vegan question

So - out of curiosity, do all you vegans out there go as far every day as to check to make sure nothing has gelatin in it and all these little hidden animal products.....or do you just not eat eggs dairy and honey?.....

 

And honey is impossible?!

 

I'm just a simple vegetarian, but I look for the hidden ones too... I doubt I'm finding them all, but I look & will purposefully choose something else when I find dairy or animal products.

except that honey
love,
mom

 

Yes. I'm vegan, and I read the ingredients of just about everything I eat.

I won't eat anything with gelatin, eggs/egg whites, milk, whey, lactose (or any lactose derivative like lactic acid and sodium stearol lactylate), gelatin, FD&C Red #40, and some other things that I can't pull off the top of my head at the moment.

And if you DON'T check these things, I wouldn't call you vegan. The point behind a vegan diet is to not consume any animal products. Gelatin is an animal product. Red #40 is an animal product. I can't expect everyone to be perfect (being perfectly vegan in this world is surely impossible), but you damn well better try like you care if you want to claim veganism.

And all other vegans I know are the same way.

Actually, perhaps the ONLY animal product that I do consume is honey, and despite the fact that it sounds hypocritical now, I'm going to explain why:

Acquiring honey doesn't really involve animal cruelty. Hell, most bee farmers are more afraid of the bees than the bees are afraid of the farmers. The honey is a byproduct of the bee's way of life, and humans merely collect the excess honey; it isn't especially detrimental to the hive's survival, or to any singular bee's survival.

That being said, honey is not so much an animal "product" as it is a byproduct from the animal's life. Kind of like manure is collected from cows and used for farming. The cows aren't given copious amounts of drugs, hormones, and Ex-Lax in order to poop, but the waste is collected and used in a non-wasteful manner. The same is true for bees.

 

I just check and re-check EVERYTHING! If I'm not sure about something I don't buy it, luckily though I have a vegan 'animal-free shopper' book - most vegan foods are in there.

 

Wow thanks for all the feedback in such a short amount of time....

 

There is a place online (I forget where exactly) where you can download a list of about 4,000 ingredients that are not vegan, and about 3,000 ingredients that are sometimes not vegan (like gelatin).

 

Actually.. honey is not so much a by-product as it is their food source. When bees make honey they make it to eat it. It is actually bee spit. They collect the pollen and process it and turn it into food for the queen and themselves. What bee farmers do is take their honey and replace it with nutritionally inferior sugar water. Bees also naturally swarm... that is, the colony splits and half the colony goes to another place with the old queen while half the colony stays behind with a new queen bee. In order to prevent this from happening the farmers kill the queen and introduce another one so they all stay. Also during the collecting process some bees do get killed. Sooo... my point is that bee farming is not as peaceful and harmless as it seems and bees lives are interrupted and ended for this practice. I do my best as a committed vegan to avoid honey, but as you've said it is hard to be 100% vegan in this animal consuming world we live in.

 

Hmm ... this is the first I've heard about bee cruelty ... do you have any sources I can check out?

Either way, that doesn't seem to make sense ... if bees are still producing honey, what's to stop them from eating the honey and not the sugar water? How are they supposed to carry sugar water on their legs to the hive anyway? Something just doesn't sound right ...

 

http://www.vegetus.org/honey/honey.htm


http://www.friendsofanimals.org/actionline/fall-2004/is-honey-vegan.html

The above links may offer a better understanding of what I'm talking about and what a bee's life is all about. I learned about them searching around online for more info about honey and veganism. They appear to present a common observation by many researchers about the realities of beekeeping. It's my personal opinion that beekeeping is not a wholesome practice therefore I choose to not indulge in the consumption of it. Oh..... and when I said molt I really meant swarm.. brain freeze on my part...

 

Ok, let me clear up some of this bee crap. As someone who is planning on running an apiary, I REALLY know what I'm talking about. Wild bee colonies in the wild are rapidly dying out in the wild due to disease. Apiculture is absolutely ESSENTIAL to the continuation of our fruit and veg farming industry. They pollinate 90 percent of our crops, without which we VEGANS would be screwed! ANY beekeeper worth his salt and with any care for his colonies, ALWAYS leaves the bees enough of their own food to keep them through any given time frame, ie winter. Sugar syrup is only given in dire emergencies or when treating an illness as a vehicle for medication. Bee colonies are actually MUCH better off with human "interference". We keep them healthy, give them top notch digs, protect them from predators and illness. In exchange they share their EXTRA (and only EXTRA honey is taken) honey crop with us. It's a symbiotic relationship that benefits us all. And bees are not domesticated. They are not genetically engineered. The most that goes on breeding wise is breeding calmer bees and believe me, even the calmest bees can get plenty pissed off enough to defend a colony. And another thing. I have NEVER met a beekeeper who had it in his mind to fatory farm bees. The business sort of attracts zen type people. We LOVE our bees and shepherd them lovingly. There is never a thought to exploit them, even in the big migratory operations. Once last year a trailer truck with hundreds of hives being transported ( perfectly safe for the bees) crashed and dumped the bees, the beekeeper wept in the road because his wards were dying.

 

Okay, this is almost too funny... I'm having a conversation about beekeeping on two different boards!

I love honey. It's always been one of my favorite "food groups." I add it to everything instead of refined sugar. It's a whole food, and has sooo many beneficial qualities that I don't think I could ever consider not eating it.

We discovered our local bee-farmer at the Farmer's Market 8 years ago when a pediatrician with an open mind suggested we try local honey as a way to help my son with some of his airborne allergies. And we've visited him every week during "Market Season" ever since. You just can't be around him for more than 2 minutes without knowing that he loves his bees... and I mean REALLY loves them & would take any precaution to keep them safe.

