Even my parents started eating meat a lot less, basically only for big events and startet using oat milk for their coffee!
Are you and they using honey or white sugar from farmed sugarcanes? For the environment sake I wish that vegan diet would include honey as it has a big net-positive effect on the environment compared to farmed sugarcanes by not causing eutrophication or water pollution, and helps with pollination both for wild forests and agriculture.
Locally harvested? Great! But likely not the bulk of supply.
Supermarket honey? Transported from Goodness Knows Where -- very likely China or Chile, where the bees are intensively fed... (you guessed it!) sugar! That's why the honey is so flavourless, not to mention the Carbon footprint of all those honey-kilometres.
Bees are almost as intensively farmed as anything else, and, while the effects and outcomes are nowhere near as severe as other forms of intensive husbandry, the honey is not necessarily the pure and innocent product you might think it is.
But for honey in particular I would say its is even more important to buy locally. It is better, safer, and better for the environment. Mixed honey has none of the unique taste that specific environments can create (my personal favorite is pollen from mixed coniferous forest, preferable with a gps coordinate to the hive). Imported mixed honey also share the same problem that plague olive oil, which is food fraud. Because honey is expensive it often get mixed with cheaper syrups or worse stuff. From a ecological perspective it is also good if the colonies are in areas that need pollination, which locally harvested usually are. Bonus points if its a small business by someone personally invested in it.
As for costs, the difference in prices from cheapest to expensive locally produced ones is normally for me about $1-2 dollar per jar. It such a small increase that just the security against food fraud is worth it (assuming you trust the local producer).
Thankyou for pointing this out. I say the same about almond milk and other products hyped by vegans that are pollinated by bees. The commercial beekeeping industry is horrific. Part of the reason wild bee colonies are collapsing is because of the diseases cultivated by commercial colonies.
I'm a backyard beekeeper myself and can say with at least some authority that there's nothing at all "vegan" or "moral" or "natural" about the way these commercial operations treat the bees and the environment.
I understand folks like bees, see them in a kindly light. But they're little automatons with maybe a neuron or two total. If we raised them, crushed them and ate them, it'd be no different from how we treat other insects.
> Part of the reason wild bee colonies are collapsing is because of the diseases cultivated by commercial colonies.
So if another bee comes at the cost of multiple existing bees, that's a problem.
The scale is my assumption, but the point appears clear to me.
Would you say that the average bee farming is causing more harm to wild bees than the average sugarcane farmer?
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/people-and-culture/food/t...
If that sort of 'stigma' goes away I would imagine a lot more people would be going vegetarian/vegan.