your opinion they were doing a ridiculous roundabout way to assert “Use your best moral judgement?”
My money’s on them never replying to agree or disagree with your guess at their intent.
Getting all meat eaters to cut intake by 50% is easier than getting 50% of meat eaters to turn vegan.
Arguably carnivores have already cut meat intake, at least red meat, to greater impact than vegetarians.
While I’m going by anecdote rather than data
- vegetarians/vegans are a small minority so limited impact
- many people I know have cut back on at least red meat for health or environmental reasons.
Basically one fewer burger a week by 100 people has more impact than one person not eating meat at all
Thats not how world markets work though. 20% of meat eaters turning vegan would compound vegan movement more than 50% less meat consumed. The former grows vegan market explicitly while the latter just maybe shrinks the meat market only. You have consider availability, research and development, service, pop culture and the fact that we massive overconsume food so less consumption does not directly shrink the market in linear fashion.
I think that’s not true. The easiest would be to ban animal farming, which would cut consumption nearly entirely.
“The easiest way is just me fiating this impossible idealistic nonsense in my own head”
You do you, man.
Top down approaches are almost never the answer.
Would you be willing to take up arms for that fight? Because meat eaters would be.
Brb, giving up my entire means of livelihood in an environment where I can’t even sell off my assets because they are also banned, all in this job market. Sounds like a good way to quickly block major roadways with tractors, fuck cars should be happy.
I don’t think fighting a civil war qualifies as an “easy way”.
How is that easy?
An incremental step would be making it more expensive through taxes or regulation. A possible improvement rather than sitting on an impossible ideal
Who defines “common sense” and “moderation”? Meat eaters?
If vegans were majority, then you would be, too, called a radical for saying “we should build a slaughterhouse to give people PTSD”
I am not even vegan, but we can’t trust meat eating majority to write the rules on what’s acceptable amount of meat eating. This is just biased and unfair.
The important thing is that you appreciat it.
Thank you for sharing my views I only murder once every 7 weeks but my friends say it’s not good.
“Murder” is a very strong (and wrong) word for killing animals.
Oh bloody vegans coopting murder. I wanted to make a joke that’d you’d murder (people) in moderation.
be careful. the blood mouths are not ready for your humour.
this is what I like about vegans, they call me the most metal “insults”.
Here is an article about why honey is not vegan. I’ll quote some notable excerpts.
The latest research in the field suggests bees are indeed sentient, and experience a host of sophisticated emotions. In his 2023 book What a Bee Knows, entomologist Stephen Buchmann states that bees are “self-aware,” highly intelligent, and possess a “primitive form of consciousness.”
The Guardian reported on the book earlier this year, saying bees’ apparent ability to recognize different human faces, process long-term memories while sleeping, and feel optimistic, playful, and scared raises “complex ethical questions” about our treatment of them.
…
…by using a piece of mesh that worker bees can pass through but [the queen bee] cannot, or clipping her wings. The structure contains horizontal sheets, where, because the queen bee is trapped nearby, the bees build their honeycomb.
To harvest the honey, beekeepers either smoke the bees to subdue them, or trap them with a clearing board over one or two days. Others kill the colony altogether.
Oftentimes, beekeepers replace the honey they remove with a sugar water substitute. This practice prompts honeybees to overwork themselves to replace the missing honey. Meanwhile, the sugar water lacks the nutrients, fats, and vitamins that bees need to be healthy.
Think of how labor rights, and even basic human rights are a constant struggle. Now imagine that you are a species that is regarded in such a way that everything you produce and everything you are is thoroughly classified a commodity. You do not have the capacity to speak against it. You are smart enough to suffer, but lack the degree of intelligence necessary to even begin to comprehend the enormity of what you are entrapped in. One species of animal has decided that all other species of animal are its products. None of the others can raise a voice against that. If human rights abuses abounds, how often do you think any kind of animal agricultural system is going to operate in a way that’s anything other than systematic abuse and suffering?
Is that really the kind of world you want to continue to create?
It’s easy to dismiss bugs, easy to think they don’t matter. But I think of them as a litmus test. We are the real equivalent to bugs, of what we think a God is like to us. Are we the kind of deitys that we would want to exist?
If you actually care about a mutualistic relationship between pollinators and humans, grow a garden.
I’ve been on the fence about honey for a while but tbh I’ve heard enough. I’ll just switch to maple spread or jam.
There is evidence that plants have some form of sentience. They react to their environment and stimuli, and communicate with each other. We honestly shouldn’t be eating anything that was previously alive.
Unless you are recommending synthesizing food from base chemicals, there isn’t another option. All life, excepting that which can photosynthesize, consumes other life for energy and materials.
The best we can do is mitigate suffering and environmental harm - factory farming is abhorrent - but until we have the Star Trek replicator pumping out TV dinners from the ether, we have to eat something.
