Here we are again at the draining task of providing critical review of/refutation to a plethora of brazenly or subtly anti-vegan literature in the internet. The piece that has been looked at is admittedly a bit more well argued than most anti-vegan click-bait trash that pops up everyday (this one is from more than a decade ago, but still used by non-vegans during arguments online). So, here we go. Lines of article (being critiqued) in italics and review lines in bold as usual.
https://slate.com/human-interest/2008/07/why-vegans-can-t-decide-whether-they-re-allowed-to-eat-honey.html
Is honey the dairy of the insect world?
Milk is a secretion of the mammary glands of a mammal meant for the nourishment and growth of their calves whereas honey is the regurgitation of bees from the stomach, transferred between mouths of several bees and then partially dehydrated in the beehive to be stored for hard times (especially winter). Honey is mostly carbohydrates and small proportion of water along with minor components, whereas milk is mostly water with a small proportion of carbohydrates with minor components. Honey is nothing like dairy, in mechanism of biological production, storage, release, nor in composition.
There’s never been a better time to be a half-assed vegetarian. Five years ago, the American Dialect Society honored the word flexitarian for its utility in describing a growing demographic—the “vegetarian who occasionally eats meat.” Now there’s evidence that going flexi is good for the environment and good for your health. A study released last October found that a plant-based diet, augmented with a small amount of dairy and meat, maximizes land-use efficiency. In January, Michael Pollan distilled the entire field of nutritional science into three rules for a healthy diet: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” According to a poll released last week, Americans seem to be listening: Thirteen percent of U.S. adults are “semivegetarian,” meaning they eat meat with fewer than half of all their meals. In comparison, true vegetarians—those who never, ever consume animal flesh—compose just 1 percent.
Let’s address the second part of the first claim here - that going “flexi” is good for the health. The author has not provided any references for it, and the one given in the line talking about going “flexi” is not working. So, it can be avoided altogether, as there is nothing to counter but just an unsubstantiated claim. As for the first part of the claim, it is stated by the author that a study found that “a plant-based diet, augmented with a small amount of dairy and meat, maximizes land-use efficiency”. Let’s look at this statement in detail. As per the study published in 2007, ALL the diets considered for the statistical analysis had varying amounts of dairy (it’s clear from second paragraph included in “Design of Diets” header under the “Methods” part, as well as the caveat by authors “more substantial differences may have been observed had a vegan diet been included among the diet scenarios.” in the “Discussion and Conclusions” part). This means that they didn’t even look at completely plant-based diets which have been found to be far more efficient worldwide in several intensive studies (this article talks about it). Even with the dairy, the statement is factually incorrect as the study results shows that out of 42 diets analysed, ALL 6 diets that included ZERO amount of meat, that too without a shadow of doubt (error bars not even exceeding the lower limit of the error bars of the diets which include even the least amount of meat), had lowest land use (See Figure 1 in the paper).
But, a layman like the author (of Slate article) is not bound to notice the detail considering the fact that they had cited an article (let’s call it B1 for avoiding confusion) which derives completely from an another article (copied verbatim) (B2) both of which doesn’t link the actual study. B2 is from the institution of the authors itself (Cornell University). So, it’s sort of a press release. One of the quotes from the press release by the authors is contradictory to the results of the study: "Surprisingly, however, a vegetarian diet is not necessarily the most efficient in terms of land use," said Peters.” (see Figure 1). Also, most people who are biased against veganism are likely to miss the word “necessarily” even if the statement was factually correct. Even in terms of carrying capacity, without a shadow of doubt, the two diets which feeds most number of people are vegetarian diets with ZERO amounts of meat. In addition, all the vegetarian diets (ZERO % meat) was above or on par with majority of the ones which included meat (see figure number 2 & 3 in the paper). In fact, only a few (n=10 give or take one, as it is difficult to comprehend the upper lines of figure 2 given the chaotic intersection of error bars) were on par or provided higher carrying capacity compared to the 4 vegetarian diet scenarios which had competition from other scenarios.
The headline of B1 is “Diet With A Little Meat Uses Less Land Than Many Vegetarian Diets”. This is also factually incorrect as ZERO diets which included meat used less land than vegetarian diets (Figure 1). This is a clearly unscientific heading from a “Science” website. The headline for B2 on the other hand is ambiguous: “Diet for small planet may be most efficient if it includes dairy and a little meat, Cornell researchers report”. The researchers surely said something on the same lines in the concluding parts of the paper, which has been so carefully crafted so that while remaining factually correct, it gives the appearance that they are concluding that a diet which includes meat is better than a vegetarian diet. But, look closely and one can understand that this comparison is only in terms of a high-fat vegetarian diet compared to low-fat low-meat diets. The devil is in the details. The study shows that low-fat vegetarian diets are clearly the most efficient in terms of land use and carrying capacity. But, there is yet another problem - a problem in the paper itself. Despite stating that all diets had dairy in them, the authors make this statement: “Thus, we conclude that the inclusion of beef and milk in the diet can increase the number of people fed from the land base relative to a vegan diet, up to the point that land limited to pasture and perennial forages has been fully utilized”. This looks like the authors have conflated lacto-vegetarianism with veganism or used “vegan” as a shortform for “vegetarianism”. This is a big blunder considering the fact that they stated afterwards, in the same section that “more substantial differences may have been observed had a vegan diet been included among the diet scenarios.”. In the B2 title, the “Diet for a small planet” is a reference to the 1971 bestselling book by Frances Moore Lappé who advocated for VEGETARIANISM (and not VEGANISM). This author of book propagated food myths like “Complementary Protein” myth, while advocating vegetarian diets from an environmental perspective. In addition to all this, they missed VERY IMPORTANT aspects of the study - it ONLY looked into i) land use ii) of ‘food’* ‘produced’** within New York, just one city in the entire world. The claim of cows raised for their secretions and flesh in New York using less fertile land than some crops for direct consumption is for foraging is hence lacking nuance as much of the world’s demand for cow/buffalo secretions and bovine flesh (‘beef’) is met from areas like pristine tropical rainforests such as the Amazon rainforest where the trees are clear felled and all vegetation cleared for making animal fodder and grazing/pasture land. The soil of these rainforests may not be as fertile as deciduous forest, but they support a plethora of wild organisms, including rare plants and animals who would have otherwise not been killed or displaced. Even within New York, it didn’t look into other issues with ‘animal agriculture’, such as soil erosion due to grazing pressure, methane emissions by enteric fermentation by bovines, faeces of these animals in huge quantities seeping or dumped into water bodies like lakes or rivers (from where it ends into water supply and/or the oceans and causing accelerated eutrophication and suffocating aquatic lifeforms).
