In place of honey I use either golden syrup or maple syrup or maple flavoured syrup.
In place of honey I use either golden syrup or maple syrup or maple flavoured syrup.
Respect for all living entities
We use maple syrup as a honey substitute a lot, too. However, if you're craving the taste of honey specifically (rather than just using it in a recipe where you won't really taste the difference), agave is what comes closest in taste, I think. There's not very much difference, from what I can remember (it's been awhile since I've had honey).
I use one called Sweet Freedom and is made from 100% fruit.![]()
Last edited by sandra; Aug 11th, 2010 at 12:37 PM. Reason: photo didn't work
I like Sandra, she keeps making me giggle. Daft little lady - Frosty
Thanks for letting us know, and let us know if you know that you are a vegan later.
I don't think 'honey is not vegan' has been presented as an 'argument'.I do respect you guys for not using honey, but please don't use the argument "honey is not vegan", that is not an argument. Take some time to do some research on how honey is made in your country. Or go visit a bee farm.
But this thread contains many posts discussing why vegans don't use honey, and if you you Google a little, you'll find other articles discussing (explaining) the same topic.
Here are some of them:
Why Honey is Not Vegan
Why Don't Vegans Eat Honey?
Why Don't Vegans Eat Honey
Bees and honey
I will not eat anything that walks, swims, flies, runs, skips, hops or crawls.
Hi Lara, I hope you are able to come to the right conclusion with regard to using bees for their honey. There is a lot of information already on this forum about why using honey isn't vegan, perhaps you could have a look at that.
(I'd written more but Korn beat me to it!)
I like Sandra, she keeps making me giggle. Daft little lady - Frosty
Some more links (some of them are from our own forum):
The ethics of honey
Bees and honey
Why don't vegans use honey?
Is Honey Vegan?
One simple way to explain why there's no such thing as a vegan using honey, is that honey was defined as non-vegan by those who coined the term 'vegan' in 1944. To say that 'some vegans use honey' would equal claiming that 'some vegetarians eat meat' - and it's not 'because honey is an animal product'...
There has been discussions about "Why can't vegans decide whether they're allowed to eat honey?" - of course they can discuss if they are 'allowed' by themselves honey, and of course they can eat honey too... They're just not vegans if they do, since not using honey is part of the very definition of being vegan - for the reasons discussed in this and other threads and articles.
I will not eat anything that walks, swims, flies, runs, skips, hops or crawls.
So if someone asks, I'm an insectotarian?
I have read through all those articles, and I'm still not sure about honey. For instance organic honey producers in my country do not cut the wings from the queen to keep her in her nest. I had this discussion in another vegan forum which was Finnish, and the majority over there thought that totally boycotting honey goes a bit too far. I do boycott honey that is foreign and not organic though.
But yes, if some group of vegans in 1944 mentioned in their manifesto that honey isn't vegan, well then it isn't *shrug*
All right, I have now slept on this matter and thought it through. I would like to define myself as vegan because I do feel for this lifestyle very deeply, but I would not want to call myself vegan if I still eat honey. Because that would confuse people and give a false picture of what veganism is about. And one important part of being a vegan is to help other vegans
I'll drop the honey!Bzzzzz...!
Yay! That's great news Lara................![]()
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I like Sandra, she keeps making me giggle. Daft little lady - Frosty
Thanks! I'm gonna buy some agave today, I heard it tastes awesome so![]()
It is great Lara.
There's also a honey substitute called Sweet Freedom...............have you heard of it? It tastes exactly as I remember honey tasting, have a look out for it. Google 'Sweet Freedom, honey' and see what you think.![]()
I like Sandra, she keeps making me giggle. Daft little lady - Frosty
Nice one Lara.
..but what would they do with all the cows?..
Great! And you know there aren't many bees left on Earth, Lara. There's been a huge decline of them in recent years; and they are needed for pollination of plants. So, I often think that avoiding honey may actually help save the bees, no?
"The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for whites or women for men." ~Alice Walker.
I *just* tried Agave Nectar in place of honey today. I've missed honey since going vegan, it was a big part of the whole morning tea ritual I grew up with. But I just made myself an evening cup and decided to try what I bought and was amazed! It tastes just like generic American honey (as compared to specialized honeys)! I even like the consistency as I pour it.
I definitely feel that honey eating is non-vegan... er, if nothing else it comes from animals...
I think Lyle's Golden Syrup (in UK) is a good substitute for honey.It's cheap too (compared to the expensive price of maple syrup
)
"The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for whites or women for men." ~Alice Walker.
Thanks for the encouragement!