Salad is murder!
Better to just eat cows. A cow is 1 suffering to feed many humans. A jar of honey is thousands of sufferings for one family to have sweeter tea.
Checkmate atheists
Ah yes the classic trolley problem: 1,000 bees getting bullied or a dead cow. Very useful.
Or just don’t eat either.
You are smart enough to suffer
Not disagreeing with your overall point, just want to say that being smart is not a prerequisite for suffering. I don’t even think it’s possible to have a “primitive consciousness”, or a “sophisticated consciousness”. A being is either conscious or, well, it simply is not - it doesn’t exist. As an individual, you either exist independently or… you just don’t - not even blackness.
Let’s say that bees are conscious. Each individual bee has a unique internal existence just as you or I have. If you are a human (actually I’m assuming you are) then your experience certainly differs from the experience that a bee has, but that consciousness, that isolated spark of being, that is the same. If you were to shut your eyes and still your mind, and we imagine a bee could also do that (just give them imaginary eyelids for this thought experiment) then both of you would be experiencing the same thing, for that brief time you are both in that state of wordless shapeless existence.
You could perhaps wake up from this meditative state as the bee, coming to with a shake of your head, and fly off away from the flower you’d been resting on. “Woah what a weird dream” you’d think in bee language, then a new enticing fragrance from another flower fills your olfactory glands and you are drawn irresistibly towards it, quickly forgetting that funny dream of being a great big thing stuck heavily to the ground with two arms and legs hanging off your body.
The bees consent! Veganism is about consent! If a cow could say “Yeah, please take my milk” it would be vegan!
Theoretically domestic sheep wool is also vegan because theyll overheat and die if we dont shave them, and thus are probably pretty happy when we do and dont care what happens with it afterwards, but i dont think vegans are ready for that convo
Sheep wouldn’t need shearing if we wouldn’t breed them to grow more wool, and if we allowed them to live where they are native, instead of “farming” them e.g. in Australia.
Also I am pretty sure that those sheep get slaughtered after a couple of years, instead of being allowed a happy life.
But I don’t think your cognitive dissonance is ready for that convo.
They could just fly north for the summer if they weren’t so lazy.
ITT: Honey-eating vegans getting ethically roasted by non-vegans.
ITT: people who don’t understand what veganism is lecturing what vegans should do.
Not a vegan.
Honey is a direct animal product. It is meant to feed them, much like milk feeds other cows.
I don’t get how that’s even arguable. I don’t care what you do and don’t eat, vegans, but honey is definitely an animal product. It’s not a product of flowers, it’s a product of bees. Veganism/vegetarianism are both already series of arbitrary lines drawn, though, so, whatever.
Also fish is meat, for those people out there. It’s an animal, you’re eating the animal: it’s meat. You can be a vegetarian that eats fish, that’s fine. You are all illogical to me. Morally right, rationally arbitrary and inconsistent and often hypocrites.
But veganism at the core isn’t even about refusing to eat animal product. It’s about living a lifestyle that causes the least amount of suffering possible. Like some people would consider cocaine not vegan even though it’s not an animal product since an inconceivable amount of suffering is caused in the production and distribution of the product.
If a Star Trek food synthesizer exists that can make beef burgers out of carbon and hydrogen molecules, those burgers can be considered vegan since no suffering is involved.
The arguments are usually that fish aren’t animals or more clearly insects aren’t animals, similar to how plants aren’t animals even if they react to damage. Very easy to argue.
I’ve seen arguments that whatever sentience fish may have, it’s too low level to be aware of pain. I don’t buy that but clearly fish have a simpler central nervous system than mammals. Also easy to argue.
Most fertilizer contains animal waste, so are you allowed to use it to grow plants? Bees are also pollinators, so many plabts also depend on labor from bees. We live in a biosphere and interact with each other, so everyone needs to decide where their line is.
Yeah it’s about limiting the exploitation of others as much as possible or practicable. We don’t live in a perfect crystal world where we just feed ourselves by inclining our facets towards the sun and nothing ever suffers, but we can stop being such grubby little thieves about how we do feed ourselves.
I think this kind of obscures the reason people are vegan in the first place. It’s more than just a dogmatic creed against eating anything animal-derived.
For people who do it for moral reasons, the core issue is consent. Animals cannot consent to be eaten and cannot understand why they are born in captivity and made to suffer. Honey can be farmed with almost total freedom for the bees (can be, not necessarily always is), and bees also produce significantly more honey than they need so do not suffer from it being taken.
Others object to the fact that choosing to eat meat when you can reasonably choose not to, is semi-directly deriving pleasure from the death of an animal. Which is the same reason most people are disgusted by blood sports. Again, that clearly doesn’t apply to bees and honey, because honey is not the flesh of a dead animal.