This sort of shameless cherry-picking and misinterpreting/manipulating the data/text of studies and making factually incorrect click-bait headlines is rampant in the media these days, and has been exposed and debunked thoroughly with respect to studies carried out. Here’s a very good example, which talks about the efficiency of land use in terms of a completely plant-based diet (in addition to several other environmental issues). Journalistic integrity is very sparse these days. Now coming to the main point: veganism is not something to do with environmental protection (as it is just a benefit of veganism) nor human health. There is certainly a great overlap between the primary reason behind veganism (non-exploitation of animals) and environmentalism (and an even weaker one with human health), as animals need a good environment to thrive and being healthy reduces the chances of usage of animal-tested medicines, but veganism should not be conflated with environmentalism nor a human health movement. All are necessary social movements, and there is a great to minor overlap, but the focus should remain.
The flexitarian ethic is beginning to creep into the most ardent sector of the meat-free population: the vegans. In recent years, some in the community have begun to loosen up the strict definitions and bright-line rules that once defined the movement. You’ll never find a self-respecting vegan downing a glass of milk or munching on a slice of buttered toast. But the modern adherent may be a little more accommodating when it comes to the dairy of the insect world: He may have relaxed his principles enough to enjoy a spoonful of honey.
Sad that veganism is drifting away from the animal rights movement due to several welfarist organizations, plant based celebrities claiming to be vegan, vegan apologists, etc., but these group(s) of morally inconsistent people/organizations do not represent veganism. One should never find a vegan, self-respecting or not, downing a glass or milk, or a slice of buttered toast, or even a spoonful of honey. This is not some "cult like dogmatic vegan rule." This is because when one understands that exploiting animals for food, clothing, entertainment, labour or for any other purpose, is immoral, there is no way for them to intentionally consume any of the substances derived from animal exploitation. It becomes a moral duty. The "modern adherents", as described by the author are nothing but morally inconsistent animal substance addicts who are always trying to find excuses to gulp down some animal products.
There is no more contentious question in the world of veganism than the one posed by honey. A fierce doctrinal debate over its status has raged for decades; it turns up on almost every community FAQ and remains so ubiquitous and unresolved that radio host Rachel Maddow proposed to ask celebrity vegan Dennis Kucinich about it during last year’s CNN/YouTube presidential debate. Does honey qualify as a forbidden animal product since it’s made by bees? Or is it OK since the bees don’t seem too put out by making it?
ARA has never even heard that honey was such a "contentious" issue. It was, and is, always a product of animal exploitation and the vegan community never considered it vegan. Probably we missed the debates and arguments because we didn't hang out in the communities of the morally inconsistent and apologetic, falsely self proclaimed "vegans". And if you want to know if something is vegan or not, you should be asking an actual vegan, not some confused celebrity politician claiming to be vegan, as most of them are just conveniently plant based. Let’s clear the example of the progressive environmentalist politician Dennis Kucinich himself. As has been documented here in this article, Kucinich didn't turn vegan, he turned plant-based purely for his health: “The search is on for vegan food. Kucinich committed to this diet in 1994 when he noticed it reduced the effects of his Crohn’s disease. He added Chinese herbal medicine, and he says the combination made the Crohn’s disappear”. It’s still unclear if he understands what veganism is or not, given the responses to personal interviews going like this: “I don’t force that choice on anyone. What I do say is that I think Americans are generally more open to changes in diet and lifestyle than most people give them credit, specifically for health reasons. There is a link between human health and the choices that people make with their diets. Now again, I don’t believe that you can tell anyone what to eat. I think it’s the worst thing in the world to start to tell people—to start to dictate—choices of food. You just can’t do that. But you can show people that if they make choices in a certain way, healthy choices, it might improve the environment. It’s an educational process.”. Although he has helped in some animal welfare and protection legislation and funding, his understanding is that veganism can be done for personal health gain or environmental reasons, when both of these are merely benefits of turning vegan (for the victims - sentient animals).
Old-guard vegans have no patience for this sort of equivocation: Animal products are off-limits, period. Indeed, the first Vegan Society was created in 1944 to counter the detestable, flexitarian tendencies of early animal rights activists. Founder Donald Watson called their namby-pamby lacto-vegetarianism “a halfway house between flesh-eating and a truly human, civilized diet” and implored his followers to join him in making the “full journey.” That journey, as the society has since defined it, takes no uncertain position on honey—it’s summarily banned, along with bee pollen, bee venom, propolis, and royal jelly.
This was not out of some irrational blind beliefs or in self gaining interests. They had a strong reason for it which is obvious to anyone who is not a honey addict - bees travel thousands of miles, visiting millions of flowers, to collect the required nectar to make honey for themselves and definitely not for all of humanity. No wonder "old-guard vegans" and actual vegans of the current times consider honey "off-limits".
The hard-liners argue that beekeeping, like dairy farming, is cruel and exploitative. The bees are forced to construct their honeycombs in racks of removable trays, according to a design that standardizes the size of each hexagonal chamber. (Some say the more chaotic combs found in the wild are less vulnerable to parasitic mites.) Queens are imprisoned in certain parts of the hive, while colonies are split to increase production and sprinkled with prophylactic antibiotics. In the meantime, keepers control the animals by pumping their hives full of smoke, which masks the scent of their alarm pheromones and keeps them from defending their honey stores. And some say the bees aren’t making the honey for us, so its removal from the hive could be construed as a form of theft. (Last year’s animated feature, Bee Movie, imagined the legal implications of this idea.)
Pretty clear now isn't it?
So, any vegan who eats honey but avoids milk is making the tacit assumption that the pain experienced by a bee counts for something less than the pain experienced by a cow. It’s exactly the sort of compromise that so appalled Watson and the early vegans. Once you’ve allowed yourself to equivocate on animal suffering, how do you handle all the other borderline cases of insect exploitation? What about silkworms and cochineal bugs? Come to think of it, does a bee feel any less pain than a scallop or an oyster? Why can’t we eat them, too?
(For the record, pearls aren’t vegan. Oysters are killed during the harvest and often suffer the indignity of having a hole cut into their gonads.)
Not just early vegans, current actual vegans also hold the same position because it's clearly speciesist to avoid milk and milk products by giving moral consideration to cows but consuming honey and honey products while ignoring that bees also deserve moral consideration. Coming to the questions at the end in the above paragraph, the degree of pain that a being experiences is morally irrelevant when both can be easily avoided. What's morally relevant is whether they are capable of feeling any pain. And whether they have interests and preferences that get neglected while humans exploit them for their substances. Are those animal substances a necessity for the human species? If it's not a necessity, why are we even exploiting them? Taste, pleasure, convenience, habit? You'll find that the answers to these questions doesn't justify their exploitation. Only in a scenario where there is no choice (such as being tied up and having a gun to one’s head) but to choose between consuming dairy and honey, would choosing honey be more ethically sound.
The flexitarians counter that if you follow the hard-line argument to its logical extreme, you end up with a diet so restrictive it borders on the absurd. After all, you can’t worry over the ethics of honey production without worrying over the entire beekeeping industry. Honey accounts for only a small percentage of the total honeybee economy in the United States; most comes from the use of rental hives to pollinate fruit and vegetable crops. According to food journalist Rowan Jacobson, whose book Fruitless Fall comes out this September, commercial bees are used in the production of about 100 foods, including almonds, avocados, broccoli, canola, cherries, cucumbers, lettuce, peaches, pears, plums, sunflowers, and tomatoes. Even the clover and alfalfa crops we feed to dairy cows are sometimes pollinated by bees.
