Honey
Posted by Allychristine on Jul 21, 2008 · Member since Dec 2007 · 15438 posts
Eating honey is not vegan.
Discuss.
I know this has been talked about many a time on VW, but I would like to be involved in the discussion. If you aren't interested in debating if/why/etc. eating honey is not/is vegan, then don't post!
Equating the building of a house or the using of an appliance with the spraying of pesticides is illogical, and I feel annoyed you, KMK, are so quick to brush off what I have to share with such a simplistic and immature comparison.
The comparison is perfectly logical. None of those things have to do with eating honey. I agree with you that there are a lot of important things to consider about organic eating--another one to consider is the impact of pesticides on the health of the farm workers. I just don't think it's really relevant to the honey issue--at least not directly. Like, I think it's perfectly feasible for everyone to avoid honey (I really can't think of a dire enough reason not to), but those other things are all more complex and probably a topic for another thread. Yes, they relate to insect well-being, but not really eating honey. I think you have a good point, no need to get personal or annoyed about it.
HH, it is unbelievably refreshing to hear you speak about these things. Thank you. :>
It has always bothered me a great deal about pesticide residues and runoffs and the disastrous effects this is having on our overall health and the health of the planet. Once I researched what "organic" and "fair-trade" was all about, I knew I had to realign my priorities with buying those products, as this is a reflection of what I place value in.
Monsanto's pesticides are being implicated in all sorts of health disasters, including the plight of honey bees. OCA's been keeping me updated, if anyone is interested they can search for Monsanto Roundup. http://www.organicconsumers.org/
they also have page dedicated to just the plight of honey bees, if anyone is interested in that as well. very pertinent information, vegan or not. http://www.organicconsumers.org/bees.cfm
KMK, we disagree, on many levels. But if you insist, I'm sorry I've taken this thread so far off relevancy.
Noah has been promised smores....tonight. He has had to pass them up on many occasions because of the marshmallows, of course.
I finally found Ricemallow Creme!
So, I told him smores for dessert.
I even conned him into going to the grocery store with me (he HATES going) because we'd be getting smores stuffs.
So, the hunt begins for decent, vegan graham crackers. Nothing in the natural section. My HFS doesn't carry them. So, I am forced to start reading the boxes from Nabisco, Kraft, etc....
Almost all of them contain honey, but what is worse, is the HFCS, the preservatives, and ingredients that I have never heard of that sound very scary and chemically. I did find one Kraft box without honey, but it had all the other crap in them. I just couldn't bring myself to buy them.
So, I ended up buying The Back to Nature Graham sticks-they have ingredients I have heard of, no preservatives, but yes, they contain honey. I'm not happy about it, but I thought those were a better choice than the GMO Krafty crackers. I certainly don't advocate for honey eating, but I felt my hands were tied.
Sure, I could have told him NO again on the Smores, but his response could easily be " I wish I wasn't a vegetarian because I miss out" type of thing...and I could lose him altogether. Looking at the big picture, I think him having this tiny bit of honey would be better than him losing interest in the lifestyle now or in the future.
I am just not going to mention the honey and let him enjoy his Smores after all these years of wondering how they tasted and what they were. In the meantime, I will hit a bigger HFS or look online for some vegan graham crackers....let me tell you, they are hard to find!
I do feel badly, so try not to ream me too hard! :-\
I've never found graham crackers (that were vegan). It's tough. I was considering making them. I found recipes like this one where I could substitute the honey with agave syrup.
wait, you put crackers with marshmellows? huh?
Ha! Pumpkin pie and marshmallows with graham crackers (but not together).
We make s'mores. It's customary to do it around campfires. If you ate real marshmallows, you'd get a stick and jab the marshmallow onto it, let it toast over the coals or small flames, trying not to catch it on fire. When it's toasted, you put it on graham cracker with a piece of chocolate. Camping goodness. With Ricemellow Creme, it's like a mushy, toasted marshmallow, but without the toasted part.
http://blog.lib.umn.edu/isler010/asianamericanstudies/smore1.jpg
oh wow. that is all new levels of odd-ness.
though that looks more like a biscuit than a cracker, which makes it a little less weird. Still, who the hell first thought of thaat?
sorry, diversion over, please to go back to discussing appropriate topics now : )
I haven't had a s'more in so long. And I can't find any vegan marshmallows.