For people who do it for environmental reasons, beekeeping has no significant negative environmental effect, as long as invasive species aren’t being used. If anything it can have a positive impact on local ecosystems if done responsibly (again, can).
Extracting honey fundamentally differs from other animal derived products. Take milk; cows are forcefully separated from their children and hooked up to automatic milking machines. They must be kept confined, and keeping them in this way is generally only economical if they are slaughtered for meat as well. There is fundamentally suffering involved, which is not the case for beekeeping.
All this is to say, if someone wants to strictly abstain from any and all animal products as a matter of principle, that’s their choice! But the vast majority of reasons to be vegan aren’t reasons not to eat honey.
Yeah if there were apiaries around me who harvested honey ethically I might consider it. Same with milk and meat (well, probably not because I just don’t like them now, but on ethical grounds), if it was just the extras from having animals around.
But as soon as there’s money involved that all goes out the window and you get the wall of flesh at the back of every grocery store, which amounts to hundreds of years of subjective suffering from beings that just had the misfortune to be born inside the factory on four legs rather than outside of it on two.
Thanks. I think the single biggest barrier to the population as a whole eating more ethically is the way that veganism as a movement has taken on this absolutist dogmatic stance that makes it a dealbreaker for most people. If you make people feel as though cutting their meat intake by 50% is pointless because you’re still going to call them murderers, why would they make the effort?
Honey can be farmed with almost total freedom for the bees (can be, not necessarily often is)
This is why I don’t eat honey. The profit motive incentivizes unethical practices, so the logical choice is to deprive that industry of its profits.
Also, we will never meet the current demand for honey sustainably, so its necessary for some of us to voluntarily go without. I’m more than capable of being one of those people.
Can honey be produced ethically? Theoretically - but you could say the same for any animal product if you get theoretical enough. The truth is that it frequently isn’t produced ethically, and that’s enough for me to opt out. And I think anyone with the ability to stop consuming animal products ought to do likewise.
The problem with the carveouts that utilitarian vegans make for honey is that they’re largely falsifiable feel-good apologia. The claim that harvesting honey doesn’t harm bees is complete bollocks, really it’s in the same realm of the claim that milking a cow doesn’t harm the cow because she can always make more and just saying it isn’t doesn’t make it so. The hive does need to downsize and drones do have to die to accommodate the loss of surplus, workers do forage further and compete more with other insects for nectar, while honey harvesting rarely harvests at the low extraction levels claimed to be harmless and domesticated bee colonies crowd out native pollinators. If it were harmless the bees would never bother to make it, it takes a shitload of energy for them to produce it. It’s turn-brain-off dissonance territory in the same league as dairy farm propaganda but because vegan utilitarian thought leader Peter Singer said it’s OK they’re all willing to make the huge leap in logic to eat something that could just as easily have been maple syrup or agave nectar.
I’d respect the utilitarians a lot more if they just said they don’t care about bees and shellfish because they’re not fuzzy mammals, instead of performing these unimpressive acts of logical acrobatics.
Also to add another reason for veganism to your list, the more important one for me personally: The reflection on oneself. We are symbolic thinkers, we transpose ideas from one context to the next. eg Slaughterhouse workers exhibit the same elevated levels of domestic violence as cops. When we harm someone else, in another manner we also harm ourselves. If we can understand another entity on some level and we then hurt it, we do ourselves a psychic injury that isn’t just philosophical but has real profound effects on our thought processes, our outlook on the world, our behaviors toward other things. Maybe utilitarian vegans just don’t see any commonality between their bodies and the beehive, but I think the core failure of utilitarianism is it’s inability to respect this very simple but unfortunately intangible concept, in all contexts.
Utilitarian hedonist here. I stopped eating prawns because I heard about them pulling the eyes out to increase breeding rates. I decided to research it by watching a video of a prawn having its eyes removed.
It looked like it was in pain.
That’s enough for Me. I don’t believe in p-zombies, so if something looks like it’s in pain, I believe it. I don’t want the prawns to have their eyes pulled out because it looks like it hurts.
And the meme is actually a lie. I don’t have strong feelings about honey, I’m undecided. I actually posted this bait in part to start an argument so I could read what people have to say. And also because it’s funny and this is lemmyshitpost. Right now in this present moment, I don’t think I want honey in My life.
This thread is actually fantastic, I’ve never seen so much open discussion about veganism between vegans and non-vegans with so little malice so I’d say you hit pay dirt.
I like your utilitarian determination of pain more than most utilitarians, who require a complete nervous system and therefore eat shellfish. Your test has a higher standard than theirs, because shellfish still retract when poked nervous system or not.
Gay space communist here. I’m not vegan, not even vegetarian - I do however only eat vegetarian at home, and most of the time vegan, but I’ll eat non-vegetarian food when visiting carnivorous friends or even in restaurants, if the veggie options are unappealing.
