I’m not a vegan, but the current state of beekeeping is pretty shit. Taking the honey and replacing it with sugar water on top of the stresses of monoculture and killing varied flora with herbicides creating food deserts and using market conditions to race to the bottom on pollination contracts just results in a whole bunch of dead hives. Like you can both support sustainably practiced beekeeping and find the production of industrial honey to be a horror show.
Regardless of whether you are vegan, vegetarian, carnivore, or other, if you aren’t horrified by industrial food production, you should be. This goes for industrial fish trawling & fish farming, industrial chicken cow and pig processing, honey I guess, even factory plant growing e.g. alfalfa almonds and corn (ruins the land and wastes water)
in the US, the only way to way ethically right now is to just die.
Like anywhere else is much different. You think only the US has industrial farming?
And there is an ethical way to eat: dumpster diving. Everything in that dumpster is already waste, and taking it does not increase demand – no store is going to order more stock because the dumpster is running low. None of your money is going to support factory farming of any kind. Any food you find in the dumpster is 100% ethical to consume.
This doesn’t hold up. For you, personally, sure. But EVERYONE couldn’t convert to dumpster diving. That’s just shitty supermarkets.
I had this revelation about buying local. If EVERYONE “bought local”, local farms begin looking like factory farms in order to produce enough for the local population. I’m certain there would be additional inefficiencies (moral atrocities) as a result. It’s more ethical for me, personally, to get my produce locally, but I can’t in good faith criticize anyone else that buys groceries on Amazon.
Dumpster diving still relies on industrial agriculture happening and doesn’t scale to more than a small portion of the population, some of whom have no other choice but to do so.
This is the correct response. Small-scale hobbyist beekeeping is awesome for humans, bees, and nature, and we absolutely positively need it. Industrial beekeeping, in which bees are carted across the continent to pollinate the fields of the highest paying industrial farmer may still be tolerable to the bee but far less so for nature. Many people don’t appreciate the nuance. Apis mellifera almost certainly won’t go extinct as long as beekeepers are around. But that’s not what we talk about when we say the bees are dying…
Apis mellifera isn’t native to the Americas and neither are a lot of the plants they pollinate. They crowd out the native bees and destroy their habitat. Small-scale beekeepers working in populated spaces aren’t the problem though. And they rescue swarms that would otherwise be exterminated. Plus they’re more likely than the average person to know about their local natives and support them, by making carpenter bee homes or whatever.
Industrial honey is just another facet of my distain and complaint of industrial agriculture as a whole. Almost every vegan argument I’ve ever encountered has been in reaction to the horrors of the industrial process
Which is why when someone asks me “Well what about indigenous tribes? Almost all of them hunt, are you doing to tell them they’re morally wrong?”. No, no I am not, because they are not morally wrong. They’re hunting for survival, in relative harmony and reciprocity with the ecology that completely enveloped every aspect of their social development.
This is what will lead me to the full change in diet. I’m at the mitigation and small changes phase. I really don’t have ethics issues with animals as food (farming & hunting meat isn’t bad when suffering is inherent to existence, and to deny this is to deny given order), but we exist in a capitalist hellscape that has zero shame or remorse for exploiting making perverse anything once natural for profit.
Hard agree. I’m no vegan as a fully understand that a) humans are omnivorous mammals who thrive on a mixed diet and b) eons of selective breeding has created creatures that are designed for food and goods and wouldn’t survive in the wild in their current state without either much suffering or outright death of the species. The monocultures created for large industrialized farms are a blight for the environment as well.
I champion local small scale farms with permaculture and local plants as much as possible while reducing meat consumption in general (at least here, meat is usually at every meal so reducing it to one a day if not every few days would be a huge shift). I also recognize not everyone wants nor cares about going vegetarian or vegan but would accept the reductions in meat use and focusing on buying local if it was made more readily available
I wouldn’t say “need”. European honey bees are a foreign invasive species. They displace the native pollinators. IMO hobbyists are worse because they are damaging the native bees without reason unlike industrial farmers that need the bees to produce the food we all eat.
And the reality is the vast majority of hobbiest bee keepers do it as a tax dodge. In most states, if you put a hive on your yard, you get to classify your house as a farm and pay virtually no property taxes.
I’m not a vegan, but the current state of beekeeping is pretty shit. Taking the honey and replacing it with sugar water on top of the stresses of monoculture and killing varied flora with herbicides creating food deserts and using market conditions to race to the bottom on pollination contracts just results in a whole bunch of dead hives. Like you can both support sustainably practiced beekeeping and find the production of industrial honey to be a horror show.
