Thanks to Nash Veggie for tweeting me this article on Slate entitled "The Great Vegan Honey Debate." I really enjoyed reading this. There are so many things to quote from this article, I don't know where to begin. Perhaps I should just say, read the article.

One of the things that hooked me right away was this:

Thirteen percent of U.S. adults are "semivegetarian," meaning they eat meat with fewer than half of all their meals. In comparison, true vegetarians—those who never, ever consume animal flesh—compose just 1 percent.

I thought vegans comprised somewhere around 3-4% of the US population these days, but it's pretty hard to get a real statistic. But what about the semi-vegetarian comment? Before we went vegan, Jane and I considered ourselves "semi-vegetarian." But to say we ate meat with less than half our meals would be a gross understatement of how much meat we ate. That holds true for the people we know who categorize their eating the same way, unless the statistics include snacks...

Then there was this comment:

You'll never find a self-respecting vegan downing a glass of milk or munching on a slice of buttered toast. But the modern adherent may be a little more accommodating when it comes to the dairy of the insect world: He may have relaxed his principles enough to enjoy a spoonful of honey.

Now, I'm a self-respecting vegan, and I fully expect to have a slice of pizza next time I'm in New York, deliberately. (BTW, pizza in NYC means a slice of cheese pizza, no other toppings.) Some people say it is this attitude specifically that excludes me from being a vegan, but I disagree. I consider myself to be a law-abiding citizen, but I occasionally exceed the posted speed limit (note: this is hard to do... I live in Los Angeles). One or two slices of pizza out of 1,095 meals (365 * 3) still makes me a vegan, in my book.

But let's get to the heart of the matter, or the article...

There is no more contentious question in the world of veganism than the one posed by honey. A fierce doctrinal debate over its status has raged for decades; it turns up on almost every community FAQ and remains so ubiquitous and unresolved that radio host Rachel Maddow proposed to ask celebrity vegan Dennis Kucinich about it during last year's CNN/YouTube presidential debate. Does honey qualify as a forbidden animal product since it's made by bees? Or is it OK since the bees don't seem too put out by making it?

Well, I've weighed in on this before... I am a vegan who eats honey. Again, a stance that has some of the vegan community pointing fingers and saying "You're not a real vegan." To that I say, you're entitled to your opinions. I consider myself a vegan. Yes, in the animal, vegetable, mineral categorization, bees are animals. However, they are insects. I would not hesitate to have my house tented or sprayed if I had termites; insects are killed collaterally in the harvesting of my produce... If I'm willing to kill insects in these instances, is it not hypocritical to forego eating honey? If my point of view isn't sufficient enough to sway you, here's what Vegan Action, has to say:

Many vegans, however, are not opposed to using insect products, because they do not believe insects are conscious of pain. Moreover, even if insects were conscious of pain, it’s not clear that the production of honey involves any more pain for insects than the production of most vegetables, since the harvesting and transportation of all vegetables involves many ‘collateral’ insect deaths.

(This group has been established for over 10 years; they are a vegan outreach group. They’re calling it an acceptable vegan behavior. This is the party line I choose to follow.)

It's also been pointed out to me that the original definition of vegan, according to the Vegan Society who coined the term back in 1944: ". . . eats a plant-based diet free from all animal products, including milk, eggs and honey." To this I reply, (unfortunately) language is organic. In the 1913 Merriam-Webster dictionary, the definition of "gay" was:

1. Excited with merriment; manifesting sportiveness or delight; inspiring delight; livery; merry.
2. Brilliant in colors; splendid; fine; richly dressed.
3. Loose; dissipated; lewd. [Colloq.] Syn. -- Merry; gleeful; blithe; airy; lively; sprightly, sportive; light-hearted; frolicsome; jolly; jovial; joyous; joyful; glad; showy; splendid; vivacious.

Today, Merriam-Webster defines "gay" as:

1 a: happily excited : merry b: keenly alive and exuberant : having or inducing high spirits
2 a: bright, lively b: brilliant in color
3: given to social pleasures; also : licentious
4 a: homosexual b: of, relating to, or used by homosexuals

But if you use the word "gay" in conversation today, it will be understood to be definition #4. Language is organic; definitions change.

Some people complain that the fact that some vegans eat honey, while others don't (refined sugar too), causes confusion in the non-vegan sector. Perhaps it does. But "vegan" is confusing for most non-vegans anyway. Do you eat eggs, milk, fish? What do you eat anyway? Before you condemn those of us who eat honey, remember, there are no perfect vegans out there.