Honey is something I stopped buying after hearing from vegans about the cruelty in its production - from what I recall, and I did also watch a video or two of the process, queen bees routinely have their legs pulled off to trigger a hive to be built, and while I don’t know if bees are conscious, I know I would never pull the legs off an insect, so I can no longer in good conscience put a pot of honey in my basket as I walk around a supermarket.
Similar logic should also apply to cheese and ice cream, the non-vegan items that I still buy a lot of, but I did try giving up these items for a couple of months, and man I’m sorry baby calves but I just love those things too much.
Good for you for trying, and at least reducing. For what it’s worth I think quitting {insert animal product} always seems inconceivable until one day it isn’t. Just by thinking about it and considering it and giving it a shot once in a while, you’re doing great.
Same. I’m not vegan, but honey is obviously an animal product, and we don’t get their consent to take it (much like eggs or milk).
Further arguments like bees leaving behind some hives are just self-serving - feel free to eat honey, or even milk and eggs, but then don’t call yourself vegan, because you are not.
I’m not vegan either, but it feels very strange for non-vegans to dictate to vegans what is and is not vegan and who is and is not a vegan.
I think the argument is that bees will do it regardless of consumption so may as well have some nectar/bee barf for sweetener?
Veganism/vegetarianism are both already series of arbitrary lines drawn, though, so, whatever.
They are not fixed lines. I can’t speak about veganism but not eating red meat is vegetarism, leaving meat out except for holidays is vegetarism, eating fish but not meat is vegetarism. There is many way to be vegetarian. Even if there is one way that is much more popular and much more discutes these days. So I can also image non-fixed lines in veganism.
Orcas would like to have a chat with you.
Context: just like vegetarians and non vegetarians, orcas are also pescaterian and Mammal eating. And they don’t mate with each other. Intact some families haven’t mated for hundreds of thousands of years
I’ve heard bees are more productive at making honey than they actually need. They’ll make so much that they abandon a hive full of honey and start a new one just to make more.
Dunno if that’s true or not, but the claim gives big “those slaves just love being natural slaves” energy.
Yeah I’ve been convinced by the comments here. There could be ethical honey. Just like theoretically there could be ethical milk/cheese, but the profit motive incentives abuse and exploitation. If you paid money for it, there is a 100% chance that a bee had to work harder than she would have otherwise with no recourse.
It’s not the same as eating meat maybe, but the principle holds.
Well put.
The fun part is that this doesn’t even tell me which side of the honey debate you’re on.
The
fungenius* partIf you can make both sides of an issue think you’re on their side, you win both of their support.
Not a vegan but I am surprised to learn there is a debate amongst vegans about honey.
Again, can’t tell if that’s because you think it’s an insignificant issue, or if you think the answer is obvious, and if so which answer you think that is. Are you being funny on purpose? If so bravo.
Again, can’t tell if that’s because you think it’s an insignificant issue, or if you think the answer is obvious, and if so which answer you think that is. Are you being funny on purpose? If so bravo.
Again? Have we talked about this before?
As a non-vegan who doesn’t spend much time in vegan spaces I wouldn’t say it’s insignificant, but if it hadn’t been brought to my attention as a topic of debate amongst vegans I never would have considered it. I’ve just had a pretty cut and dry understanding that animal products are not vegan.
You can see in my other comments here, my speculation as to how that could be the wrong take. Not because I think any one side or the other is right or wrong, but just trying to understand each position.
I usually am trying to be funny, but not in this case. I’m mostly just disappointed in myself for not knowing why my comment would be funny 😒
Again?
I just meant that you were replying to a comment about not being able to discern someone’s true opinion and it was kind of hard to discern the true opinion behind your very reply. That was the “again” part - recursion. I thought perhaps you were being deliberately witty. I would honestly appreciate that kind of humor, in all sincerity. I didn’t mean to make fun of you like haha you’re funny you clown.
I guess you actually meant yet another interpretation, which is that you simply never knew this was a thing and hadn’t imagined it, so were surprised. Fair enough!
Honey is an animal byproduct, so technically it is non-vegan, but I think that’s kind of pedantic because the bees (ideally) aren’t harmed by the apiaries, and the relationships is more of symbiosis rather than exploitation.
I’ve tried explaining this to vegans and they get really hostile about how apiaries are bee slavery and we need to abolish all forms of subjugation and exploitation, and that I’m a colonialist pig for not seeing it that way.
They also talk about some of the problems with large-scale apiary practices. But those problems are very much known within beekeeping communities, and the average small-time beekeeper is as upset as any vegan about giant corporate monocultures spreading parasites and diseases.
