NB: This thread is not for discussion or debate about the vegan lifestyle. The topic is ‘Surprising things that are not vegan-compliant’. It may be more suited for Factual Questions, but here it is.
Yesterday I learned that these things are not compatible with the vegan lifestyle:
Most printer ink. (Contains glycerine, gelatine, bone chars, beetle shellack)
As a native Californian, I have a passing acquaintance with almonds. Virtually all almond trees rely on bees for pollination. ‘Commercial growers in California pay to rent hives during the almond bloom.’ (And of course the beekeepers harvest the honey.) So while almond milk itself does not contain animal products, and a quick search indicates it is indeed vegan, almonds and almond milk rely on the use of animals to produce the products. (This is probably one of those ‘You have to draw the line somewhere!’ things, but this isn’t the thread to debate that.)
Aside from photographic film and most printer ink, and possibly almond products depending on where you draw the line, what are other things that you never suspected contain animal products?
White sugar often uses bone-derived charcoal to remove color, so it can often not be vegan.
I always thought veganism was all about animal exploitation, and if they’ve been dead for tens of millions of years before man was even a species, how are we exploiting those animals in petroleum? (which was mostly ancient zooplankton and algae, from what I understand)
If you use the almond example, wouldn’t that also exclude most fruits and vegetables? While not all farms use domesticated(?) bees, the practice is very common, and I don’t think a vegan person would have any way of knowing if orange A vs. orange B was or was not pollinated by an owned hive of bees rather than the free-in-nature variety.
Even cotton growers now sometimes use bees. Cotton is self-pollinating, but bees can increase the yield. Hard core vegans will have to wear scratchy hemp fruit-of-the-looms. (No, bees do not pollinate hemp)
I think this falls under ‘Where do you draw the line?’ as opposed to ‘Hey, I didn’t know that contained animal products!’ (Yes, I know I brought up almonds. )
Many fruits typically have pollinating insects or larvae in them, and all soils will have both living arthropods and various clades of worms (which will be injured or killed by tilling and the application of pesticides), and of course the residues of dead animals in various states of decomposition and humification. Limestone is really made by precipitation and compaction of the calcium residues which certainly include the exoskeletons of molluscs and reef structures constructed to house corals but it can be precipitated from non-living sources.
There are essentially no products in modern use that doesn’t in some way utilize material from living or previously-living animal organisms, or displace them in order to extract and refine material resources, so if your definition of “vegan” precludes anything that injures or kills microscopic animals it is literally impossible to keep living. Most definitions of veganism draw the line at ‘exploiting’ animals complex enough to have a brain (or at least a complex central nervous system) under the thesis that they have some level of sentience, causing them to experience pain and fear. Using naturally occurring animal wastes and residues, or the products of instinctual animal ‘labor’ such as pollination is accepted.
Yeah, I mean ultimately nearly everything has been recycled and mixed up a whole lot. Not only does a carrot contain materials derived from previously living animals, it’s highly likely some of those animals were human beings.
I suppose figs would be right out, since they’re not only pollinated by fig wasps, the wasps die inside the fig so you’re eating (mostly dissolved) wasp corpses when you eat a fig.
As I understand it, veganism started out with a group of vegetarians who, on ethical grounds, decided they should object to the use of eggs and dairy, and this grew into a more general ‘don’t exploit animals’ principle. Most vegans seem to interpret this as not taking explicit advantage of anything that necessitates the death, harm or keeping-in-captivity of any organism in the animal kingdom. The people who drew up these guidelines formed The Vegan Society - so if anyone defines the principles, I think it would be them.
Keeping of bees for the purpose of pollination and/or harvesting their honey is considered wrong by the Vegan Society, on the keeping-in-captivity grounds, but also because beekeeping pretty inevitably involves culling at some point or other.
Nature doesn’t like bright dividing lines though and so there will always be edge cases that are challenging.
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