Vegan ‘honey’ is just hypocritical fake food
VEGAN ‘honey’ is made of apple juice to avoid cruelty to bees — forget that apple trees need bees for pollination. That’s vegan logic for you, writes Ed Gannon.
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THE lurch towards fake foods gets more ludicrous every day.
And the latest effort has entered the realm of comedy.
Vegan “honey” is the newest thing to hit the shelves, manufactured by a Byron Bay (of course) company.
As it is vegan, and despite the name, it doesn’t contain any real honey, as the vegans argue to do so would mean supporting the stealing of honey from bees, and the death of many bees in the production of honey.
So this company is producing two types of “honey” — one of which contains apple juice concentrate.
Now, my Year 11 biology teacher would attest that I should never again be allowed into a science lab, but even I know this fundamental fact — apple trees need bees for pollination to produce the apples.
So the vegans, who are trying to avoid real honey because it is cruel to bees, are enjoying a product that is also the work of bees.
But it seems you can justify anything in the vegan world.
Vegan Australia director Greg McFarlane told The Weekly Times, when asked about the apple anomaly, that the vegan philosophy was applicable “wherever possible and practical”.
A bit like the non-smoker who only smokes when they drink.
The real point, though, is if honey is so bad and so cruel, then why call your fake concoction honey?
There is an explosion of products that are stealing the names of real products to cash in on what these marauders know — most consumers consider honey, dairy and meat to be safe, natural, nutritious and tasty food.
What they are producing are none of these things, so shouldn’t be called as such.
Foolish and dishonest terms such as “clean meat” or “analog meat” are emerging to disguise the fact we are dealing in fake.
The Good Food Institute in the US, which promotes plant-based food, recently released a survey that found a majority of US residents were willing to eat “clean meat” instead of conventional meat.
That’s not a survey. That’s push-polling verging on propaganda. If you are going to do it, at least be honest about it.
How would the survey result go if they had framed the question around “in vitro meat” or “lab-made meat”.
The world is going mad on factory farming — which shouldn’t have the word farming in it — to produce all sorts of unnatural things.
We have cultured chicken meat, the Dutch are making burgers from cultured beef cells, a company is fermenting yeast with egg cells to create egg whites and there is a plethora of cow-free dairy products.
We even now have the “impossible burger”, made from plants and containing the ingredient heme, which is injected into the burger to give the impression it contains blood.
Air New Zealand is now serving the “impossible burger” on some flights.
These products are aimed at not just vegans or vegetarians, but at the newest category — flexitarians.
These are people who eat meat but are happy to look at an alternative due to concerns about their health, animal welfare or meat’s environmental footprint.
At least some sanity has prevailed in the fake honey case.
The NSW Food Authority has told the manufacturer to change the labelling due to breaches of the food standards code.
The owner of the Vegan Honey company said she hadn’t heard of the food standards code.
That says a lot.
At the end of the day the stuff that is being manufactured is not meat. It is not honey. It is not dairy. It is something else entirely that should not carry these titles.
Ed Gannon is publisher of the Weekly Times and co-host of The Ag Show on Sky News Business.
Originally published as Vegan ‘honey’ is just hypocritical fake food