The beekeepers are also very active in trying to solve that problem by regulating large-scale apiary practices, monitoring bee colonies, medicating, funding (and participating in) research, etc… All stuff that most vegans couldn’t be bothered to do.
It’s a bit like being against backyard chickens because Tyson and Perdue are an evil industrial ag duopoly.
So… they saw the bee movie and considered a documentary?
Critical thinking skills are on an all time low
Do/can domesticated bees swarm/rewild?
If so it seems like it would be the best argument that bee keeping was mutually consensual.
It’s a bit like being against backyard chickens because Tyson and Perdue are an evil industrial ag duopoly
Are there apiary industry standards/certifications? It seems unlikely most folks are buying the backyard chicken version of honey.
Do/can domesticated bees swarm/rewild?
It is possible. When a colony grows too large for the hive it produces a new queen and then splits itself in half. Usually beekeepers who monitor their colonies notice this and start a new hive, but if left to do their own thing (and if there’s not a queen trap on the entrance) then one of the queens will take half the colony and go search for a place to build a new hive.
If so it seems like it would be the best argument that bee keeping was mutually consensual.
I generally agree, but how do you define that? You can’t exactly get a bee to sign a legal document. Sure you could opt against using a queen trap, and make your hive as enticing as possible so they stay. A good apiary will provide ideal conditions, and cultuvate botanical and herb gardens in the immediate surroundings. Basically make it a paradise for bees, and give them medicine too.
Just because some people abuse their dogs doesn’t mean pet-keeping as a whole should be damned. Punish the abusers and prevent the abuse as much as you can. But don’t take away granny’s sweet little shitzu just because Dale down the street kicks his pit.
Are there apiary industry standards/certifications?
That unfortunately depends on the state. Some do a better job than others.
It seems unlikely most folks are buying the backyard chicken version of honey.
Yes but try asking a vegan “Is it fine if I only choose local honey?”
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
Honey seems similar to milk - we’re harvesting a secretion. But I think vegans care about more than just killing animals - it’s also about enslaving them, for lack of a better word. Cruelty. And I don’t know enough to argue whether bees are free. It seems like they are - they leave their hives and then return. But their Queen does get moved around by the beekeeper and they are bound to her… its an interesting one.
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.
There is far more debate about veganism within veganism than there is outside of veganism. Honestly it makes debates with non-vegans look fucking boring.
There are a lot of debates. Vegan as a diet vs. lifestyle for example.
Some call themselves vegan when they have a plant-based diet, some insist that it’s a lifestyle and extend beyond just diet, into other aspects of life. Some are pro pets, others are against keeping animals at all.
I’ve known people who called themselves vegan and still ate fish, there are basically no rules
That’s pescatarian, not vegan. Whoever said that was wrong.
But I recognize that confidently saying something is wrong is viewed as arrogant these days. We have to respect everyone’s subjectivity, even if that means not saying anything even when they’re blatantly wrong.
Like “No, don’t keep walking forward. There’s a cliff in front of you.” “DON’T TELL ME WHAT TO DO! YOU CAN’T CONTROL ME.”
Toxic positivity has seeped way too far into the collective unconscious…
Vegan means whatever.
That’s pescatarian, not vegan. Whoever said that was wrong.
(And for some reason, ‘vegetarian’ has gone completely out of fashion…)
Probably because vegans bludgeon anyone who calls themselves vegetarians, because apparently we’re worse than carnists because we see that there’s a problem yet only go partially through with the solution.
Like I’ve tried going vegan before, but after a few days I get really cranky and then the cravings start and I end up crashing. I never made it a full week, and it made it harder to even stick to vegetarian foods.
But apparently I’m a terrible person if I ever call myself a vegetarian within earshot of a vegan…
Also there are some obnoxious asses out there who insist that it’s really “ovo-lacto-vegetarian” because apparently vegetarians only eat plants? I’m like no, that would be vegan.
Not that it’s ever been convenient to be vegetarian. But now you get hit from both sides…
weeell
They justified it as something to do with fish/shellfish not having the same kind of pain receptors and consciousness that “real” animals do and argued it was more akin to consuming fungi and bacteria. They didn’t eat dairy products or meat for more traditional vegan reasons. Since it’s this thread, i’ll say they also ate honey lol.
I don’t agree with them, and I do agree with everything you said here. I’m just saying, based on experiences in the field, when someone says to me “I’m vegan” internally I’m like “cool, so you eat whatever you want, just like everyone else” 😂
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!
I did assume vegans would be majority against honey consumption.
Hah! It’s roughly 50-50 but even the 50% that doesn’t mind honey would usually buy some sort of syrup. It’s usually about it being an Ingredient.
Some otherwise vegan sweets are coated in super thin bee’s wax, so they don’t stick together. Many don’t mind, especially if the alternative is wrapping them in plastic.
The right side
In Lemmy you have to be on the left side.
