Alright, so a thing I still hear people throughout various vegan communities discussing and arguing about is whether or not honey is vegan.
And I'm here to tell you that honey is indeed not vegan.
By definition, a vegan is a person who does not eat or use animal products. Honey is an animal product. So, technically honey cannot be considered vegan.
If you're still kind of on the fence I'd like to raise these examples of why honey is not vegan.
- Bees produce honey for themselves. We shouldn’t be taking something that isn’t ours.
- When beekeepers take the honey from the bees they replace the honey with a sugar -water solution food replacement. - If the bees are making the honey, they are obviously making it for a reason and should be eating what they create naturally for survival.
- It would take a group of eight honey bees all of their lives to create just one tsp of honey.
- Inevitably, if you keep bees, you are going to accidentally kill some of the bees in the process of procuring the honey from them.
- Honey is an easy thing to live without and can be replaced easily by things like agave nectar and maple syrup.
- There are some parallels to the dairy industry where the milk is meant for the calf but it is taken away from them for human consumption.
- In beekeeping, the queens bees are killed and replaced by younger bees at the discretion of the beekeeper.
I like how this Reddit user explained it:
Check out the original post here!
Yeah, it's good to think about the consequences of our consumption patterns for sure. I think this Reddit comment really nicely expresses the rationale about why honey is for the bees.
Very important to think about. And yes, I thought it very apt.