Well the only bees that are in Scandinavia are domesticated bees, the rest of the pollinators are bumblebees and such. We haven't had any problems with declining populations of bees, but there has been some minor decline in pollinators overall. I don't think not having domesticated bees around these parts does any good nor harm. There is huge differences in bee production depending on where you live.
Can anyone give me their opinions on this?:
I've been vegan for over 3 years now, and have never eaten honey during that time, mostly because i don't like it. A few months ago, i went into hospital with apendicitis, and was (in a state of semi-consciousness) given drugs that were no doubt gelatinous, animal-tested chemicals. I had no choice in that situation, i would have died without the operation and resulting drugs. I picked up a skin infection whilst there, and have been put on anti-biotics since (with which i had qualms), but, desperate to get rid of the hospital-acquired infection, i took them. They didn't work. Reading a raw food magazine the other day, i discovered that the type of infection i picked up could be resistant to anti-biotics, yet manuka honey has anti-bacterial properties that could work, so i've decided to give it a go and have bought a raw, sustainable, organic Manuka honey. Does putting honey on my skin make me no longer a vegan? Surely the drugs, in terms of vegan-ness, were worse, yet i still considered myself vegan then. Now i feel decidely un-veganbecause i'm also thinking to myself, ooh, if i'm using honey, now i can have cereal bars and crunchy nut cornflakes... Yet i bought the honey with the intention of buying the best quality i could afford, just that once, and not consuming mass-produced honey. It just seems to me that if i'm having honey, i might as well go the whole hog. I don't want this to be a slippery slope back to vegetarianism...
Hello JC, sorry to hear about the op and aftermath.
I can imagine using honey for medicinal purposes as an alternative to (animal-tested) drugs if there was evidence that it would work better than any animal-free alternative. I don't think it would make me want to eat honey as a food any more than taking an animal-tested medicine would make me think it was OK to eat meat. In each case I would see the medicinal use as justified because it was (thought to be) necessary for health, but eating animal products is obviously not necessary for health or anything else.
Hope your skin is better soon.
If your medical condition can be helped by using the honey, I'd say use it.
^^
JC
You bought that particular honey out of what may be termed "a medical necessity" and that being the case, the action, in my opinion, was vegan. To purchase cereal bars and crunchy nut cornflakes can hardly be considered "a medical necessity" and so in my opinion, the purchase would be a non-vegan action.
lv
[Harpy has got in before me and put it much better than I have. Good luck with the treatment.]
Last edited by leedsveg; Dec 16th, 2010 at 12:21 AM. Reason: to acknowledge Harpy's posting, also good wishes
I'd say continue using the honey you bought, now that you have it, but it seems plausible that other substances might have the same anti-bacterial effects you're looking for, so in your situation I would look for those, for use with this infection or for future use.
Though I'm noticing now that you say you read this in a natural health / raw food mag? Not sure how scientific the info you find in those usually is.
Honey is not vegan because it's an animal product and humans can live indepenantly of animals, therefore it's needless. (Not referring to the Manuka-on-skin post)
bees are culled every two years, and honey is actually bee vomit 0.o
This is how I see it and this is why I'm vegan.
We are humans and we have more power over a lot of animals.
If we use it to exploit them that is abusing our powers and I want no part in that.
I gave up honey, and really I didn't care because I was never a big honey fan.
And when I found out it's just bee spit then I REALLY didn't want it. lol
Everyone here is talking about what the harm that comes to bees by collecting honey- yet no one has answered me as to why you all think that is so harmful yet, almost everyone walks around with a cell phone and that has been proven to kill the bees.
http://inhabitat.com/its-official-ce...-killing-bees/
there are tons of links.
I tried to ask this in a post but all of my post keep getting sent everywhere and I am getting confused, and like none of my questions are getting answered. I am here to learn how to be vegan and justify these questions and I can't seem to get the answers I need.
Hi StarlightButterfly. Sorry your posts are getting moved. I think korn is probably just trying to keep the place organized.
The way I see it is, it's a matter of trying to live without exploiting animals. We don't need honey to live and it's not ours to take.
Have you searched for a thread about bees and cell phones?
Each snowflake in an avalanche pleads not guilty.
Maybe this thread? http://www.veganforum.com/forums/sho...-alarming-rate
Each snowflake in an avalanche pleads not guilty.
Hi Starlight, I don't believe it is proven at all that mobile phones kill bees.
Even though that article is titled "It’s Official – Cell Phones are Killing Bees" the first sentence states "Scientists may have found the cause of the world’s sudden dwindling population of bees – and cell phones may be to blame."
See the wikipedia article here about the studies referred to in the article - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_...etic_radiation
I'm not sure if you're suggesting that it's okay to eat honey or not but even if mobile phones were proven to kill bees it wouldn't justify eating honey. Just as driving a car may kill small animals doesn't make it okay to intentionally kill and eat animals that could be hit by cars.
