The argument is that keeping bees for the commercial production of honey is animal exploitation.
That does raise the question of the consumption of fruits from plants that are pollinated by kept bees.
I am not a vegan so I am not going to pursue the argument, other than to say that you have to draw the line somewhere or you won’t eat anything except food you grow in your own backyard wild garden. (I guess there are people who do that.)
I’m not sure what’s more annoying, aggressive vegan evangelism or really stupid gotcha attempts by people trying to “own vegans”.
It would seem that peanut butter would not qualify as vegan, since it has insect parts in it. Hell, can you even make flour without bits of insect in it?
I assume he was talking about vegan bread and vegan “butter”. Lots of bread is vegan, even if lots isn’t.
Some of the products marketed as ‘plant butter’ are a bit more than regular margarine - for example they may be formulated to try to mimic butter in terms of specific mechanical properties like melting point or hardness when cold, and/or they may contain cultured ingredients to try to give them a more buttery sort of flavour
That sounds like regular margarine, to me. I mean, that’s what margarine is: It’s plant fat that’s formulated to be mechanically similar to butter, and maybe ingredients meant to mimic the flavor (to the extent that butter has a flavor beyond “fat”).
That said, a fair number of margarines will also contain animal products, including sometimes a little bit of butter itself. A vegan product obviously wouldn’t contain those.
Most of the margarine you can buy in the store has whey in it.
Most of the products that used to be called margarine are now called ‘vegetable spread’ here in the UK - and most of them are formulated to be spreadable straight from the fridge, so they are not direct substitutes for butter in some applications such as puff pastry - and it’s been like that since before they changed from ‘margarine’. There are vegetable baking blocks that are more like butter, but generally quite neutral in flavour.
What about crops that are pollenated by the commercial rental of the bees that produce the honey?
That’s actually a remarkably nuanced view considering the reputation of the source.
There are vegans I’ve met who won’t buy almonds and avocadoes because of specific beekeeping-related concerns. I don’t know if those two crops are particularly egregious examples of the problem, or if it’s one of those things like plastic drinking straws where it’s the tip of the iceberg, but the tip is a convenient thing to chip away at.
Yeah, PETA is pretty weird, IMO (hopefully I’m not straying from the forum guidelines here). Their big splashy stuff is pretty dumb and outrageous, and I think they know that. They’re kinda like media trolls: they want people to talk about them and figure that any publicity is good publicity. Their target demographic is young people who might dig on the outrageousness more than they pay attention to cold logic. It is, I think, a somewhat cynical approach.
But if you look at their policy statement and their on-the-ground work, it’s often fairly nuanced and thoughtful. I say this as a meat-eater who has pets and has no intention of going vegan or giving up my pet ownership: they’re no dumb, pardon the offensive term, bunnies.
It took a little bit, but at some point I realized PETA didn’t make outrageous statements because they’re stupid they made them to garner attention. So when they asked the residents of Fishkill, NY to change their town’s name and asked Games Workshop to ban fur on Space Marines they didn’t expect anything to happen. But it sure put PETA in the news for a little while.
Actually, the “no honey” thing is not universal among vegans. Like the rest of us, vegans are individuals and like many groups of people they quibble amongst themselves on the details.
Still, it’s a good idea, when dealing with vegans, to inquire and/or indicate foods with honey just so they can be clear on what they’re eating (or choosing not to eat).
Also, as a practical matter, just like people who are kosher rely on broadly accepted standards, vegans need to be able to cook for each other without TOO much discussion. So most vegans accept the ordinary standards, which exclude honey, even if gathered from bees kept by hobbyists who pamper their hives, and include almonds, even though the commercial almond industry exploits bees to a far greater extent than local beekeepers do.
Along those lines, I know a lot of vegans who have given up palm oil because of the destruction to orangutan habitats. But palm oil is still considered vegan. And frankly, it’s incredibly difficult to avoid in processed foods. On the flip side, I know a lot of people, myself included, who fall somewhere along the spectrum of making vegan choices more often than pure flavor preferences would dictate, but less than 100% of the time. But there is a fairly broad consensus about what is and isn’t vegan, with only a little bit of gray area, even if the choices actual people make are far more varied.
The problem is, what they get attention for is the trolling and extreme opinions, so people then don’t listen to the more reasonable stances.
The one positive to me is that they give ab easy target. You can say something like “Yeah, PETA is too extreme, but what about the Humane Society?” In other words, extreme statements can help move the Overton window.
The bad thing is that it can taint the whole movement by association.
Especially (ironically) prepared vegan foods - since the room temperature properties of palm oil are similar to those of animal fats.