Bees make too much honey. Nobody knows why, but they always have. That's why in the wild you find things like hollow tree trunks just bursting at the seams with honey. Do you have any idea how long it would take a colony of bees to eat 200 gallons of honey? Neither do I, but simple logic tells me it would be decades. When we started homeschooling, "Mr. Bee" invited us to his home to see how he works with the bees. And he's invited us back every year. Yeah, a few bees get smooshed occasionally, and he says that twice now he's had disease run through & wipe half of his colony out. The man cries when he talks about it.

As someone who has seen how honey is harvested firsthand, I don't see the problem with it. Sure, if you don't want to consume a single animal product/byproduct then you should consider dropping it from your diet. But to me? I'm still not seeing it. Pass the honey please, my grapefruit is lonely!
love,
mom

 

Thanks for the links, shutterfly. I checked them out, but there were a few things that the pages said that didn't match what you said. I also checked out the Wikipedia entry for bees.

Basically, all that honey IS is bee-processed sugar water. Giving corn syrup or sugar syrup to a bee is essentially doing the same thing as providing nectar and water. And just as lawn fertilizer increases the health of one's lawn, the sugar syrup is often formulated by bee keepers to increase the bees' health and potentially even give the bees extra vitamins and such that bees wouldn't get much of otherwise.

However, I also did read about the whole queen replacement process. And that's not something that I am fond of. JazzMama (or any other bee-keepers out there), I'd be interested to hear what you have to say about that.

 

Hey Hikaru - and anyone else interested in what I know from first hand experience......As most folks know Im a country boy....My great grandfather was a beekeeper....my neighbor is a beekeeper....and his neighbor is a beekeeper......I will tell you right not that it is true, THEY DO LOVE THEIR BEES......They are treated with respect.....and most of the folks I know, they let their bees split off to form other colonies, that is how they let their apiary or whatever the fancy term for stock is - grow....they just set up another box for them........Also - When you keep bees, it is much less damaging then when people go bee hunting out in the woods.
When you go honey huntin in the woods you find where the swarm is (i wont go into the process of how you find them)....then you chop down the tree or else you get a bag and put a flash light inside of it and the light will attract the bees into the bagso you can steal ALL of their honey and destroy the nest...........
BUT when you keep the bees - usually instead of them making their own comb and everything, there is an artificial one stuck in their (i forget the term) that way it is easier to control how much honey you take and it does not harm the bees NEARLY as bad - and you can replace it with an empty one so that the bees can keep making their honey....Hell - out here in the country I have never even seen a beekeeper otu in one of those silly lookin suits i see on tv - they just walk out there in their overalls and keep their hands VERY steady lol......But sorry I dont know the terms for everything, this is just what I know from personal experience. peace....oh yeah - that is another reason why you should buy local honey from the farmers market....it's local so you are helping out the folks close to home and chaces are that the bees are happier, although I would seriously doubt these other honey producers treat their bees bad- but I dont know how the big companies do it.

 

I check every label for animal products, including food, cosmetics, and any other thing that is processed... I also check for the no animal testing label.

I'm used to it but now I'm learning of a lot of other hidden names for animal ingredients that i had no idea of...

I felt realy crapy when I found out that things i thought were vegan actualy had animal stuff in it...

PETA has a list of hidden names for animal ingredients, excelent source.

Now i just have to get used to looking for these new names.
I find it hard to avoid every single thing because this world is too complicated in that sence... but i try my best to avoid anything that caused harm to any animal.

I've gotten so involed that I stoped using film... And I studied photography, so that was a big sacrifice for me...

so anyway. I am a big time label reader

 

When a queen grows old, she loses her ability to manage her hive effectively. Production falls and chaos begins to creep into the tidy workings of the hive. When this happens, the bees will begin growing a replacement queen. When the new queen hatches, a battle ensues and the old queen is stung to eath. Not a pretty way to die. Then the hive has to regain it's delicate working balance. Sometimes it doesn't and the hive fails. Some beekeepers feel that it is better to kill the old queen (usually by crushing it quickly between the fingers) before the hive gets too out of balance. This has MUCH more to do with the health of the colony than honey production.

 

It also helps to understand the mentality of a bee. One bee alone is nothing. A bee's motto is, all for one and one for all! It helps to think of the whole colony as one organism. The queens life is only usefull to the hive when she is strong and able to perform her duties She's like a brain in a mammal. If one bee dies for the health of the hive, well, thats what bees are about really.

 

Kind of like killing off the conservatives every now and again keeps society healthy?

(Whoops, I may have said too much!)

Just kidding as always.

 

So what do you think about the queen killing Hikaru? How does it make you feel about honey?

 

Honestly, I'd always heard that there wasn't any cruelty in honey farming, so I was surprised to hear about the whole queen situation. But, as cruel as it may seem ... a human squishing an unhealthy queen doesn't sound any worse than the other bees stinging an unhealthy queen to death. It just sounds like the inevitable. From doing a bit of research, I've heard conflicting reports, mainly regarding swarming and the queen's life expectancy. I've read that queens naturally live for about 5 years, while queens are "often" killed off after only 2 years to prevent swarming. However, I've also read (including the testemonials on this board) that this practice is uncommon and not the standard or norm.

As as far as swarming goes ... it seems like population control to me. Stunting the growth of a society, so to speak. Is stunting growth cruelty? It doesn't seem any more cruel than contraception does, just because not as many bees are going to be brought into life.

So honestly, I can't say for certain, but it seems to me that the indicators point toward a cruelty-free beekeeping practice (to the best of human abilities, of course).