Question for vegans

I don't get why vegans don't eat honey. Bees make honey, it doesn't come from them. They actually have to work for it.
When you go to a restaurant, the food doesn't come out of your waiter, right?

It *might*. Some of those waiters are naaaaasty.

:hide:


:)


Anyway, bees make honey but they never wash their hands - that's disgusting...

n/t

:popcorn:

:yoiks:

:spray:

I assume it's only some vegans but still, I'll be interested in the answer too.

because it's an animal product, and evidently harvesting honey kills some bees.

Vegan is a term that was coined in 1944 by a group of British activists who broke off from the Vegetarian Society to form the Vegan Society. Elsie Shrigley and Donald Watson created the term vegan by taking the first three and last two letters of the word vegetarian.

According to the Vegan Society, veganism is a lifestyle that abstains from causing any form of exploitation or cruelty to animals. In practice this means adopting a plant-based diet free of all animal products, including meat, dairy, eggs and honey. That means, according to those who coined the term, honey and all other bee products by definition are not vegan.

Vegans are among the most likely consumers to seek out products that claim to be free of animal ingredients. Honey, along with all other animal derived ingredients, has always been excluded from the vegan lifestyle. It appears that Tom’s of Maine and other companies with similar policies are substituting their judgment for that of the vegan consumer.

Honeybees, like other animals, have a complex central nervous system, which means they are able to experience pain and suffering. At peak honey-production time in 2003, an estimated 155 billion bees, from 2.59 million colonies, were exploited in the U.S. to produce honey for human consumption.<3> Honey, beeswax, bee pollen, royal jelly, propolis and venom are taken from bees for human uses. In the process of acquiring these, beekeepers regularly disturb the bees’ homes by removing the honeycombs from the hive. When this is done some bees will inevitable be injured or crushed, and any bees who sting the beekeepers will also die.

Honey is usually taken from the hive in the spring and fall. In the fall, beekeepers replace honey with white sugar syrup — a poor substitute for the bees’ natural food supply — or kill off the colonies to avoid maintaining the hives throughout the winter.

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

Silly me to assume that we didn't somehow fuck with the bees to get honey. If we didn't we wouldn't be human.

Seriously, though, I really do love honey.

My understanding of veganism is nothing from animals on or in the body or elsewhere.

I also don’t eat anything processed, manufactured, or artificially preserved.

And you’ll never catch me munchin’ on anythin’ flavored or sweetened either.

In fact my diet consist of four foods;

rice,
soy,
tofu,
and lentils.