Reading the Slate article further, the author, Daniel Engber, points out:

...you can't worry over the ethics of honey production without worrying over the entire beekeeping industry. Honey accounts for only a small percentage of the total honeybee economy in the United States; most comes from the use of rental hives to pollinate fruit and vegetable crops. According to food journalist Rowan Jacobson, whose book Fruitless Fall comes out this September, commercial bees are used in the production of about 100 foods, including almonds, avocados, broccoli, canola, cherries, cucumbers, lettuce, peaches, pears, plums, sunflowers, and tomatoes. Even the clover and alfalfa crops we feed to dairy cows are sometimes pollinated by bees.

Life for these rental bees may be far worse than it is for the ones producing honey. The industrial pollinators face all the same hardships, plus a few more: They spend much of their lives sealed in the back of 18-wheelers, subsisting on a diet of high-fructose corn syrup as they're shipped back and forth across the country. Husbandry and breeding practices have reduced their genetic diversity and left them particularly susceptible to large-scale die-offs.

So, are you vegan if you exploit insects in this way? Would this treatment of mammals be acceptable?

Mr. Engber ends with this:

According to Matthew Ball, the executive director of Vegan Outreach, the desire for clear dietary rules and restrictions makes little difference in the grand calculus of animal suffering: "What vegans do personally matters little," he says. "If we present veganism as being about the exploitation of honeybees, it makes it easier to ignore the real, noncontroversial suffering" of everything else. Ball doesn't eat honey himself, but he'd sooner recruit five vegans who remain ambivalent about insect rights than one zealot who follows every last Vegan Society rule.

That may be the most important lesson to come out of this debate: You'll catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.

Which brings me to my final point. I've said it before, and I'll say it again... There is a small, but vocal, minority of vegans out there who think that if you eschew animal products for any reason other than animal welfare, then you are not a vegan. Or that if you’re not being vegan to the extreme (by this I mean scrutinizing the ingredients and processing of every food item you’re going to ingest) then you may as well eat meat. We emphatically disagree. Every little bit helps, and if that means embracing the omnivores who choose to “eat vegan” one or two days a week, I say welcome to the fold! Yes, you can be vegan one day per week. If you choose to eat honey, I believe you are not "throwing the baby out with the bathwater." And I have to ask the less flexible members of the vegan community, what exactly is the goal here? Because it seems to me, if you are coming at veganism from an animal rights or environmental perspective, every little bit helps.

This month's Daring Bakers challenge was a Filbert Gateau with Praline Buttercream from Great Cakes, by Carol Walter. Our host was Chris at Mele Cotte, you can visit her site for the recipe, if you're interested.

So my first reaction was a deep sigh. Layered buttercream cakes aren't my thing. I much prefer a good loaf of bread, or the Danish Braid we made last month. But each host has the right to choose whatever recipe they desire, and as a Daring Baker, it is up to us to take the challenge and do the best we can. There were also a few interesting twists to this recipe. The recipe included a hazelnut cake moistened with simple syrup, layered with praline buttercream and whipped cream, topped with apricot glaze, and glazed with a chocolate ganache. Whew! And there were components to some of these things. For example, we made praline paste which was incorporated into the buttercream.

The first thing I did was make the cake. I did not attempt to veganize the original recipe, but instead opted to follow the "spirit" of the challenge. I used this recipe for vegan genoise instead. It came out swell, but not nearly tall enough to cut into the three layers the recipe called for. So my cake was only two layers. I opted not to redo the cake as I didn't have high expectations for the results this time around.

Next I worked on the components for the cake. I had leftover macadamia nuts which I used to make my praline. What fun. It took forever, way more than the 20 minutes the recipe specified, but yum. I will be making the praline again (not necessarily the paste), you can be sure of that. I had to keep Lane out of the kitchen. He loved it, and I was afraid I wouldn't have enough for the cake! For any of our "inner circle" reading this out there, you can be sure to see a bit of the praline on your Christmas cookie trays!

I don't normally include the recipes for the challenges here, but this component is something you should try at home!!! And make sure to read below about incorporating the paste into your buttercream!

Praline Paste
1 cup (4 ½ oz.) Hazelnuts, toasted/skinless (any nut would work here, depending on the flavor you're going for)
2/3 cup Sugar
Line a jelly roll pan with parchment and lightly butter. (I used my Silpat.)

Put the sugar in a heavy 10-inch skillet. Heat on low flame for about 10-20 min until the sugar melts around the edges. Do not stir the sugar. Swirl the pan if necessary to prevent the melted sugar from burning. Brush the sides of the pan with water to remove sugar crystals. If the sugar in the center does not melt, stir briefly. When the sugar is completely melted and caramel in color, remove from heat. Stir in the nuts with a wooden spoon and separate the clusters. Return to low heat and stir to coat the nuts on all sides. Cook until the mixture starts to bubble. **Remember – extremely hot mixture.** Then onto the parchment lined sheet and spread as evenly as possible. As it cools, it will harden into brittle.

