We have been eating honey all our lives and seeing how it is produced, the natural one, of course, the vast majority of honey sold in supermarkets is not very natural, but we will deal with that topic another day. Honey is understood as a product of plant origin, right? Because it comes from flowers, but perhaps we have missed an important step and there is the answer to why honey is not allowed in the vegan diet.
The vegan diet is not one of the strictest we currently have, let's remember that there is a so-called raw vegan, and also another that only allows eating fruits and vegetables known as frugivorous.
The vegan diet, broadly speaking, is a lifestyle where the rights of animals and people are equalized and everyone is respected equally, be it a dog, a pigeon, a goldfish, a frog or a worm. A diet where radically eliminates all food products that are of animal origin, reaching the point of not buying something if the label says "may contain traces of milk or eggs".
So far so good, and it is a food that is on the rise and highly respected today, although it is still the subject of ridicule and the perfect excuse to underestimate someone.
Within the current vegan diet we can eat eggs, milk, cheese, sausages, salami, pate, hamburgers, etc. Since the current food industry has recreated the same products of animal origin, but based on plants, it is what is known as plant based, but it is not highly recommended to base our diet on processors and ultra-processed foods, even if they have good ingredients.
Honey is not of vegetable origin
Returning to the subject of honey, in the vegan diet it is not accepted because honey is not like making a cake at home that mixes 3 ingredients with some rods and bakes it for 20 minutes. Getting honey is a superhuman effort for bees.
Furthermore, it is not just pollen mixed with water, but actually, and although it is very ugly to say it like that, the bees regurgitate the nectar for a while and it turns into honey. It is not vomiting, since the stomach where the nectar that forms honey is housed is not the stomach as such, but another organ specially designed to create honey called honey crop.
As we can see, it could be considered a product of animal origin, since the bee is required to achieve it. Another reason is that the beekeeping industry is quite cruel to these insects.
Bees are manipulated and exploited to achieve the maximum amount of honey possible, as it happens with chickens and eggs. From bees we can extract honey, propolis, pollen, Royal jelly, wax and poison. The queen bee is tortured to the point of cutting off her wings to prevent the queen from leaving her and taking the entire troop with her, and the beekeeper being left with no hive to control.
If we are vegan we already know that we cannot consume honey, and we will need another sweetener, since white sugar is unhealthy. We can use erythritol, stevia or sweeten with dates and other fruits.