:(
I feel like we need to sponsor oww on a trip to the States and eat pumpkin pie and make s'mores and go trick-or-treating. (oww - it's more of a biscuit than a cracker. It's sweetened a bit, but not as much as a cookie.)
ck, do you have access to Ricemellow? I've had other, marshmallow shaped marshmallows and the consistency was waaay off. Ricemellow is the way to go.
http://cn1.kaboodle.com/hi/img/2/0/0/105/2/AAAAAsusgG8AAAAAAQUh8w.jpg
I tried the dandies marshmallows and was unimpressed, but WML and her boy told me that they got a batch just like mine, and that it wasn't a good representation of their goodness. I might try again next summer.
In case anyone wants to make graham crackers: http://veganyumyum.com/2009/04/graham-crackers-and-dandies/
Requires a particular flour, but the rest of the ingredients are pretty standard.
I feel like we need to sponsor oww on a trip to the States and eat pumpkin pie and make s'mores and go trick-or-treating.
;)b
all donations to the under-priviledged new zealand children fund will be gratefully accepted. don't delay, donate today!
OWW,
I hope you can try a smore someday, they are ooey gooey good!
OWW,
I hope you can try a smore someday, they are ooey gooey good!
Seconded! The are a fantastic invention of improvised campside yumminess!
In so far as this thread is concerned, it has been interesting reading and enlightening...actually has inspired me to specify my diet as vegetarian so as to avoid confusion with the vegan philosophy / lifestyle. Its a distinction I would not have thought of had I not read this.
On a related note, there should be a "strict vegetarian" header under the VegFriends profile selection for Diet.
On a related note, there should be a "strict vegetarian" header under the VegFriends profile selection for Diet.
Let 'em know --> here
They're going to rework the site, so maybe they can add that in.
Honey is a weird one... though i don't eat it... im confused though... so i'm not supposed to kill flies, spiders, ants?!?! I do, so I feel like a hypocrite I don't eat honey but I murder pests... i dunno it is hard to grasp the whole cruelty to pests thing... so nobody here kills flies and stuff?
so nobody here kills flies and stuff?
Not on purpose, and I hate when I do it accidentally. I just try to get them outdoors, and if they are already outdoors, why mess with them!
P doesn't have a problem killing bugs, though. Well, maybe a problem..but not a big enough one. : \
The approach with bugs - if it's going to harm you first, you're simply protecting yourself.
i.e mosquitoes.
Like I've said before - bugs are animals and are in our kingdom.
If you can avoid harm, do so.
If it's unavoidable, then you shouldn't feel bad.
never harm something simply because you can.
Honey is a weird one... though i don't eat it... im confused though... so i'm not supposed to kill flies, spiders, ants?!?! I do, so I feel like a hypocrite I don't eat honey but I murder pests... i dunno it is hard to grasp the whole cruelty to pests thing... so nobody here kills flies and stuff?
I know a lot of people here will "catch and release" spiders and other critters in their house. I do that as well, whenever I can.
I mean, there might be times when you end up killing bugs, but that doesn't have anything to do with whether you choose to eat honey. I think being vegan is about taking the most possible opportunities you can to spare suffering. So, if it's easy to abstain from honey, do it! If it's easy to avoid squashing that spider, do it!
It's the "carpe diem" approach to veganism, rather than the "I'm not 100% consistent 100% of the time, so why bother?" mindset, which is rather defeating.
Being vegan is about doing the least amount of harm.
How I apply that here is that if I had carpenter ants eating my house, I'd kill them. If there were carpenter ants in a tree outside, I'd let them be.
In terms of spiders, I relocate the spiders in my house outside. Even the occassional black widow. I had to go into a tight crawl space and there was a black widow there and I killed her because I couldn't capture her and there was an elevated risk of harm. I've probably killed two spiders in the past decade.
For flies, I do what I can to keep flies out of my space. If they're in my house beating themselves against a window, I'll open the window and remove the screen so they can fly out. I find an occassional carcass on my window sill, so I don't save them all.
Way before I was vegan I lived in a hot, arid climate and had little black ants in my kitchen all the time. I realized they were there for water and put bowls of water by the crack they came in through. They drank at the water bowls and left. Easy as that and no more ants in my kitchen.
CCD (Colony Collapse Disorder) is causing massive amounts of bee dieoffs. They had an update on this on NPR a couple of days ago. It's still not known what causes CCD because it's likely a combination of many factors. There are some localized issues, such as pesticide use, but a lot of the issues are tied to migratory beekeeping. Bees are moved between continents and within contentints, which spreads Varroa mites, pathogens, and virus'.
I liken consuming honey to consuming milk. If someone can understand, internally, why they don't drink milk, it's the same as why they wouldn't consume honey.
I liken consuming honey to consuming milk. If someone can understand, internally, why they don't drink milk, it's the same as why they wouldn't consume honey.
Yes! It really is just like that.
Also, the water bowl for the ants is really, really cute!
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