Regardless of whether you are vegan, vegetarian, carnivore, or other, if you aren’t horrified by industrial food production, you should be. This goes for industrial fish trawling & fish farming, industrial chicken cow and pig processing, honey I guess, even factory plant growing e.g. alfalfa almonds and corn (ruins the land and wastes water)
It’s so pervasive it’s hard to avoid everything.
With that and the amount of recalled food in the US, the only way to way ethically right now is to just die.
Like anywhere else is much different. You think only the US has industrial farming?
And there is an ethical way to eat: dumpster diving. Everything in that dumpster is already waste, and taking it does not increase demand – no store is going to order more stock because the dumpster is running low. None of your money is going to support factory farming of any kind. Any food you find in the dumpster is 100% ethical to consume.
This doesn’t hold up. For you, personally, sure. But EVERYONE couldn’t convert to dumpster diving. That’s just shitty supermarkets.
I had this revelation about buying local. If EVERYONE “bought local”, local farms begin looking like factory farms in order to produce enough for the local population. I’m certain there would be additional inefficiencies (moral atrocities) as a result. It’s more ethical for me, personally, to get my produce locally, but I can’t in good faith criticize anyone else that buys groceries on Amazon.
There’s no ethical consumption under capitalism.
Dumpster diving still relies on industrial agriculture happening and doesn’t scale to more than a small portion of the population, some of whom have no other choice but to do so.
True, but at a personal level, you can get perfectly ethical food that way, even meat.
I mean I was talking about the topical issue that it seems every food is getting recalled in the US, but alright buddy.
This is the correct response. Small-scale hobbyist beekeeping is awesome for humans, bees, and nature, and we absolutely positively need it. Industrial beekeeping, in which bees are carted across the continent to pollinate the fields of the highest paying industrial farmer may still be tolerable to the bee but far less so for nature. Many people don’t appreciate the nuance. Apis mellifera almost certainly won’t go extinct as long as beekeepers are around. But that’s not what we talk about when we say the bees are dying…
Apis mellifera isn’t native to the Americas and neither are a lot of the plants they pollinate. They crowd out the native bees and destroy their habitat. Small-scale beekeepers working in populated spaces aren’t the problem though. And they rescue swarms that would otherwise be exterminated. Plus they’re more likely than the average person to know about their local natives and support them, by making carpenter bee homes or whatever.
Industrial honey is just another facet of my distain and complaint of industrial agriculture as a whole. Almost every vegan argument I’ve ever encountered has been in reaction to the horrors of the industrial process
Which is why when someone asks me “Well what about indigenous tribes? Almost all of them hunt, are you doing to tell them they’re morally wrong?”. No, no I am not, because they are not morally wrong. They’re hunting for survival, in relative harmony and reciprocity with the ecology that completely enveloped every aspect of their social development.
This is what will lead me to the full change in diet. I’m at the mitigation and small changes phase. I really don’t have ethics issues with animals as food (farming & hunting meat isn’t bad when suffering is inherent to existence, and to deny this is to deny given order), but we exist in a capitalist hellscape that has zero shame or remorse for exploiting making perverse anything once natural for profit.
But it isn’t necessary (at least in most cases), and we have the intelligence to make better decisions simply because they are better.
Unless I misunderstood your comment, “when suffering is inherent to existence” could be used for things like burglaries as well.
Hard agree. I’m no vegan as a fully understand that a) humans are omnivorous mammals who thrive on a mixed diet and b) eons of selective breeding has created creatures that are designed for food and goods and wouldn’t survive in the wild in their current state without either much suffering or outright death of the species. The monocultures created for large industrialized farms are a blight for the environment as well.
I champion local small scale farms with permaculture and local plants as much as possible while reducing meat consumption in general (at least here, meat is usually at every meal so reducing it to one a day if not every few days would be a huge shift). I also recognize not everyone wants nor cares about going vegetarian or vegan but would accept the reductions in meat use and focusing on buying local if it was made more readily available
I wouldn’t say “need”. European honey bees are a foreign invasive species. They displace the native pollinators. IMO hobbyists are worse because they are damaging the native bees without reason unlike industrial farmers that need the bees to produce the food we all eat.
And the reality is the vast majority of hobbiest bee keepers do it as a tax dodge. In most states, if you put a hive on your yard, you get to classify your house as a farm and pay virtually no property taxes.
But… I am European?
Europeans used to be pretty invasive, too!
Sadly they still are in some areas of the world.
Particularly the middle east.
I thought that Americans are the invasive species in the middle east.
Isn’t a lot of the industry produced “honey” actually honey flavoured corn syrup anyways?