Avocados aren’t vegan! Quelle horreur! Stop the presses, throw out the baby with the bath water. What, avocados aren’t vegan?
Hang on a minute. Aren’t avocados vegetables? Or fruit, if you’re speaking botanically? How can this green, alligator-leathery skinned food responsible for all millennials never been able to be financially free also not be vegan?
Because anti-vegans are looking for any bullshit excuse to find a flaw in veganism, that’s why.
I’m not going to link to these whining, mewling babies trying to call up vegans for eating avocado. ‘Cos, ‘cos bees. Yeah, bees don’t you know.
Vegans don’t eat honey, so that means avocados are not vegan either. Oh yeah, and almonds, and probably a third or more of most plants that humans eat.
In fact, let’s not eat plants at all. Yeah, breatharianism is the new veganism. Veganism is so passe. The real warriors of peace and ahimsa are the breatharians.
The nonsense about avocados not being vegan, as you probably gathered, goes something like this. Bees are needed for the pollination of avocados (and many other plants we eat). And because we’ve fucked up the planet and have started a war on bees, most bees that pollinate the plants we eat are kept by apiarists.
Because these bees are ‘slaves’ or kept by beekeepers there’s cruelty involved. This part is true.
However, saying that we can’t eat avocados or other plants that are pollinated by bees is like saying we can’t use roads, wear shoes or write with ink because all of those things contain slaughterhouse and animal byproducts.
Honey is different. Honey is a more obvious exploitation of bees and it is unnecessary. The pollination of plants is a necessity. And feeding 7 billion humans means that we need a large scale mechanism for pollinating enough plants to feed the planet.
Am I happy about it? No. I’m not happy about the increasing inequality, the lack of fucks that those in charge generally give about the poor and the disenfranchised and the environment.
But let’s focus on the big, easy wins. Veganism is a big and easy win if enough of us get behind it.
Let us first get rid of the bloody steaks and broken wings on our plates. Let’s exchange the cow’s mammary secretions for the juice squeezed from the soybean.
Let us forgo the menstrual waste of galliformes in favor of oatmeal for breakfast.
Let us bid adieu to assholes and lips in favor of vegan tofu dogs and sausages.
When we are free from skinning snakes and tanning the hides of bovines and boiling the silk from the worm, then, and only then, let us look to ways of making our food pollination free from all exploitation.
When the meat eaters of us have taken the plank from their eyes, I’ll seek out the mote in my own.
In the meantime, pass the avocado toast instead of the roast. I’ll have the almond butter instead of the cows udder.