The general "flexitarian" argument that they like to consume animal substances once in a while is clearly nonsensical from a moral standpoint. However, the argument of the "flexitarians" here is only about honey, because they find other animal products like "meat", "dairy", eggs, etc. to be morally objectionable, at least that's what the article says till now. So just excluding or adding honey would not make their diet "so restrictive" or not restrictive. It's just an excuse to include honey which fails as an argument. This becomes more absurd considering the fact that there are plenty of tasty and healthy vegan honey alternatives.
"After all, you can’t worry over the ethics of honey production without worrying over the entire beekeeping industry." This is a good point. There are 2 things to consider here,
1. Worrying about the ethics of honey.
2. Worrying about the entire beekeeping industry.
The author says we cannot worry about the ethics of honey without worrying about the ethics of the entire beekeeping industry. But, we certainly can. By this, we do not mean that we should not worry about honey and ignore the beekeeping industry. What we mean is that, though both are related issues, the products of both these issues are different - one is honey, and the other are fruits, vegetables and nuts. Now, look at these products and their necessities separately - Is eating honey necessary? No. Is eating fruits, vegetables and nuts necessary? Yes. How would it be logical or reasonable to consume/use honey when it is absolutely not necessary, and the only reason to consume honey is just that consuming/using fruits and vegetables is necessary? So we CAN stop using honey and still use fruits and vegetables that come from the use of bees (still not saying we can completely ignore the beekeeping industry). After all, if one is genuinely concerned about bees and their rights, they should try and look for ways to stop using them completely and to free them, instead of using all of the products of their exploitation just because they are not able to ditch one of their products.
Now that honey is out of the way, because using/consuming honey is not a necessity and it's not impossible to ditch honey just because we are not able to ditch fruits and veggies, we can look at the second point closely. How does the beekeeping industry work? According to the author, farmers use rental hives from the beekeeping industry, or the farmers may have their own bee hives for pollination. If the honey consumption is still on, the bees are exploited for their honey, along with using their "pollination labour" (which is what is happening). So stealing honey from these bees would be like making them work for us like slaves, and also steal their food. Assuming that honey is not stolen from them, there is still the question of using their labour for pollination. Bees don’t pollinate because they want to do just that. They do it without being forced to because pollination happens by “accident” because honeybees rub against the floral anther with pollen grains and later, the stigma where they are fertilized while going to and coming back from sucking nectar from the flowers. They don't do it for us, or because of us making them do it. Even though bees are reared or rented from beekeepers, are they put into hard labour by farmers to meet the expected fruit, vegetable and nut produce? They are rented and moved into the fields in the pollinating season and the bees inadvertently pollinate the crops/orchards themselves. It's not like the farmers chain each and every bee and force them to collect the pollen grain from the male anther of a flower to the female stigma of same/different flower. They do it out of their own free will. In case of doubt that farmers don't treat the bees well, or harm them, or kill them in fields and transportation, there is no way to identify if a fruit or vegetable in the market is obtained from human-kept-bee pollination or from natural pollination agriculture.
And bees aren't the only animals who pollinate. Wasps, hornets, hummingbirds, bats, beetles and many others pollinate too. In fact, the portrayal of domesticated honeybees as master pollinators and saviours of the environment are inherently false, most likely peddled by beekeepers themselves. This is because, the domesticated honey bees (Apis mellifera in most western countries) compete with bee populations which carry out the ecosystem “service” of pollination (more than 20,000 wild bee species contributing to crop pollination around the world!). A recently published article in the leading journal Science has thrown some light on the issue. So, stopping commercial beekeeping actually solves the vegan dilemma of using the services of enslaved bees, because wild and freely roaming bees can take over. The real reason why commercial beekeeping of honeybees and not any others bees (who don’t live in hives or produce honey), including “commercial pollination”, boomed to the level it is today and still thrives is very likely because they had and have honey, beeswax and bee pollen, in addition to the individuals themselves (workers and queen), to steal from the maintained bee colonies to sell for profit. As the author mentioned, most honey comes from the rental hives maintained for fruit and vegetable pollination. From this, it's understandable that bees are exploited in rental hives not purely because they pollinate (as many other animals also pollinate) but because they also produce honey and other bee “products” which are major sources of income for the rental hives.
Again, honey aside, we are still not in a position to live/thrive (or even survive) without fruits, vegetables, nuts and grains. On the contrary, as already understood, avoiding honey is perfectly possible. Also, the farmers and beekeepers are not vegan. At the end of the day, we all can do only what we can, and ditching honey is one of the things which we all can do. Vegans who are able to grow food in their backyards are already doing that. One of us has maintained a small rooftop veganic garden which at its prime offered about 20 different types of fruits/vegetables (direct from farm to kitchen) in addition to attracting large hordes of pollinators (especially bees and butterflies). But, most vegans probably don't even have backyards. When more and more people go vegan, there will be fewer and fewer beekeepers and more vegan farmers who do veganic farming and are mindful of the wild bees (and other animals, including insects) in their farms, they take care not to cause them harm as much as possible. As more people turn vegan, new methods and technology would also arise to reduce our harm footprint even more.
Life for these rental bees may be far worse than it is for the ones producing honey. The industrial pollinators face all the same hardships, plus a few more: They spend much of their lives sealed in the back of 18-wheelers, subsisting on a diet of high-fructose corn syrup as they’re shipped back and forth across the country. Husbandry and breeding practices have reduced their genetic diversity and left them particularly susceptible to large-scale die-offs.
As mentioned above, as sad and morally wrong it is, we cannot do much as of right now. One way in the future where these rental bee usage might fall is when awareness about the detrimental environmental impacts of domestic honey bee pollinators is turned into action, and veganic farming rises wherein vegan farmers grow and produce fruits and vegetables by using only natural means of pollination (by wild and free-roaming animals). Meanwhile, we can try our best to stop using plant based foods that are evidently obtained from explicit animal use in pollination, like California almonds.
Even the vegans who abstain from honey end up dining on the sweat and hemolymph of exploited bees. There isn’t really an alternative: We can’t replace our insects of burden with machines, as we’ve done for the mules that once pulled our tractor rakes. You might try to do right by seeking out wind-pollinated grains and fruits tended by wild insects. But what about the bugs that inevitably perish in the course of any large-scale agriculture? Even the organic farmers are culpable: They may not spray synthetic pesticides, but they do make use of natural chemicals and predators to kill off unwanted animals.
