Opinion: Seriously, vegan honey?

By Mike Williscraft
NewsNow

So Catherine and I were watching a Quebec version of Dragon’s Den last week when something that was just plain silly popped up.

The fellow was pitching a new line of honey he has come up with and – mixed in his pitch – he noted the honey was vegan.

Now, I get there are vegans out there in the world who require that type of diet due to serious dietary issues. Completely get it, understand it, no issue.

But why anyone would go vegan by choice is beyond understanding for my feeble, meat-loving mind.

My view of vegans may be coloured significantly since the first and only person I knew who was vegan for the first 50 years of my life was the then-brother-in-law of my best buddy growing up.

Not only was this guy vegan, but was a hard-ass militant who would fist-fight anyone who challenged his choice. That was a bit of an ongoing issue because my buddy Glen and I could be pains in the butt at the best of times, so we chose our spots to needle Bill to the point he would have to storm out of their apartment and walk around for an hour.

He couldn’t deck Glen because he was living with him and his sister at the time and I think he just deemed me too big to take on. So we made the best of that.

But to hear this fella spew pure meat-eater hate and disdain, one really had to wonder where that came from. So, there was that.

On to last week.

When one thinks of all the components in a grocery store, it is easy to surmise honey may be considered the singular, most pure product on any shelf.

Right out of Nature’s cupboard, you have these busy little bees doing their thing and “poof”, honey results.

There are different scales and definitions of “vegan” so I was intrigued to find out what this fellow considered vegan honey. As he spoke, he defined traditional honey as being “manufactured” by bees, which he deemed an unfair use of these insect as beasts of honey burden.

Simply, because it was made by a living thing, a vegan (in his definition) could not eat it.

Again, not passing judgment, but holy mackerel, get a grip lad.

Next thing I know I find myself going full Jay from Modern Family and I’m yelling at this guy on the TV. I hope I didn’t scare the neighbours.

In the end, it’s all good. More power the entrepreneur. There must be people out there who want to buy fake honey made my people and machines rather than bees. I hope he makes a million, I just won’t “bee” buying artificial honey.

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Not sure if any of you have taken in one of our initial forays into the wonderful world of podcasts, but we are up to No. 7 this week, with West Lincoln Mayor Dave Bylsma dropping into our Mountain Street office. It turned out to be more than an hour of conversation – let’s just say we had a lot of ground to cover.

That conversation can stand on its own, but something he mentioned at the end, basically that area politicians are “afraid” of me – I am sure to levels varying from not at all to lots.

That is unfortunate.

No politician should be “afraid” of me. Voters are who they should be afraid of, but with that fear coming from a place of undying respect and having a fear of letting the general public down.

This ties into a conversation I have had with several people over the last month and that revolves around the extent of insulation which politicians have had for the vast majority of their current terms.

No rookie politician has any idea of what level of accountability they need to be living to given the conditions of the last year-plus. At the municipal level, nobody got by the honeymoon period before COVID hit. Grimsby has had a boatload of issues, West Lincoln and Lincoln have had a few things which would have drawn a crowd but Zoom meetings have created a thick, false insulation which will melt quickly once restrictions are ready to go.

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This is still a “municipality-west-of-Lincoln-and-number-between-four-and-six-free zone” but I have to say, the thought of this particular Grimsby council deciding a new ward structure for the Town going into the 2022 election is akin to handing your toddler off to Evel Knievel for a joyride on the back of his motorcycle. Yikes!