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.
With that and the amount of recalled food in the US, the only way to way ethically right now is to just die.
in the US, the only way to way ethically right now is to just die.
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Like anywhere else is much different. You think only the US has industrial farming?
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And there is an ethical way to eat: dumpster diving. Everything in that dumpster is already waste, and taking it does not increase demand – no store is going to order more stock because the dumpster is running low. None of your money is going to support factory farming of any kind. Any food you find in the dumpster is 100% ethical to consume.
This doesn’t hold up. For you, personally, sure. But EVERYONE couldn’t convert to dumpster diving. That’s just shitty supermarkets.
I had this revelation about buying local. If EVERYONE “bought local”, local farms begin looking like factory farms in order to produce enough for the local population. I’m certain there would be additional inefficiencies (moral atrocities) as a result. It’s more ethical for me, personally, to get my produce locally, but I can’t in good faith criticize anyone else that buys groceries on Amazon.
There’s no ethical consumption under capitalism.
Dumpster diving still relies on industrial agriculture happening and doesn’t scale to more than a small portion of the population, some of whom have no other choice but to do so.
True, but at a personal level, you can get perfectly ethical food that way, even meat.
I don’t think that paying for it or not paying for it changes anything about the ethics of how it came to be. Dumpster diving concerns capitalism, not veganism.
I mean I was talking about the topical issue that it seems every food is getting recalled in the US, but alright buddy.
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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
Which is why when someone asks me “Well what about indigenous tribes? Almost all of them hunt, are you doing to tell them they’re morally wrong?”. No, no I am not, because they are not morally wrong. They’re hunting for survival, in relative harmony and reciprocity with the ecology that completely enveloped every aspect of their social development.
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.
I thought that Americans are the invasive species in the middle east.
Isn’t a lot of the industry produced “honey” actually honey flavoured corn syrup anyways?
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.
Honestly, I’m on Team Honey, but that argument has a glaring hole in it.
Which is that many apiaries put an object over the entrance to the hive which lets worker bees pass freely but blocks the queen from escaping. And worker bees bonded to a queen will literally die before abandoning her.
So they can’t just leave. Bees that do that in the while travel as a colony in what’s called a swarm (which is actually very docile because they have no hive to defend). A bee that gets separated from its colony dies.
I’m not an expert by any means, but I have known some beekeepers. Once I was asked to go help because one of their hives had “swarmed”, meaning a group had left the box with the/a queen and had posted up on a neighbors rose bush.
Some areas have a “swam list,” where beekeepers put their name on the list and whenever someone in the area finds a swarm on their property they call someone from the swarm list and they come out to get the bees.
It’s a lot better than the alternative, which is ignorant property owners spraying the swarm with wasp poison… :(
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.
You really are a terrible wish granting device
For example:
HyperNormalisation is a 2016 BBC documentary by British filmmaker Adam Curtis. It argues that following the global economic crises of the 1970s, governments, financiers and technological utopians gave up on trying to shape the complex “real world” and instead established a simpler “fake world” for the benefit of multi-national corporations that is kept stable by neoliberal governments. The film was released on 16 October 2016 on BBC iPlayer.[2]
Anything by Adam Curtis is required viewing.
I’d say it’s defined by the dominant group, but that group isn’t necessarily an ethnic group. For example, Sundar Pichai and Jensen Huang are certainly a part of that group. It’s not limited to white Anglo-Saxons anymore.
We really need to stop looking at the issue by pigeonholing it into racial, gender, or sexual categories, because that does not reflect the reality. There are gay oligarchs. There are women oligarchs. There are oligarchs of every skin tone.
These are counter-examples, of course; deviations from what we might consider the “norm,” which is cishetero white male oligarchs. Pointing out that it’s not limited to the latter isn’t a denial that the latter form a disproportionate majority of oligarchs. That’s the part a lot of people miss when I bring this up.
The fundamental issue though is class disparity, which we cannot lose sight of; even if there are other demographic trends within that disparity. Trying to make it about anything else is overly reductive and harmful.
Here in Australia, there was a genocide for a long time where the goal was to destroy Aboriginal culture. I mean, there was plenty of murder and eugenics in there too, but the culture was a really big thing. Kids were stolen from their parents and put on missions where they couldn’t speak language or practice religion. English and Christianity only. For a long time, Aboriginal people could only be granted citizenship if they renounced their Aboriginality. No more interacting in any way with the community, no language, no culture.
Aboriginal ontology and metaphysics are fundamentally different to European ontology and metaphysics. It’s a different reality. Consensus reality was made by white people, practicing whiteness in their actions. And then everyone else was forced into it, at least in “the west”. I assert that nonwhite people in the anglosphere are only allowed to join the dominant class, if they give up their own culture and its reality, and practice whiteness and white reality instead. Which isn’t that hard for a lot of bougie people of colour to do, because they’ve been colonised and assimilated.