"Even the vegans who abstain from honey end up dining on the sweat and hemolymph of exploited bees." Not necessarily, as we don't know for sure if the fruits and vegetables we are dining on are obtained from enslaved rental bees or from free living wild pollinators. And even if we are doing it, it is NOT a justification to consume honey. The goal, as well as what's clear from the definition of veganism, is excluding animal use and harm as far as practical and practicable. It is as the author explains here, there is no alternative in terms of choice as of now. But choosing wind-pollinated grains and fruits, if identifiable and distinguishable from rental bee pollinated fruits and grains, is still a least harm way of eating because the bugs and rodents who inevitably perish, accidentally and unintentionally, in the course of large scale agriculture, due to pesticides, insecticides and transportation, storage, etc. will still inevitably perish even with the rental bee pollinated ones. So the rental bee pollinated ones are still responsible for both the harm caused to rental bees, and also for the accidental and unintentional deaths of various bugs and rodents in above mentioned ways. The question of intentional killing of animals by farmers needs addressal by trying to get to them to stop such unwanton killings.
In the face of this insectile carnage, vegans fall back on a common-sense dictum that animal suffering should be “reasonably avoided” as opposed to “avoided at any cost.” By this logic, it’s not a sin to treat a termite infestation that’s imperiling your house, nor should you worry over the gnats that get squashed on your windshield whenever you drive to the farmer’s market. But that doctrine won’t absolve us for eating honey. In the first place, honey is quite easy to avoid—especially compared with everything else in the Vegan Society’s codex of forbidden foodstuffs. (A scrupulous eater must also attend to calcium mesoinositol, sodium stearoyl-2-lactylate, disodium guanylate, and dozens more unpronounceable, animal-derived chemicals.) Honey doesn’t fill any nutritional gap, nor is it the only acceptable vegan sweetener.
Agreed to most of this paragraph. Just to clarify the terms in - “reasonably avoided” as opposed to “avoided at any cost,'' people who are actually vegans, who care about animals, and their harm footprint, lean towards the term “avoid at any cost” if the cost is tolerable. Though this seems similar to “reasonably avoided”, this seems somewhat like "trying less" or "not trying enough". When someone truly respects the rights of all other animals, and try not to be a speciesist, they do (and should do) everything in their power to avoid causing harm to others because not doing so is morally inconsistent.
Though it's not a "sin" to treat a termite infestation that's imperiling your house, and you cannot do much about the gnats who get squashed on your windshield whenever you drive, it's not okay to just go ahead and kill all the termites and gnats even if they aren't posing any harm or threat to us. If you don't want to be a speciesist (We hope so), or at least trying not to be one like most actual vegans do, you would try to explore ethical ways to protect your house from the termites without causing them harm as far as practically possible.
Those dozens of unpronounceable animal-derived chemicals are most probably byproducts, and it's very difficult, and sometimes impractical to find all the places where they are used, when there is a dearth of information. Thankfully, these days almost all commercial food products come with detailed ingredients lists and allergen information. Therefore, most do (and should do) avoid such substances as and when they are aware about them.
From a practical perspective, all this back-and-forth doesn’t help anyone (or any animal). You either eat honey or you don’t; to debate the question in public only makes the vegan movement seem silly and dogmatic. According to Matthew Ball, the executive director of Vegan Outreach, the desire for clear dietary rules and restrictions makes little difference in the grand calculus of animal suffering: “What vegans do personally matters little,” he says. “If we present veganism as being about the exploitation of honeybees, it makes it easier to ignore the real, noncontroversial suffering” of everything else. Ball doesn’t eat honey himself, but he’d sooner recruit five vegans who remain ambivalent about insect rights than one zealot who follows every last Vegan Society rule.
Yes, from the practical perspective (not from the moral one), the back-and-forth doesn't really help anyone, considering the current population of vegans regionally where honey is produced and sold. But when our population goes significantly higher in the future (which it will) and all the "modern vegans" are like "honey is not non-vegan, it doesn't matter," then you'll be doing a grave injustice to the honey bees because those bees would be free if it wasn't for the honey consuming "modern vegans" in significantly higher numbers.
Coming to what Matthew Ball said, will be deconstructed sentence by sentence to show how nonsensical it really is.
"the desire for clear dietary rules and restrictions makes little difference in the grand calculus of animal suffering: “What vegans do personally matters little,” he says.
It probably does not right now, as explained above - it depends on the population. But when the vegan population increases (which it will) in the future, it will definitely make a huge difference in the "grand calculus of animal suffering" and it will almost entirely depend on the type of "modern vegans" (apologists, welfarists, speciesists, "flexitarians", "veganish", etc.) the population consists of. If significant portions of the “modern vegan” population consumes some kind of animal substances, like 10% of them cheese, 20% of them honey, 15% of them eggs, 20% of them fishes***, for instance, then those animals who would have been free from suffering if all the vegan population were on morally consistent diets (viz completely plant based), will still be suffering due to those portions of "modern vegans" with morally inconsistent and conveniently changing dietary rules. What “vegans” do personally matters A LOT, in future anyway, and especially in forming the mindsets and views of new vegans whom these current “vegans” influence. Under proper influence which considers fellow animals' interests unapologetically and consistently, they will see other animals as the individuals they are, and give them the respect they deserve. And under improper and misinformed influence which places self interests over other animals' interests, they will keep on seeing other animals as food, objects, commodities and creatures at their mercy.
“If we present veganism as being about the exploitation of honeybees, it makes it easier to ignore the real, noncontroversial suffering” of everything else."
From this, Bell sounds speciesist as he clearly discards and disregards the potential suffering of honeybees. No one is asking to present veganism as being only about the exploitation of honeybees to ignore other animals' suffering. While honeybees' suffering is biologically plausible, at the moment there isn’t much evidence to support it, but nonetheless, given the lack of conclusivity of studies, a true vegan always uses the precautionary principle and not consume animals with a system evolved for detecting and experiencing pain (a nervous system). Bees are shown to exhibit quite intelligent behaviour which may be indicative of presence of consciousness (in the insect scale) which allows them to experience pain (which is subjective in nature). Bell says this only because he's not a honey bee, or because he's not as capable of empathetically connecting to honeybees as he's capable of connecting to other species whose suffering he sees as "real". How can he judge the subjective suffering of different species without credible non-controversial and conclusive scientific evidence for absence of pain in honeybees and other insects? The attitude is undeniably speciesist!
That may be the most important lesson to come out of this debate: You’ll catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.
Veganism is not about trapping non-vegans into veganism using honey as a bait. The quote makes little to no sense in the context and definitely not funny, considering the fact that flies die a horrible death while stuck in viscous fluids. We want them to be free (except those mosquitoes who annoy, but even for them, one would not wish for such a gruesome death). We want people to turn vegan, not just plant based, or vegetarian, or flexitarian, or pescatarian, or some other random fancy word that's made up to label the kind of animals they exploit. The goal is animal liberation. Not moderated exploitation.
If you want to know the "what and why" of veganism, here is a great article to start,
https://veganethos.wordpress.com/2014/12/05/veganism-what-and-why/
* From a non-speciesist perspective, animals are not “food”.
