Avocados aren’t vegan?

[Tunnockssnowballs]

AIBU to think this is a bit OTT or should Vegans think twice about eating avocados and almonds because bees are harmed and killed in the farming process.

www.google.com/amp/s/www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-6269825/amp/Avocados-almonds-broccoli-NOT-vegan-dieters-favorite-ingredients-break-rules.html

I really enjoyed reading this thread.

Some of my dear friends are vegan, have been all their lives (parents are also vegan) they moved her from NZ and have their own coffee shop which is heaving every day. I have no idea if they are aware of the implications of palm oil, almonds, and avocados. (Almonds and avocados 🥑 feature heavily on their menu) But they have inspired me to buy locally, reduce my meat intake, and I even attempted to grow my own chillis, cucumbers and courgettes this year.
It’s this day and age I would suggest exceptionally hard to be 100% vegan and totally ethical.

One of the NZealand vegan societies:
"More and more people are becoming vegan and for all kinds of reasons. "
(italics mine).
ALL kind of reasons. Not mainly or must include animal exploitation. ALL kinds of reasons are allowed.
(very soppy shouldn't hurt animals page here, too)

lljkk That’s true people become Vegan for many great reasons but it doesn’t really answer the questions posed on this thread. Why is one food product more ethical than the other. What is the definition of being a Vegan. If you cannot define the word Vegan then why bother using it?

My friend is vegan and uses lots of plastics and convenience foods that also contain things such as palm oil. She uses computers, drives a car - these things contain animal derivatives and are bad for the environment, which in turn is bad for animals. My other friend is a real hippy who lives in wales. He has a small holding and grows, raises, kills and eats his own food. He doesn’t own much technology. Doesn’t have a TV, phone etc. Surely he must live a more ethical life than my Vegan friend but why does she have the moral high ground?

Is being a vegan really more ethical? I don’t know what the answer is.

lljkk I'd dispute your assertion about the 'British definition of vegan' and think it slips into the 'veganism as ideology' and even towards the 'vegansim as cult with top-down direction' trap. The key question is whose definition of vegan are you talking about?

Vegans are people who don't eat animal products. It really is that simple. (I was one, in the UK, for many years and didn't feel the need to explain it beyond that. Though I could explain my own particular, personal reasons for making that choice and, how far I chose to extend it into other areas of life).

I do agree, as above, that there is an association with ethical choice. The 'accidental vegan' might not describe themselves as such - mainly, I'd have thought, to avoid the sort of tedious wind-up whataboutery that a certain kind of time-wasting omnivore likes to indulge in, to make themselves feel good, or just because they're an immature twerp. Though they would when indicating food-choice for an airline meal or a wedding.

It may be that there's a new wave of very ideological vegans. It may be that The Vegan Soc has changed its wording. But, neither of those groups owns the word vegan.

The Vegan Soc is not The Pope. It is a membership organisation that represents the interests of its members. That's all. The majority of vegans are not members of that or any 'vegan group'. They're just people who are vegan.

OP, I'd come back to two points really. One is that, it's good to think about things and make ethical choices in life. Two is that doing your best is always better than not trying.

How you balance your various ethical concerns is up to you. It is often the case that starting with an interest in one area of ethical pratice develops your ethical thinking capacity and broadens your awareness, so that your reason for doing that thing changes, or your choices about what you do evolve with your knowledge.

I do think that, whatever choice you make, it is important to maintain the ability to reason and the sense of freedom to make choices (which can get tricky when a past choice becomes part of your identity). Dogmatism is dangerous, mostly because it moves from making good choices based on an ethical framework, to following rules at the expense of reasoning.

lottiegarbanzo Thanks that’s really insightful. The last paragraph in particular really resonated with me. I don’t want to be tied to a particular ideology. I want to continue to question and make objective decisions. Really helpful thank you.

It's naive not to recognise that many people hold the VeganSoc definition to be only valid definition. See the hot-tempered discussions on here, too, about what qualifies as vegetarian & what qualifies as... some sort of fraud veggie, I guess. People get very het up. It all just alienates me, too. Very unattractive.

All rules are made up by humans and all humans have disagreements so in the end everything is personal choice informed by what you're taught, what you believe, what other people you admire do etc. However this leads to self-definition, and we all know how problematic that is (in many fields) so...
There are no answers.

I think honey industry is cruel because they take the honey away from the bees and give them sugar water instead.

