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The Honey Pot Argument With A Colleague Over Why Vegans Don’t Eat Honey

by Dave Hewitt | January 3, 2019

As a vegan, you’ll be more than used to the questions.  “What do you eat?”, “Don’t you miss steak?” or “How do you live without cheese?” – the usual sort of stuff. But sometimes, we do get asked about why vegans don’t eat honey.

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Why Vegans Don’t Eat Honey?

So, unsurprisingly, my work non-vegan colleague today asked me a nifty 1-2 set of questions:

1.  So, do you eat honey?

Me:  Erm, no.  No I don’t.

•  Ohhhh, that’s because they have eyes, right?

Me:  Erm, kind of, I guess.  But not really…

The to-ing and fro-ing went back and forth for no more than a minute or so.  That culminated in my stressing that honey is made by bees, exclusively for bees and that it isn’t ours to take in the first place.  By doing so we were being a pretty crummy, over-bearing species that helped itself as it saw fit. The exact reason why vegans don’t eat honey.

Further that humans have proven very good at coming up with convenient names for doing generally shabby things to non-human creatures in an effort to paper-over the inequity of it all.  Consequently, dead cow becomes steak or burgers, while dead pig becomes pork or bacon, dead chickens become nuggets and so on.

I’d like to have captured the subsequent look on my colleague’s face, maybe for posterity, in some sort of key-fob mini-photo arrangement.  Only because there was kind of a frozen look, of both bewilderment and some sort of previously unto, before known recognition of something not being quite right as to what she had readily been told / accepted all of her life regarding animal products.

Veganism really is the great revealer.  It takes away what has been verbally sanitized, what has covered up with convenient phrases, to show the stark reality of what humans for so long have taken for granted, but at such great cost to our animal friends, our health and the planet.

And yep, bees do have faces.  And they work hard for their honey.  And it’s not mine or anyone else’s.

Vegans DON’T eat honey!

Any other questions?

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