** Animals are not “produced”, they were enslaved and raised for exploitation and/or slaughter.
*** The usage of the term 'fishes' is intentional. Using 'fish' while referring to more than one individual animals is speciesist.
https://www.facebook.com/AnimalRightsAllegiance/photos/a.349418605657853/435518553714524/
Join https://www.facebook.com/groups/553752208470902/ to unlearn speciesist language.
https://slate.com/human-interest/2008/07/why-vegans-can-t-decide-whether-they-re-allowed-to-eat-honey.html
Is honey the dairy of the insect world?
Milk is a secretion of the mammary glands of a mammal meant for the nourishment and growth of their calves whereas honey is the regurgitation of bees from the stomach, transferred between mouths of several bees and then partially dehydrated in the beehive to be stored for hard times (especially winter). Honey is mostly carbohydrates and small proportion of water along with minor components, whereas milk is mostly water with a small proportion of carbohydrates with minor components. Honey is nothing like dairy, in mechanism of biological production, storage, release, nor in composition.
There’s never been a better time to be a half-assed vegetarian. Five years ago, the American Dialect Society honored the word flexitarian for its utility in describing a growing demographic—the “vegetarian who occasionally eats meat.” Now there’s evidence that going flexi is good for the environment and good for your health. A study released last October found that a plant-based diet, augmented with a small amount of dairy and meat, maximizes land-use efficiency. In January, Michael Pollan distilled the entire field of nutritional science into three rules for a healthy diet: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” According to a poll released last week, Americans seem to be listening: Thirteen percent of U.S. adults are “semivegetarian,” meaning they eat meat with fewer than half of all their meals. In comparison, true vegetarians—those who never, ever consume animal flesh—compose just 1 percent.
Let’s address the second part of the first claim here - that going “flexi” is good for the health. The author has not provided any references for it, and the one given in the line talking about going “flexi” is not working. So, it can be avoided altogether, as there is nothing to counter but just an unsubstantiated claim. As for the first part of the claim, it is stated by the author that a study found that “a plant-based diet, augmented with a small amount of dairy and meat, maximizes land-use efficiency”. Let’s look at this statement in detail. As per the study published in 2007, ALL the diets considered for the statistical analysis had varying amounts of dairy (it’s clear from second paragraph included in “Design of Diets” header under the “Methods” part, as well as the caveat by authors “more substantial differences may have been observed had a vegan diet been included among the diet scenarios.” in the “Discussion and Conclusions” part). This means that they didn’t even look at completely plant-based diets which have been found to be far more efficient worldwide in several intensive studies (this article talks about it). Even with the dairy, the statement is factually incorrect as the study results shows that out of 42 diets analysed, ALL 6 diets that included ZERO amount of meat, that too without a shadow of doubt (error bars not even exceeding the lower limit of the error bars of the diets which include even the least amount of meat), had lowest land use (See Figure 1 in the paper).
But, a layman like the author (of Slate article) is not bound to notice the detail considering the fact that they had cited an article (let’s call it B1 for avoiding confusion) which derives completely from an another article (copied verbatim) (B2) both of which doesn’t link the actual study. B2 is from the institution of the authors itself (Cornell University). So, it’s sort of a press release. One of the quotes from the press release by the authors is contradictory to the results of the study: "Surprisingly, however, a vegetarian diet is not necessarily the most efficient in terms of land use," said Peters.” (see Figure 1). Also, most people who are biased against veganism are likely to miss the word “necessarily” even if the statement was factually correct. Even in terms of carrying capacity, without a shadow of doubt, the two diets which feeds most number of people are vegetarian diets with ZERO amounts of meat. In addition, all the vegetarian diets (ZERO % meat) was above or on par with majority of the ones which included meat (see figure number 2 & 3 in the paper). In fact, only a few (n=10 give or take one, as it is difficult to comprehend the upper lines of figure 2 given the chaotic intersection of error bars) were on par or provided higher carrying capacity compared to the 4 vegetarian diet scenarios which had competition from other scenarios.
The headline of B1 is “Diet With A Little Meat Uses Less Land Than Many Vegetarian Diets”. This is also factually incorrect as ZERO diets which included meat used less land than vegetarian diets (Figure 1). This is a clearly unscientific heading from a “Science” website. The headline for B2 on the other hand is ambiguous: “Diet for small planet may be most efficient if it includes dairy and a little meat, Cornell researchers report”. The researchers surely said something on the same lines in the concluding parts of the paper, which has been so carefully crafted so that while remaining factually correct, it gives the appearance that they are concluding that a diet which includes meat is better than a vegetarian diet. But, look closely and one can understand that this comparison is only in terms of a high-fat vegetarian diet compared to low-fat low-meat diets. The devil is in the details. The study shows that low-fat vegetarian diets are clearly the most efficient in terms of land use and carrying capacity. But, there is yet another problem - a problem in the paper itself. Despite stating that all diets had dairy in them, the authors make this statement: “Thus, we conclude that the inclusion of beef and milk in the diet can increase the number of people fed from the land base relative to a vegan diet, up to the point that land limited to pasture and perennial forages has been fully utilized”. This looks like the authors have conflated lacto-vegetarianism with veganism or used “vegan” as a shortform for “vegetarianism”. This is a big blunder considering the fact that they stated afterwards, in the same section that “more substantial differences may have been observed had a vegan diet been included among the diet scenarios.”. In the B2 title, the “Diet for a small planet” is a reference to the 1971 bestselling book by Frances Moore Lappé who advocated for VEGETARIANISM (and not VEGANISM). This author of book propagated food myths like “Complementary Protein” myth, while advocating vegetarian diets from an environmental perspective. In addition to all this, they missed VERY IMPORTANT aspects of the study - it ONLY looked into i) land use ii) of ‘food’* ‘produced’** within New York, just one city in the entire world. The claim of cows raised for their secretions and flesh in New York using less fertile land than some crops for direct consumption is for foraging is hence lacking nuance as much of the world’s demand for cow/buffalo secretions and bovine flesh (‘beef’) is met from areas like pristine tropical rainforests such as the Amazon rainforest where the trees are clear felled and all vegetation cleared for making animal fodder and grazing/pasture land. The soil of these rainforests may not be as fertile as deciduous forest, but they support a plethora of wild organisms, including rare plants and animals who would have otherwise not been killed or displaced. Even within New York, it didn’t look into other issues with ‘animal agriculture’, such as soil erosion due to grazing pressure, methane emissions by enteric fermentation by bovines, faeces of these animals in huge quantities seeping or dumped into water bodies like lakes or rivers (from where it ends into water supply and/or the oceans and causing accelerated eutrophication and suffocating aquatic lifeforms).
This sort of shameless cherry-picking and misinterpreting/manipulating the data/text of studies and making factually incorrect click-bait headlines is rampant in the media these days, and has been exposed and debunked thoroughly with respect to studies carried out. Here’s a very good example, which talks about the efficiency of land use in terms of a completely plant-based diet (in addition to several other environmental issues). Journalistic integrity is very sparse these days. Now coming to the main point: veganism is not something to do with environmental protection (as it is just a benefit of veganism) nor human health. There is certainly a great overlap between the primary reason behind veganism (non-exploitation of animals) and environmentalism (and an even weaker one with human health), as animals need a good environment to thrive and being healthy reduces the chances of usage of animal-tested medicines, but veganism should not be conflated with environmentalism nor a human health movement. All are necessary social movements, and there is a great to minor overlap, but the focus should remain.
