Well, I’m not vegan but my wife is. I’m a vegan spouse, I guess. She’s pretty good at being vegan, a lifestyle I don’t really understand. I go with the flow, ya know?
So the other day I run into a gas station and she asks for a snack. I pick up a granola bar. When I get back to the car I hand it to her. As always, she peruses the ingredients before any ingestion takes place. “Honey” she gumbles.
“Yes” I reply.
“No. Honey. There’s honey in this.”
“You gotta be kidding me. You can’t eat honey?” I ask exasperated.
“No”
“&!%@. I mean, they’re bugs, right? And they don’t kill them. Or pen them or anything. You can’t seriously….”
I’m on the receiving end of “The Stare”.
Okay, okay, I understand. So I ask her, later, when this kind crap comes to mind. “So you can only eat organic?” I ask in my most un-sarcastic voice, which indicates absolute sarcasm.
“No, I can eat unorganic stuff.”
I candidly point out that anything that is not organic has used vast amounts of pesticides, thus reducing entire insect civilizations into rubble for the sake of an apple harvest. She looks slightly aghast. I mean, I know she prefers organic and we buy a lot of it but this vegan conundrum had escaped her.
I also point out that virtually any crop harvested in any way has disrupted the soil, any colonies, earthworm dens, and the like. Hell, I bet a gopher or two has been killed by farm equipment during the planting of corn.
All of a sudden it occurs to me, the very act of creating food anywhere has probably claimed the lives of animals.
My wife goes a little pale. All of a sudden she realizes her chosen diet has created a virtual holocaust of any creatures that live upon the ground. However, I soon begin to think that my diet of hamburgers and chicken sandwiches results in fewer deaths of living creatures than any vegan diet. My burger is the death of one cow, split among dozens of people. An apple, on the other hand, is perhaps the death of thousands of bumble-bees, ants, worms, centipedes, and the like. I imagine John Deere as a sort of Farmer Hitler in overalls, huge hulking beasts tearing across the land while spiders run in terror.
Then again, I have a wild imagination.
Broke 