this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2026
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Can vegans eat figs?
Most vegans do. The general idea is to avoid exploiting animals, but the wasps are living out their natural life cycle. There are a small number of people who do worry about preventing wild insect suffering but they're not concerned particularly with figs.
Vegans eat other foods that use fertilizer. Fertilizers could contain meat or meat byproducts... So....
Can you provide an example? Sounds strange. Too expensive.
cow is made of meat.
cow eats grass.
cow has a shit.
said shit is collected to form manure.
this manure is an animal byproduct which the animal did not consent to you taking.
Same as bees and honey.
Im not vegan but thats what a vegan explained to me
also: bone and blood meal
My go-to at KFC.
Consent is needed to pick up animal shit now??
Most certainly, that's expensive shit!
Do we have any theories as to what the cows were going to do with it?
The fact that some vegans think honey is exploitative really says a lot about their lack of knowledge.
They DO know that if bees don't like a place, they'll just .... leave, right?
You could say the same about humans working exploitative jobs. You can be unhappy and still stay because the cost of quitting is too high. It's only when it gets really bad that it becomes worthwhile.
Edit: I just learned from another comment that they sometimes clip the queen's wings so they can't leave.
You could, but bees overproduce honey. There's literally no drawbacks to taking the surplus besides maybe preventing the colony from sending off new queens quite as often, and mildly disturbing the hive when it's done. (A lot of honey bees are pretty chill about it, even without a smoker.)
I don't jive with the wing clipping though.
Ok, evil humans extort shit from the cows without their consent. I never thought that vegans are that crazy.
Hi vegan here, stop talking shit about something you know nothing about. Veganism is not living just on air and water.
If there is a cow shitting there is no problem taking that shit and putting it on a field. The problem is when a industry - that is based on exploiting animals - profits of shit flooding our groundwater with nitrate. We want to reduce that huge industry in different ways:
Basic for every vegan: food based on plants not on animals.
how and why people choose to be vegan is as diverse as "being a meateater" is. Some people eat a cheeseburger a day some eat one piece of deer a year.
What I was doing most of my life is environmental veganism: Never bought anything animal related. If e.g. meat was actually thrown away otherwise I'd eat it as well.
Then there are health reasons. (Never digged to deep into that - I am damn healthy and happy with my diet)
And what you are talking about is ethical veganism: Ethical Vegans say there is no reason why humans are allowed to treat animals in that way and think animals are somewhat equal to humans. They would strongly oppose the use of shit of animals on fields if it is possible with less support of the harm the industry does.
Depending on the reason why people do it they often live it in a different way (and sometimes hate each other for their approach)
Isn't this kind of how society works and why we are where we are?
You want me to provide examples of fertilizer? Sorry I'm not into shitposting.
Get off the internet and get back to work, Dad.
2nd paragraph: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertilizer
Hasn't XIX century started in your region yet? :)
Vegans in your country don't like organic food? Blood/bone meal is still a very popular fertlilizer.
I think I heard recently that one of the mushrooms that is popular as a vegan meat substitute lives off of some sort of living creature like insects or something.
But realistically, it's all the circle of life. Animal life is part of the circle. Probably all plants have consumed nutrients that came from an animal in some way.
Ethical vegans want to avoid suffering. If figs cause or experience suffering is a philosophical question.
It's not these figs.
Yeah sure I'll eat figs. You don't eat the fig wasps as they have been eaten by the fig already. If I knew there was a fig wasp still inside, I wouldn't eat it though.
I had a friend that didn't eat figs for this reason.
Yeah I have a coworker who avoids certain varieties (many varieties don’t include wasps in the normal lifecycle)
yeah
not if they have trypophobia
ffs they won’t eat honey, and that’s only because you’re stealing the fruits of the bees’ labor. I would assume the International Vegan Council outright bans figs with extreme prejudice.
Not the only reason. For example, an infamous and common practice in the honey industry is to cut off the queen's wings, ensuring the hive has no choice but to stay there and produce honey.
I've never met a vegan who won't eat figs; figs' relationship with fig wasps is symbiotic, and yes, excluding fruit on the basis that "eating the fruit of a pollinated plant is exploiting the pollinator" probably far oversteps the "practicable" part of veganism:
Would you eat honey from a natural hive without these practices?
Good question. I wouldn't (we're assuming casual foraging for fun and not a survival situation); it's still not vegan, but it'd be arguably less unethical on a spectrum.
A con compared to the apiary is that these wild bees aren't being artificially supplemented by e.g. sugar water; it's live-or-die for them, and that's their food. It's not in me to take that away from them when I don't have to.
If someone took like a teaspoon of honey (still the lifetime output of about a dozen bees) while giving the bees something greater in return, then I don't think most vegans would think it's inherently wrong*, but like any ethical framework, whenever you try to find contrived boundaries, it's kind of like "okay, but why?" It's sometimes engaging on the armchair but rarely in practice.
A huge pro compared to the apiary is avoiding, in addition to the physical mistreatment of the bees themselves, the perpetuation of the exploitation. If you one-and-done plunder a hive, that's not vegan, but you're not giving money to someone as a way of telling them "thanks, and keep doing this".
* I'm making a hand-wavey assumption here that you can just do that without pissing off and killing a bunch of bees or smoking them out just so we can have perfectly ideal ethical conditions.
This is more in the "dead worms in the compost make their way into the vegetables we eat" wheelhouse than in the "lets steal these animals labor for their young, risking death and injury to the workers while doing so" wheelhouse