The flexitarian ethic is beginning to creep into the most ardent sector of the meat-free population: the vegans. In recent years, some in the community have begun to loosen up the strict definitions and bright-line rules that once defined the movement. You’ll never find a self-respecting vegan downing a glass of milk or munching on a slice of buttered toast. But the modern adherent may be a little more accommodating when it comes to the dairy of the insect world: He may have relaxed his principles enough to enjoy a spoonful of honey.
Sad that veganism is drifting away from the animal rights movement due to several welfarist organizations, plant based celebrities claiming to be vegan, vegan apologists, etc., but these group(s) of morally inconsistent people/organizations do not represent veganism. One should never find a vegan, self-respecting or not, downing a glass or milk, or a slice of buttered toast, or even a spoonful of honey. This is not some "cult like dogmatic vegan rule." This is because when one understands that exploiting animals for food, clothing, entertainment, labour or for any other purpose, is immoral, there is no way for them to intentionally consume any of the substances derived from animal exploitation. It becomes a moral duty. The "modern adherents", as described by the author are nothing but morally inconsistent animal substance addicts who are always trying to find excuses to gulp down some animal products.
There is no more contentious question in the world of veganism than the one posed by honey. A fierce doctrinal debate over its status has raged for decades; it turns up on almost every community FAQ and remains so ubiquitous and unresolved that radio host Rachel Maddow proposed to ask celebrity vegan Dennis Kucinich about it during last year’s CNN/YouTube presidential debate. Does honey qualify as a forbidden animal product since it’s made by bees? Or is it OK since the bees don’t seem too put out by making it?
ARA has never even heard that honey was such a "contentious" issue. It was, and is, always a product of animal exploitation and the vegan community never considered it vegan. Probably we missed the debates and arguments because we didn't hang out in the communities of the morally inconsistent and apologetic, falsely self proclaimed "vegans". And if you want to know if something is vegan or not, you should be asking an actual vegan, not some confused celebrity politician claiming to be vegan, as most of them are just conveniently plant based. Let’s clear the example of the progressive environmentalist politician Dennis Kucinich himself. As has been documented here in this article, Kucinich didn't turn vegan, he turned plant-based purely for his health: “The search is on for vegan food. Kucinich committed to this diet in 1994 when he noticed it reduced the effects of his Crohn’s disease. He added Chinese herbal medicine, and he says the combination made the Crohn’s disappear”. It’s still unclear if he understands what veganism is or not, given the responses to personal interviews going like this: “I don’t force that choice on anyone. What I do say is that I think Americans are generally more open to changes in diet and lifestyle than most people give them credit, specifically for health reasons. There is a link between human health and the choices that people make with their diets. Now again, I don’t believe that you can tell anyone what to eat. I think it’s the worst thing in the world to start to tell people—to start to dictate—choices of food. You just can’t do that. But you can show people that if they make choices in a certain way, healthy choices, it might improve the environment. It’s an educational process.”. Although he has helped in some animal welfare and protection legislation and funding, his understanding is that veganism can be done for personal health gain or environmental reasons, when both of these are merely benefits of turning vegan (for the victims - sentient animals).
Old-guard vegans have no patience for this sort of equivocation: Animal products are off-limits, period. Indeed, the first Vegan Society was created in 1944 to counter the detestable, flexitarian tendencies of early animal rights activists. Founder Donald Watson called their namby-pamby lacto-vegetarianism “a halfway house between flesh-eating and a truly human, civilized diet” and implored his followers to join him in making the “full journey.” That journey, as the society has since defined it, takes no uncertain position on honey—it’s summarily banned, along with bee pollen, bee venom, propolis, and royal jelly.
This was not out of some irrational blind beliefs or in self gaining interests. They had a strong reason for it which is obvious to anyone who is not a honey addict - bees travel thousands of miles, visiting millions of flowers, to collect the required nectar to make honey for themselves and definitely not for all of humanity. No wonder "old-guard vegans" and actual vegans of the current times consider honey "off-limits".
The hard-liners argue that beekeeping, like dairy farming, is cruel and exploitative. The bees are forced to construct their honeycombs in racks of removable trays, according to a design that standardizes the size of each hexagonal chamber. (Some say the more chaotic combs found in the wild are less vulnerable to parasitic mites.) Queens are imprisoned in certain parts of the hive, while colonies are split to increase production and sprinkled with prophylactic antibiotics. In the meantime, keepers control the animals by pumping their hives full of smoke, which masks the scent of their alarm pheromones and keeps them from defending their honey stores. And some say the bees aren’t making the honey for us, so its removal from the hive could be construed as a form of theft. (Last year’s animated feature, Bee Movie, imagined the legal implications of this idea.)
Pretty clear now isn't it?
So, any vegan who eats honey but avoids milk is making the tacit assumption that the pain experienced by a bee counts for something less than the pain experienced by a cow. It’s exactly the sort of compromise that so appalled Watson and the early vegans. Once you’ve allowed yourself to equivocate on animal suffering, how do you handle all the other borderline cases of insect exploitation? What about silkworms and cochineal bugs? Come to think of it, does a bee feel any less pain than a scallop or an oyster? Why can’t we eat them, too?
(For the record, pearls aren’t vegan. Oysters are killed during the harvest and often suffer the indignity of having a hole cut into their gonads.)
Not just early vegans, current actual vegans also hold the same position because it's clearly speciesist to avoid milk and milk products by giving moral consideration to cows but consuming honey and honey products while ignoring that bees also deserve moral consideration. Coming to the questions at the end in the above paragraph, the degree of pain that a being experiences is morally irrelevant when both can be easily avoided. What's morally relevant is whether they are capable of feeling any pain. And whether they have interests and preferences that get neglected while humans exploit them for their substances. Are those animal substances a necessity for the human species? If it's not a necessity, why are we even exploiting them? Taste, pleasure, convenience, habit? You'll find that the answers to these questions doesn't justify their exploitation. Only in a scenario where there is no choice (such as being tied up and having a gun to one’s head) but to choose between consuming dairy and honey, would choosing honey be more ethically sound.
The flexitarians counter that if you follow the hard-line argument to its logical extreme, you end up with a diet so restrictive it borders on the absurd. After all, you can’t worry over the ethics of honey production without worrying over the entire beekeeping industry. Honey accounts for only a small percentage of the total honeybee economy in the United States; most comes from the use of rental hives to pollinate fruit and vegetable crops. According to food journalist Rowan Jacobson, whose book Fruitless Fall comes out this September, commercial bees are used in the production of about 100 foods, including almonds, avocados, broccoli, canola, cherries, cucumbers, lettuce, peaches, pears, plums, sunflowers, and tomatoes. Even the clover and alfalfa crops we feed to dairy cows are sometimes pollinated by bees.