I think the intersections of race and class are really important to understand, because if we rebel against race and not class, we’ll just end up with racist socialism. You know, like China and the USSR. And we’ll be doing “the people’s genocide” against the Uyghurs or whatever.
I propose instead that the revolution must be decolonial. Communism was invented by Turtle Islanders and Aboriginal people. Engels got the idea from reading Lewis Henry Morgan’s books on the Haudenosaunee. We will achieve successful communism, with no state, by working together with Indigenous people as our Elders and teachers, because they’re the experts. They’ve got the social science to do it already.
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!”
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.
People who would be angered by this aren’t reachable, ya just gotta block em.
I have known vegans IRL who are genuinely reasonable and can discuss this stuff. On the Internet, 95% of the time you just cannot even discuss it with someone who identifies as vegan, I would imagine even if you’re a vegan yourself, unless you 100% agree with them on how to apply the philosophy. In this very thread I asked a question and it was all but ignored and I was assumed to be shitting on veganism rather than questioning a specific argument/interpretation of it. I think it sucks because I literally agree with like 90% of everything any vegan says, it’s when they veer away from the facts and more toward personal feelings they have that I cannot talk to them about it anymore. It makes sense on the one hand because if that viewpoint resonates with you it’s gonna make you upset to think about and to be shit on for, but on the other, if it cannot even be discussed without false assumptions, insults, and avoidance of inconvenient facts on their part, they’re just going to lend credence to the anti-vegan prick arguments. Because of this extreme inability to even discuss the topic I have to block a lot of vegans because I’d rather do that than always remain silent for fear of upsetting them. They always seem 100% convinced I’m an evil carnist who hates them and is pretending not to be just to erode veganism, but it’s just not so.
I’m in the same boat. I actually agree with 90% of veganism. Animals shouldn’t suffer needlessly. People should eat less meat and animal products. Factory farming is horrifying and unethical. Where it falls apart is the universal claim of “Therefore, even the smaller regenerative and ethical farms are evil, because ALL animal use is unethical.” Which, if you follow the logic and consequences, requires us to either support millions of animals in domestic environments without ANY method of financial independence beyond donations or government support. Or, we drive dozens of distinct species to extinction, simply because some people feel personally attacked when I make an omelette. If we could ask the animals themselves, I struggle to believe that a happy cow living on a dairy farm would prefer non-existance to getting milked occasionally when they want to.
I have very little respect for anyone who cannot justify opinions, or get offended when beliefs are questions. If you don’t want your beliefs questioned, don’t announce them.
Yeah. I think it comes down to the absolutism. They almost certainly ate some amount of meat/animal products themselves, but once they arrived at their current principles, they have no more understanding for it. Rather than remember that they too had to learn/work to get to their understanding, they see you as an enemy for not sharing it. Of course I mean if you offer even the slightest pushback.
I’ve reduced my meat intake by a lot and I agree with what you wrote here. If vegan food was widely available everywhere I’d probably eat WAY less animal products. But dozens of vegans online have given no shits about that, whereas a reasonable person would, and would have some level of empathy toward not being 100% with them on everything they say in terms of applying the knowledge. I totally get wondering how a person could acknowledge animal suffering and still participate in it. I’ve examined myself over that one hundreds of times now. But it’s the reality, it’s where I’m at. And I should be able to talk about it without an automatic assumption that I’m a thoughtless monster who is trying to tear down their worldview. I’m not. Is this about me personally? I’m talking about so obviously yes it’s sorta personal that I have these unpleasant and unproductive conversations on the Internet sometimes, but I truly would rather them not happen for anyone else either. For the toxic assholes who really do want to tear down veganism, they’re worse people, but I already knew that. For the vegans spewing hatred at all the “carnists” I expect better and I think I’m right to. They changed their lives for a good reason. Now why the fuck can’t they talk about it the majority of the time? It’s frustrating.
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.
Listen i love animals and I 100% believe they are far more intelligent and empathetic than humans like to give them credit for, but even a human isn’t reading and signing apples terms and conditions i doubt an elephant is either
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 whole debacle can be easily avoided by just eating the bees directly.
The whole debacle can be easily avoided by just eating the
beesflowers directly.You could probably get out of just about any argument this way.
Pssshhhh!!! Maybe you set your sights that low. You can eat your bee’s, I’ll only be eating A’s!
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) …just tell me where the line starts…
Vegans fight amongst themselves all the time, and plenty of them have different rules.
For example, veganism doesn’t extend just towards diet but animal products overall. A lot of people will only focus on the diet or certain animal products such as leather though.
Really wish people would just agree to do whatever they can, anything helps.