It's a bit different, Starlight Butterfly. I'm sure that we accidentally walk on insects and run them over in our cars, but that is very different from confining them and using them for our own purposes.
Bees have their honey STOLEN from them, they are gassed, and even artificially inseminated by bee 'farmers'.
Hi, I read an article a while ago by some scientist who said that a lot of the activities humans are involved in today more or less could be considered experiments - some of them even quite risky ones, involving a lot of people. Using cell phones as much as we do today could be one of these experiments. But vegans don't have a detailed set of instructions re. what we should do and not to. If you have read enough about cell phones and bees to feel that you're sure that using cell phones is something humans shouldn't do, I really think it's a good idea to bring this up - both among vegans and non-vegans.
Re. moving/merging threads: there are arguments both pro and against doing that. IMHO, it's a good idea to move a thread about dealing with a non-vegan husband to an existing section about relationships and the 'non-vegan world'. And when a general thread about non-vegan husbands/wives already exist, it seems to make sense to add your new post to that thread - with a short comment explaining that this post was from another thread.I tried to ask this in a post but all of my post keep getting sent everywhere and I am getting confused, and like none of my questions are getting answered.
OTOH, it doesn't make sense to merge all posts about eg. 'dinner' into one gigantic thread. In such cases, it's better to have subforums for all threads about such topics.
We get new members every day, and I certainly don't newbies them to be familiar with our structure of subforums etc, so when thread is merged with an existing one, there's usually a redirect alias in the original subforum for a little while. This should make it easy to find the new location of a post that has been moved.
One reason for not having an increasing number of threads about eg. bees/cell phones, thyroid issues, deer hunting/culling, or whether it's wrong to have 'pets' is that we already have almost 14,000 threads. In many cases, all a new member wants is to have some questions answered. When threads are merged, they often get the answers they want immediately - because the question has been answered and discussed already. We would probably have twice as many threads if we never merged (or in some cases, closed) threads about similar topics, and lots of useful info would be pushed back to pages our visitors rarely check out.
I'm not saying that this is the only good way to deal with questions that come up often - but at least now you know why this forum (and many others) do it this way.
My personal ( = not an 'official' vegan viewpoint) comment to that is that one cannot - and shouldn't - learn to become a vegan (!).I am here to learn how to be vegan and justify these questions and I can't seem to get the answers I need.Veganism isn't about learning a set of viewpoints or dogmas and accept them, or about living according to some rules one possibly doesn't think is making any sense. The way I see it, 'vegan' is about a really simple viewpoint; something you will or won't discover that clicks with you.
Vegans don't agree that animals don't exist for human benefit. They exist for their own 'reasons'. Humans have some qualities other animals don't have, and vice versa - so we're not 'equal'. But vegan differs from others in that we insist that all living beings - including those that aren't equal to us - still have the same right to live a life on their own premises. An example I mentioned many threads ago is that even if it would't hurt me if someone would cut other people's hair while they were sleeping, it still would be wrong to do it. Your hair is your hair, and honey belongs to the bees.
Like Risker said - even if mobile phones were proven to kill bees it wouldn't justify eating honey. I personally use my cell phone as little as possible - and did that before the bee/cell phone thing came up - because I feel, on a physical level, that cell phones are doing something with my brain which I don't enjoy.
Water, soil, plants, humans, animals and insects are constantly being bombarded by radiation from phones, TV stations, electro-magnetism, satellites, GPS and much more. If our planet one day collapses, I wouldn't be surprised if the constant multi-irradiation of everything on the Earth's surface would be found to part of problem.
I will not eat anything that walks, swims, flies, runs, skips, hops or crawls.
Hi
I found this recipe in an old perserves book. It was used during the war when honey was difficult to obtain. I haven't tried it as I've never been a fan of honey but it sound interesting. It's mainly sugar really so is more like jam.
Parsley Honey
6oz Fresh Parsley
1½ pints water
1lb sugar approx.
½ teaspoon vinegar or juice of 1 small lemon
Wash the parsley well and dry thoroughly. Chop it roughly, including the stalks and put into a pan with the water. Bring to the boil and simmer gently for 30 mins. Strain through a jelly bag and measure resulting juice. Put the juice into a clean pan with the vinegar or lemon juice and 1lb sugar for every 1 pint of parsley juice. Stir well over low hear until the sugar has dissolved, then bring to the boil. Reduce the heat and simmer gently for 30 mins or so, until the mixture is clear and syrupy, like thin honey. Pour into warm, sterilized jars and cover and seal while hot.
Agave syrup and golden syrup taste ten times better than honey...
"The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for whites or women for men." ~Alice Walker.
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