Break the candied nuts into pieces and place them in the food processor. Pulse into a medium-fine crunch or process until the brittle turns into a powder. To make paste, process for several minutes. Store in an airtight container and store in a cook dry place. Do not refrigerate.

I'll spare you the details of the rest of the assembly. Things went as they should have. My real "issue" was the buttercream. I'd discussed the buttercream dilemna in forum land. So far, I haven't found a vegan buttercream recipe I like the taste of. My original intention was to use Vegan Noodle's suggestion of adding soy milk powder to the mix. Unfortunately, I set out on my quest to buy the soy milk powder ("better than milk") the day before I was assembling the cake, and my Whole Foods does not carry the product. The inventory manager knew what I was talking about and offered to order it for me, but I needed it "now." Alas. Nor did my local health food store stock it. Strike one!

Natalie recommended using a vegetable shortening/coconut oil/cocoa butter mix, but it's a little warm now to be using coconut oil. I know this because the coconut oil is liquid in the cupboard, and I didn't want my buttercream running down the side of the cake! Strike two!

Shellyfish recommended using the buttercream recipe in Vegan with a Vengeance (a much better book than Veganomicon, IMO). Hey, a home run, sort of. It was good enough to eat, although not in large quantities. I wound up using a non-vegan non-dairy creamer, since that recipe also called for soy milk powder. Unfortunately, non-dairy creamer is somewhat of an oxymoron as the non-dairy creamer contains SODIUM CASEINATE (a MILK DERIVATIVE), and a whole host of other badness. But it was the only thing I could find, and I knew the Earth Balance / Powdered Sugar combinations were not palatable. So, it was a pseudo-vegan buttercream, strike three?

Whatever buttercream recipes you wind up using in your cake baking ventures, I recommend adding the praline paste (1/3 Cup added into your finished buttercream, then stir together) It's amazingly delicious.

So my finished cake was not worthy of a blog post. It looked pretty, but wasn't worth the time or the effort, and most of it wound up in the trash. But I walked away with the promise of a palatable vegan buttercream, yay! And the praline alone was worth the rest of the challenge.

~ Cheers, Jane!

I keep complaining that the news media isn't promoting vegetarianism as a viable "green" behavior. It's really frustrating to me when I read an article or watch a program which talks about the things we can do to save the environment and no one mentions eating vegan! And I'm not the only one, Alex comments:

This omission (“Go Vegan”) is fairly consistent throughout the environmentalist movement. A compilation of the most common policy proposals and suggested lifestyle alterations shows that this prescription is absent, and it’s revealing.

Today, New Scientist comes right out and says it...

In 2004, Pimentel (David Pimentel, professor of ecology and agriculture at Cornell) estimated 6 kilograms of plant protein are needed to produce 1 kg of high quality animal protein. He calculates that if Americans maintained their 3747 kcals per day, but switched to a vegetarian diet, the fossil fuel energy required to generate that diet would be cut by one third.

We're eating 3,747 calories/day on average when the recommended average is somewhere around 2,000?!?!?!!!! Wow! But I digress... Maintaining the ridiculous amount of calories consumed and switching to a vegetarian diet cuts fossil fuel used to create those calories 33%. So, for the time being, you can still have your vegan cake and eat it too, and save the environment!

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And on a completely unrelated note, thank you to all our readers who've asked us how we fared during today's earthquake. Aside from being shaken up and around, and having two sculptures fall to the floor, we survived unscathed. Don't believe everything you see on TV; it wasn't that big a deal. But we'd still prefer not to feel the ground moving under us!

Back in September, an art teacher was fired in Illinois for teaching veganism to his classroom.

They said he began teaching veganism and animal rights instead of art without telling school officials or parents, told students to keep it a secret, and then refused to answer school officials’ questions about what he was teaching.

Source: Northwest Herald

Now, while I believe in freedom of speech, I don't believe that teachers have the right to proselytize to their students. Dave Warwak, the fired teacher, took it upon himself to use his classroom to promote his agenda, rather than teach art, the subject he was hired to teach. Wrong forum, wrong audience, wrong behavior!

While I'm all for broadening the minds of our youth, I don't believe a teacher has the right to take it upon himself to try to sway their opinions in such a furtive manner. Clearly Warwak knew he was doing something "wrong" or he would not have demanded secrecy from his students.

Today, the Illinois State Board of Education, upheld the decision to fire Warwak.