Yeah veganism isn’t a single set of beliefs, it’s a range of practices and the people who do those practices do so for a rather wide variety of sometimes-overlapping reasons. I’ve never had a more heated debate about veganism than one with a fellow vegan.
IMO, leather really isn’t a big deal. It’s a by-product of the meat industry. Nobody is raising and butchering cows specifically for the leather. If nobody used the leather, then the skins would just be thrown away … or maybe ground up and used in dog food or something.
Leather is horrible for the environment plus you’re still supporting animal AG
I would argue polyester is worse than leather for the environment, but to each their own.
it subsidises the meat industry.
Valid, lowers the costs of the resulting meat and thus increases consumption
It’s also responsible for a not-insignificant portion of the meat industry’s carbon footprint.
Fur on the other hand…
I mean, to be fair there aren’t many if any first world countries that eat fox, bear, or really anything with fur. I understand some people shoot bears and such, but in talking about actual farms.
Yeah my bad, I meant the fur industry is almost entirely barbaric for the purpose of fur, as opposed to leather being a byproduct.
Though I have found a shop that allegedly has ethically sourced fur that they buy from Alaskan natives that hunt for food, but I don’t think I have the means to confirm that.
I agree, as well with things like sauces from shellfish shells that would otherwise be tossed.
However, I recently heard the reasoning (of a buddhist who tries to avoid animal products, i.e. would not actively seek out a non vegan option, while accepting non vegan food if offered) - would the product in question still exist if the animal was seized to be killed? Even if it was for a different purpose and leather, seafish shells, gelatin etc were just byproducts, they would not exist if the animal it is derived from wasn’t killed for whatever reason.
I totally agree that it would be a shame to only use a part of an animal and let the other go to waste. Likewise, I get that “I’ll do X as long as everyone else does Y” is a way of reasoning that ends up counterproductive and keeps us locked in a status quo. So, if someone wants to stop using not just the primary products of the meat industry but also the secondary, I can understand.
So, basically like religion? Just follow the parts you want to and everything is good?
vegans will always argue with everyone, especially themselves, forever and ever, amen
If there’s any animal that profits from a partnership with humans, it’s bees.
And rats. Never forget the rats. They’re everywhere. One is watching you, right now. Waiting.
The province of Alberta was officially rat free for most of my life. They have decided to do what conservatives do and scrapped various programs for being “wasteful”
Basically they said why are we spending money on eradicating rats, we don’t have any. That’s stupid and we are going to save money on this.
Well guess what. Now there rats everywhere in that province. Maple god damned maga
Had a roommate who was vegan and I tried it out as well (they don’t shut up sometimes). At that point I learned that maybe I should just think things through myself when he told me wifi is bad and you can only use Ethernet cables. My friend, who has a doctorates in electrical engineering, and I had a lot of laughs; surprise the cables emit the same harmless radiation. It was fun when I got ratted out by my ex then for just running wifi without broadcasting for her dumbass to use the internet when I was at work. Haha punny right.
And the honey thing is such a hilarious argument. Like do you want plants to grow? Also watch the third Ghost in the Shell movie, where yeah crops get destroyed. But hey, we already are getting to experience that now, as in what’s the next recall?
Here in Australia, native bees are solitary. All the bee farms use foreigner bees.
Well Australia has their shit together, well except for the ID bullshit every county is trying to push. I’m honestly not sure if foreign bees are bad, I figure the more the better.
https://www.unisq.edu.au/news/2025/05/honey-bees
A University of Southern Queensland (UniSQ) researcher has found that honey bees – a species introduced by European colonisers for honey and crop pollination – may be driving down the population sizes of native bee species, potentially leading to extinction.
Interesting, I had no idea that was a thing. Not really sure what should be done about that; I don’t specialize in this subject matter. I’m a bit on the dumber side; it’s bees or is … wasps.
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.
Eh, the parts people eat are not the mushroom itself. The mycelium underground doesn’t give a shit if you eat its reproductive organs. Hell, it probably likes it.
Freaky-ass mushrooms… That’s why the shapes are so tantalizing!
By definition are vegans those that don’t eat or use animals or animal byproducts.
Fungi aren’t animals. If this group doesn’t consume fungi then they should call themselves something else entirely to avoid further confusion. Maybe they should go strictly by herbivores.
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
That’s cause we don’t, the only time I’ve ever heard this mushroom fud come up is from non-vegans. “Did you know that grass screams when you cut it?”-tier territory.
soo true
No one said any of that here.
I think you misunderstand me, I’m comparing the mushroom claim to an equally silly claim that often rears it’s head in these sort of discussions, not saying it was made here.
Not some. They are taxonomically more related to animals than plants. Just a fact.
We’re also technically eating their peepees.
Same with all fruits and some vegetables. The reproductive organs are the tastiest part!
Jeremy’s Space Penises
