If you are like me, you are sick of the honey question: No, honey isn’t vegan (bees are animals…duh). Yes, some people who consider themselves vegan eat honey. No, they are not undermining the vegan revolution.
Someone at work sent me this article today (I am officially “the vegan” at work). A decent article, but, seriously, the honey issue bores me. Here’s why:
- Honey is SO easy to avoid. Are you kidding? You can give up meat, cheese, milk, ice cream, etc…but not honey?! How can it possibly be that important to anyone? And there are so many really obvious substitutes…maple syrup (my fav!), agave nectar, um…sugar! So I don’t understand why people get so up-in-arms about it.
- It really doesn’t matter. Most of us can’t relate to insects. It’s a lot easier to picture the exploitation of cows, pigs, even fish than it is to empathize with the blight of bees. Why is this relevant? Because I doubt many vegans were inspired to give up animal products because of the exploitation of bees, and we are definitely not going to convince people that veganism is a good choice by describing the suffering of insects. Bickering over honey is just counterproductive…another example of focusing on the trees rather than the forest.
Michael Greger wrote this fantastic article for Satya magazine on the honey issue. You should read it as a follow-up to the slate article. His point is the same as what I’ve said above–non-vegans are definitely turned off by the honey debate, and while most vegans probably avoid honey, many agree that it should not be the focus of the movement.
As for me…I avoid honey, but not the same why I avoid other animal products. For example: My mother made me some granola this weekend, and she happened to mention that it had honey in it. Had it been powdered milk, I would have declined, but I like her granola and I just don’t think it’s a huge deal. I’ll tell her to use something else next time. I actually avoided honey for a while before really understanding the reason why. Like non-vegans (and many vegans, I bet), I just didn’t get the honey issue; on an intellectual level, I could understand why it was off-limits for vegans, but it just didn’t click with me emotionally the way other animal products do. And then one day in my Botany class this spring, it suddenly dawned on me: bees don’t make honey for us. They make it for their families. If I was a worker been, spending all my days buzzing around and building up stores of honey for my kids to eat over the winter, I would be really mad if someone came and took it all away just to stick in their tea! But it did take me a while to come to this realization…and it was only after I had become accustomed to thinking about animal rights as a given, rather than a question.
And now I’ve added to the unnecessarily large collection of writings on the honey issue…only to say stop worrying about it!
hehe. i like this post, it puts things in perspective:)