The general "flexitarian" argument that they like to consume animal substances once in a while is clearly nonsensical from a moral standpoint. However, the argument of the "flexitarians" here is only about honey, because they find other animal products like "meat", "dairy", eggs, etc. to be morally objectionable, at least that's what the article says till now. So just excluding or adding honey would not make their diet "so restrictive" or not restrictive. It's just an excuse to include honey which fails as an argument. This becomes more absurd considering the fact that there are plenty of tasty and healthy vegan honey alternatives.
"After all, you can’t worry over the ethics of honey production without worrying over the entire beekeeping industry." This is a good point. There are 2 things to consider here,
1. Worrying about the ethics of honey.
2. Worrying about the entire beekeeping industry.
The author says we cannot worry about the ethics of honey without worrying about the ethics of the entire beekeeping industry. But, we certainly can. By this, we do not mean that we should not worry about honey and ignore the beekeeping industry. What we mean is that, though both are related issues, the products of both these issues are different - one is honey, and the other are fruits, vegetables and nuts. Now, look at these products and their necessities separately - Is eating honey necessary? No. Is eating fruits, vegetables and nuts necessary? Yes. How would it be logical or reasonable to consume/use honey when it is absolutely not necessary, and the only reason to consume honey is just that consuming/using fruits and vegetables is necessary? So we CAN stop using honey and still use fruits and vegetables that come from the use of bees (still not saying we can completely ignore the beekeeping industry). After all, if one is genuinely concerned about bees and their rights, they should try and look for ways to stop using them completely and to free them, instead of using all of the products of their exploitation just because they are not able to ditch one of their products.
Now that honey is out of the way, because using/consuming honey is not a necessity and it's not impossible to ditch honey just because we are not able to ditch fruits and veggies, we can look at the second point closely. How does the beekeeping industry work? According to the author, farmers use rental hives from the beekeeping industry, or the farmers may have their own bee hives for pollination. If the honey consumption is still on, the bees are exploited for their honey, along with using their "pollination labour" (which is what is happening). So stealing honey from these bees would be like making them work for us like slaves, and also steal their food. Assuming that honey is not stolen from them, there is still the question of using their labour for pollination. Bees don’t pollinate because they want to do just that. They do it without being forced to because pollination happens by “accident” because honeybees rub against the floral anther with pollen grains and later, the stigma where they are fertilized while going to and coming back from sucking nectar from the flowers. They don't do it for us, or because of us making them do it. Even though bees are reared or rented from beekeepers, are they put into hard labour by farmers to meet the expected fruit, vegetable and nut produce? They are rented and moved into the fields in the pollinating season and the bees inadvertently pollinate the crops/orchards themselves. It's not like the farmers chain each and every bee and force them to collect the pollen grain from the male anther of a flower to the female stigma of same/different flower. They do it out of their own free will. In case of doubt that farmers don't treat the bees well, or harm them, or kill them in fields and transportation, there is no way to identify if a fruit or vegetable in the market is obtained from human-kept-bee pollination or from natural pollination agriculture.
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| Meme by wwwegan |
And bees aren't the only animals who pollinate. Wasps, hornets, hummingbirds, bats, beetles and many others pollinate too. In fact, the portrayal of domesticated honeybees as master pollinators and saviours of the environment are inherently false, most likely peddled by beekeepers themselves. This is because, the domesticated honey bees (Apis mellifera in most western countries) compete with bee populations which carry out the ecosystem “service” of pollination (more than 20,000 wild bee species contributing to crop pollination around the world!). A recently published article in the leading journal Science has thrown some light on the issue. So, stopping commercial beekeeping actually solves the vegan dilemma of using the services of enslaved bees, because wild and freely roaming bees can take over. The real reason why commercial beekeeping of honeybees and not any others bees (who don’t live in hives or produce honey), including “commercial pollination”, boomed to the level it is today and still thrives is very likely because they had and have honey, beeswax and bee pollen, in addition to the individuals themselves (workers and queen), to steal from the maintained bee colonies to sell for profit. As the author mentioned, most honey comes from the rental hives maintained for fruit and vegetable pollination. From this, it's understandable that bees are exploited in rental hives not purely because they pollinate (as many other animals also pollinate) but because they also produce honey and other bee “products” which are major sources of income for the rental hives.
Again, honey aside, we are still not in a position to live/thrive (or even survive) without fruits, vegetables, nuts and grains. On the contrary, as already understood, avoiding honey is perfectly possible. Also, the farmers and beekeepers are not vegan. At the end of the day, we all can do only what we can, and ditching honey is one of the things which we all can do. Vegans who are able to grow food in their backyards are already doing that. One of us has maintained a small rooftop veganic garden which at its prime offered about 20 different types of fruits/vegetables (direct from farm to kitchen) in addition to attracting large hordes of pollinators (especially bees and butterflies). But, most vegans probably don't even have backyards. When more and more people go vegan, there will be fewer and fewer beekeepers and more vegan farmers who do veganic farming and are mindful of the wild bees (and other animals, including insects) in their farms, they take care not to cause them harm as much as possible. As more people turn vegan, new methods and technology would also arise to reduce our harm footprint even more.
Life for these rental bees may be far worse than it is for the ones producing honey. The industrial pollinators face all the same hardships, plus a few more: They spend much of their lives sealed in the back of 18-wheelers, subsisting on a diet of high-fructose corn syrup as they’re shipped back and forth across the country. Husbandry and breeding practices have reduced their genetic diversity and left them particularly susceptible to large-scale die-offs.
As mentioned above, as sad and morally wrong it is, we cannot do much as of right now. One way in the future where these rental bee usage might fall is when awareness about the detrimental environmental impacts of domestic honey bee pollinators is turned into action, and veganic farming rises wherein vegan farmers grow and produce fruits and vegetables by using only natural means of pollination (by wild and free-roaming animals). Meanwhile, we can try our best to stop using plant based foods that are evidently obtained from explicit animal use in pollination, like California almonds.
Even the vegans who abstain from honey end up dining on the sweat and hemolymph of exploited bees. There isn’t really an alternative: We can’t replace our insects of burden with machines, as we’ve done for the mules that once pulled our tractor rakes. You might try to do right by seeking out wind-pollinated grains and fruits tended by wild insects. But what about the bugs that inevitably perish in the course of any large-scale agriculture? Even the organic farmers are culpable: They may not spray synthetic pesticides, but they do make use of natural chemicals and predators to kill off unwanted animals.
"Even the vegans who abstain from honey end up dining on the sweat and hemolymph of exploited bees." Not necessarily, as we don't know for sure if the fruits and vegetables we are dining on are obtained from enslaved rental bees or from free living wild pollinators. And even if we are doing it, it is NOT a justification to consume honey. The goal, as well as what's clear from the definition of veganism, is excluding animal use and harm as far as practical and practicable. It is as the author explains here, there is no alternative in terms of choice as of now. But choosing wind-pollinated grains and fruits, if identifiable and distinguishable from rental bee pollinated fruits and grains, is still a least harm way of eating because the bugs and rodents who inevitably perish, accidentally and unintentionally, in the course of large scale agriculture, due to pesticides, insecticides and transportation, storage, etc. will still inevitably perish even with the rental bee pollinated ones. So the rental bee pollinated ones are still responsible for both the harm caused to rental bees, and also for the accidental and unintentional deaths of various bugs and rodents in above mentioned ways. The question of intentional killing of animals by farmers needs addressal by trying to get to them to stop such unwanton killings.
