Honey I want to know!

Comments

• mandelicious

  you can call yourself a vegan and eat honey! i find the anti-honey thing very silly. honey and bee pollen were never a part of the bees body, honey and bee pollen are incredibly life promoting, consuming honey and bee pollen does not harm the bees, bees are essential to our food supply! bees carry that pollen so that plants can live.

  lots and lots of vegans eat honey. i heart honey.
• Justine

  Here’s a good Q&A on basic vegan questions and there’s a blurb about honey: http://www.vegan-info.com/faq.html#heading3ques…

  I do not consider honey vegan and neither does Vegan Action, the group that puts the certified vegan logo on packaged products.

  Here’s another Q&A on honey that delves deeper into the subject matter: http://www.vegsource.com/jo/qa/qahoney.htm
• Renoir

  Here is a link that explains it quite well…. http://www.vegetus.org/honey/honey.htm

  And here is my opinion. I am vegan. I do not eat animal products and do my best to not use items that may have used or harmed animals in their production. Bees are very mistreated in some (not all) honey farms. I do not eat honey for one of the same reasons I don’t eat/drink dairy. Cow’s milk is breastmilk for baby cows. Honey is like that for bees. Bees ingest pollen, digest it, and vomit it up for the baby bees to eat. That is honey. If you don’t consider bees as animals, read the link above. I prefer not to eat bee vomit. That is my personal choice.
• Adensspell

  Honey is perfectly acceptable on the RAW diet. It is about what is confortable with you. If you are against it, then don’t do it! I however will never cut out honey from my diet.
• humanimal Raw Newbie

  The term vegan isn’t really legit. Everything that we eat is created by bees. They carry the pollen from plant to plant which in turn reproduce. Anyways the real reason that I don’t eat honey is because the bees are just beginning to dissapear. We are just placing too much stress on them through transportation. Put yourself in the view of a bee. It can be quite horrifying.
• Justine

  Bees would pollinate whether we use them for honey or not. In addition, there are several other species that are pollinators.

  It wouldn’t shock me to find out that the decline in bee populations is directly related to the honey and bee products industry.
• winsome

  Sweeteners are hard when it comes to raw/vegan. Half of them aren’t raw and then if they are, theyre not vegan! So I suppose it depends where you feel you can personally compromise (or if you will at all).

  I do eat honey, but I’m lucky because it is all from my in-laws property (native bees colonised an old hive that belonged to gramps. He harvests the honey, singing to the bees as he takes just enough for me! Personally, i’m terrified of the little critters but he takes pride that hes never stung! lol) It is beautiful liquid gold.

  Then of course, there is the fact that honey has been vomited/processed internally by the bees. But if that turns your stomach, check out this thread (http://goneraw.com/forums/6/topics/2481) on the ‘unique’ relationship between figs and wasps!! :-)
• flybaby

  I totally agree with mandelicious! A lot of vegans eat honey and as long as it don’t harm the bees it is not bad at all. To make sure it is really does not harm the bees choose organic honey. It is really difficult to find really raw sweeteners, especially if you are not living in the US, so if you can find raw organic honey, especially if it is local I’m not against to use it!
• ex-pat Katie

  Renoir, THANKYOU so much for posting that fantastic link! Everybody else, please read it. If on any level your apart-from-honey-veganism is remotely related to concern for the other creatures who are unlucky enough to have to share this planet with us, you’ll do well to reconsider your stance on honey being a suitable food for humans. Organic-ness aside. “Organic” isn’t a synonym for “cruelty-free”!!

  Besides which, I’d be very surprised if the honey you eat (again, “organic” or not) is raw – it is usually heated to remove it from the combs.
• mandelicious

  ok, i read the essay. the honey i buy is indeed from small, organic honey farmers who treat the bees well, and do not heat or filter the honey that i purchase. i don’t expect that we will all agree on this, but i don’t think it’s fair for someone to say a person isn’t vegan because they eat honey, or even for a person to need to say they are vegan-except-for-honey.