Day 55 -- Come Here, Honey!

One of the benefits of eating vegan is that I'm not making a negative impact on an animal's life.  I am an animal lover and, in the past, I managed to put the whole issue aside and happily ate meat.  But now that I've come to enjoy a plant-based diet, it will be much harder for me to go back and eat meat again.

I decided to take dairy out of my diet over concerns about casein  and all of the antibiotics and growth hormones in milk products.  Casein is thought to feed cancer cells, while the hormones and antibiotics have their own bad side effects.  And corporate dairy farms are pretty cruel places for cows to spend their lives.  If I were to start consuming milk products again, I would probably look for organic products produced by smaller independent farmers.

So, taking animals into account, why isn't honey considered vegan?  The basis of honey is plant-based -- nectar from flowers.  We don't eat the bees or even kill them to get honey.  They get to live their lives in the wild.  In fact, by harvesting their honey, we're keeping them employed.  And considering my hatred of bees (and wasps and hornets), I'd rather see the bees occuped elsewhere and not chasing me around my yard or ruining my picnic.

Daniel Engber wrote a thought-provoking article on the honey conundrum for Slate.  It's called "The Great Vegan Honey Debate" and is worth a read.  Most strict vegans believe that the beekeeper exploits the bees, much like a dairy farmer exploits his cows or an egg farmer exploits his chickens.  But these animals are kept prisoner to provide these food products.  No one is trapping bees and forcing them to make honey.

For me, this is going just a little too far.  Are we exploiting the bees because we eat the apples or the corn they've pollinated?  Should we avoid truffles because a pig is used to find them?  And if we go that far, what about the migrant workers who are exploited in harvesting all the veggies we eat?  I'd much rather exploit a bee than a farm worker.  The only way to avoid that is is grow and/or pick all my own veggies.  So, I've decided that honey is all right for me.  I guess I'm what Daniel Engber calls a "flexitarian."  My views on veganism are somewhat flexible.  And maybe they always will be.  But I'm eating healthier and that's the most important thing to me.