You are worried about the suffering of INSECTS???

(And I know that bees are incredibly important in environmental terms and I'm all for supporting them and protecting them and so on. But come on, insects aren't known for their deep emotional life).

I'm not vegan or even vegetarian but this point from Reccy2018 has really struck a chord:

Honey is an animal product so that's why vegans don't eat it. Bees make honey so they can survive over winter. But instead we nick it and give them a syrup replacement which doesn't sustain them for long winters and many honey bees die as a result.

I'm sure that's true because we as a people are so commercially orientated and are massive consumers of everything. BUT if we don't have the bees, will we ultimately have nothing to consume? We've given over our entire back garden to wildlife (I hate gardening anyway) and plant lots of bee-friendly things.

I do lots of other horrendous, environmentally-impacting stuff which I'm not proud of but I do worry about the bees and I'm glad I don't eat honey (I don't like it).

I also agree with PP that there are 'trade-offs' with absolutely everything that we do. Everything has an impact; we just have to pick the ones that are palatable to us.

Strawbeerisc
Don't do that ... think of the ozone layer 😋

There is a vegan diet and an ethical diet. A vegan diet may not be ethical. You can also be omnivorous but eat ethically.

You can also be omnivorous but eat ethically.

Depends on what you mean by ethically.

I don't think dairy for instance can ever be ethical.

t's naive not to recognise that many people hold the VeganSoc definition to be only valid definition. See the hot-tempered discussions on here, too, about what qualifies as vegetarian & what qualifies as... some sort of fraud veggie, I guess. People get very het up. It all just alienates me, too. Very unattractive.
Oh god yes. I used to do a massive eye roll when people talked about preachy vegans (because that wasn’t my experience of vegans) until I saw certain threads on here and learned of that definition.

Veganism is the practice of abstaining from the use of animal products, particularly in diet, and an associated philosophy that rejects the commodity status of animals.

according to wiki.

Please someone explain how an avocado is an animal product.
Which animal produces it?

Im not vegan. Im not even vegetarian, but the lengths some people go to go AHA, BUT WHAT ABOUT with regards to vegans is astonishing.

Figs aren't vegan because of the dead wasp

Bees are more important than cows, sheep etc. You would confer less cruelty if you gave up fruit and veg and ate meat.

Bran, bees are crwded into hives and driven in very large lorries (how's that for the environment) all over the place to pollinate hard-to-grow plants like avocados, tomatoes etc, then herded into hives again and driven to the next. It's not a natural bee life. Might as well buy battery chickens, it's the bee equivalent.

I have heard the argument that vegans could eat eggs if the chickens were living a good normal free range life and not being forced to lay eggs in any way. If that is all true, hens lay eggs anyway and the unfertilised eggs would just be wasted so why not eat them?

I am not sure how to argue against that on the grounds of preventing harm to animals so I assume that vegans who would never eat eggs even in these circumstances are just unhappy to eat animal products for any reason which is probably more an emotional reason than a practical one

I think the reasons for veganism are varied so some may avoid avocados based on this but others won't

Just a couple of points. Urea is made commercially from scratch in enormous quantities so it’s highky unlikely that the stuff in cosmetics will be extracted from animal urine. And there are no air miles on bananas: they have a very low carbon footprint even if you eat them in the U.K., which is why they’re so cheap.

I have a fig tree (I think it's 4th summer now) it has never produced fruit that has lasted long enough to ripen. I'm quite relieved now having read the fig/wasp connection.

It is a very pretty tree and obviously the birds are picking the fruit before I can.

Oh ffs.

And I wonder how long it is before they stop eating figs because each fig contains a dead wasp.

I have heard the argument that vegans could eat eggs if the chickens were living a good normal free range life and not being forced to lay eggs in any way. If that is all true, hens lay eggs anyway and the unfertilised eggs would just be wasted so why not eat them?

Anyone can eat anything, of course, but as chickens are produced by an animal, they aren't vegan. Male chicks are gassed in huge numbers as a result of the number of female chickens needed to keep everyone in eggs, and chickens 'in the wild' would only lay 6 eggs a year. We have fucked with chickens so they lay every day but it's not great for them, health wise. They get egg bound and things much more often.

Chickens also need calcium and protein so I feed my chickens eggs back to them.

Eggs are produced by an animal*, not chickens produced by an animal. Although, suppose that is true too, haha.