Ethical living: should vegans avoid eating honey?

I am vegan. Is it OK to eat honey?
honey bees
Daylight robbery: bees toiling to make honey. Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

As a vegan, honey is officially out of bounds. The originator of the vegan movement, Donald Watson, singled it out as a no-go food stuff in the British Vegan Society manifesto of 1944.

Naturally he had the originators of honey in mind. Viewed through the vegan lens honey consumption seems less cutesy, as in Winnie the Pooh, and more shabby, as in literal daylight robbery: the bees toil to manage nectar from surrounding flora, incidentally pollinating our plants. They regurgitate this substance and fan it with their wings to the right consistency, whereupon bee vomit becomes honey. Then they painstakingly store it for their sole use during the cold weather.

While they're out working, we rob the hive, stealing the core product and its associated royal jelly and beeswax. And to speed up the process we harvest earlier in autumn, leaving the bees without the nutrition they've stored for the cold weather and instead we feed them on sugar supplements.

Bees are being driven to the brink. Not only are they being attacked by a viral infection spread by mites, they appear to be at odds with industrialised agriculture and perilously vulnerable to pesticides – honey production is one of the few yields that has not significantly increased as a result of the "green revolution". While we plough on with agri-industrialisation it's difficult to hold out much hope for bees at all.

Will your honey boycott help? I don't think so. In fact natural apiculture should be one of the bedrocks of sustainable and resilient food production. Unlike commercial apiculture, it is not dependent on cheap fossil fuel and has a vested interest in protecting the ecosystem.

The question is how can we make this theft more ethical? Hives managed properly (such as those harvested during spring as advocated by the and products from local hives (buy local, non-blended honeys) should help landscapes to flourish.

Honey is also the least gas-guzzling sweetener we have. Beets and corn (processed into fructose syrup) are spectacularly energy intensive in growth and production, and cause a plethora of ethical problems.

Conscientious consumers need to understand the amazing product that honey can be and say no to cheap, imported products. If ethical consumers all disappear up a moral cul-de-sac, the bees have a problem. And if the bees have a problem, we have a bigger one.

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