In the face of this insectile carnage, vegans fall back on a common-sense dictum that animal suffering should be “reasonably avoided” as opposed to “avoided at any cost.” By this logic, it’s not a sin to treat a termite infestation that’s imperiling your house, nor should you worry over the gnats that get squashed on your windshield whenever you drive to the farmer’s market. But that doctrine won’t absolve us for eating honey. In the first place, honey is quite easy to avoid—especially compared with everything else in the Vegan Society’s codex of forbidden foodstuffs. (A scrupulous eater must also attend to calcium mesoinositol, sodium stearoyl-2-lactylate, disodium guanylate, and dozens more unpronounceable, animal-derived chemicals.) Honey doesn’t fill any nutritional gap, nor is it the only acceptable vegan sweetener.
Agreed to most of this paragraph. Just to clarify the terms in - “reasonably avoided” as opposed to “avoided at any cost,'' people who are actually vegans, who care about animals, and their harm footprint, lean towards the term “avoid at any cost” if the cost is tolerable. Though this seems similar to “reasonably avoided”, this seems somewhat like "trying less" or "not trying enough". When someone truly respects the rights of all other animals, and try not to be a speciesist, they do (and should do) everything in their power to avoid causing harm to others because not doing so is morally inconsistent.
Though it's not a "sin" to treat a termite infestation that's imperiling your house, and you cannot do much about the gnats who get squashed on your windshield whenever you drive, it's not okay to just go ahead and kill all the termites and gnats even if they aren't posing any harm or threat to us. If you don't want to be a speciesist (We hope so), or at least trying not to be one like most actual vegans do, you would try to explore ethical ways to protect your house from the termites without causing them harm as far as practically possible.
Those dozens of unpronounceable animal-derived chemicals are most probably byproducts, and it's very difficult, and sometimes impractical to find all the places where they are used, when there is a dearth of information. Thankfully, these days almost all commercial food products come with detailed ingredients lists and allergen information. Therefore, most do (and should do) avoid such substances as and when they are aware about them.
From a practical perspective, all this back-and-forth doesn’t help anyone (or any animal). You either eat honey or you don’t; to debate the question in public only makes the vegan movement seem silly and dogmatic. According to Matthew Ball, the executive director of Vegan Outreach, the desire for clear dietary rules and restrictions makes little difference in the grand calculus of animal suffering: “What vegans do personally matters little,” he says. “If we present veganism as being about the exploitation of honeybees, it makes it easier to ignore the real, noncontroversial suffering” of everything else. Ball doesn’t eat honey himself, but he’d sooner recruit five vegans who remain ambivalent about insect rights than one zealot who follows every last Vegan Society rule.
Yes, from the practical perspective (not from the moral one), the back-and-forth doesn't really help anyone, considering the current population of vegans regionally where honey is produced and sold. But when our population goes significantly higher in the future (which it will) and all the "modern vegans" are like "honey is not non-vegan, it doesn't matter," then you'll be doing a grave injustice to the honey bees because those bees would be free if it wasn't for the honey consuming "modern vegans" in significantly higher numbers.
Coming to what Matthew Ball said, will be deconstructed sentence by sentence to show how nonsensical it really is.
"the desire for clear dietary rules and restrictions makes little difference in the grand calculus of animal suffering: “What vegans do personally matters little,” he says.
It probably does not right now, as explained above - it depends on the population. But when the vegan population increases (which it will) in the future, it will definitely make a huge difference in the "grand calculus of animal suffering" and it will almost entirely depend on the type of "modern vegans" (apologists, welfarists, speciesists, "flexitarians", "veganish", etc.) the population consists of. If significant portions of the “modern vegan” population consumes some kind of animal substances, like 10% of them cheese, 20% of them honey, 15% of them eggs, 20% of them fishes***, for instance, then those animals who would have been free from suffering if all the vegan population were on morally consistent diets (viz completely plant based), will still be suffering due to those portions of "modern vegans" with morally inconsistent and conveniently changing dietary rules. What “vegans” do personally matters A LOT, in future anyway, and especially in forming the mindsets and views of new vegans whom these current “vegans” influence. Under proper influence which considers fellow animals' interests unapologetically and consistently, they will see other animals as the individuals they are, and give them the respect they deserve. And under improper and misinformed influence which places self interests over other animals' interests, they will keep on seeing other animals as food, objects, commodities and creatures at their mercy.
“If we present veganism as being about the exploitation of honeybees, it makes it easier to ignore the real, noncontroversial suffering” of everything else."
From this, Bell sounds speciesist as he clearly discards and disregards the potential suffering of honeybees. No one is asking to present veganism as being only about the exploitation of honeybees to ignore other animals' suffering. While honeybees' suffering is biologically plausible, at the moment there isn’t much evidence to support it, but nonetheless, given the lack of conclusivity of studies, a true vegan always uses the precautionary principle and not consume animals with a system evolved for detecting and experiencing pain (a nervous system). Bees are shown to exhibit quite intelligent behaviour which may be indicative of presence of consciousness (in the insect scale) which allows them to experience pain (which is subjective in nature). Bell says this only because he's not a honey bee, or because he's not as capable of empathetically connecting to honeybees as he's capable of connecting to other species whose suffering he sees as "real". How can he judge the subjective suffering of different species without credible non-controversial and conclusive scientific evidence for absence of pain in honeybees and other insects? The attitude is undeniably speciesist!
That may be the most important lesson to come out of this debate: You’ll catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.
Veganism is not about trapping non-vegans into veganism using honey as a bait. The quote makes little to no sense in the context and definitely not funny, considering the fact that flies die a horrible death while stuck in viscous fluids. We want them to be free (except those mosquitoes who annoy, but even for them, one would not wish for such a gruesome death). We want people to turn vegan, not just plant based, or vegetarian, or flexitarian, or pescatarian, or some other random fancy word that's made up to label the kind of animals they exploit. The goal is animal liberation. Not moderated exploitation.
If you want to know the "what and why" of veganism, here is a great article to start,
https://veganethos.wordpress.com/2014/12/05/veganism-what-and-why/
* From a non-speciesist perspective, animals are not “food”.
** Animals are not “produced”, they were enslaved and raised for exploitation and/or slaughter.
*** The usage of the term 'fishes' is intentional. Using 'fish' while referring to more than one individual animals is speciesist.
https://www.facebook.com/AnimalRightsAllegiance/photos/a.349418605657853/435518553714524/
Join https://www.facebook.com/groups/553752208470902/ to unlearn speciesist language.
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