The nub of the issue is that MeliBio must develop a strong story to market a novel product to make the return to the fat cats who loaned them $7.2m to develop and bring the sugar to market. By painting beekeeping as cruel the vegan customer - emotively led but factually ignorant - will be enticed easily down the dark alley of salvation. High fives all round!
In a similar way electric vehicles are promoted to the unwise as salvation from ICE emissions, when in fact EV emissions take place far away where they can be ignored and the production, maintenance and disposal of an EV has other significant environmental consequences.
Still, never let facts get in the way of the world of devious capitalist marketing, as MelBio founder Darko Mandich knew when he
described how he learned about the “lies” of the honey industry ...
“The honey industry narrative was: ‘The more honey you sell, the more bees will get to work. By employing the bees you’re giving them a life.’ That narrative is one of the biggest lies that exists today. Making honey using honey bees is one of the biggest greenwashing that exists today.”
Such skewed misinformation suits MeliBio's agenda but ignores the fact that bees do not have an off-switch and will forage and make honey whether they have 1g or 1 tonne in the larder. Here is Mandich playing the same cheap tune:
Mandich explained that MeliBio aims to make the honey industry sustainable “by finally giving bees a break".
Bear in mind that the demonised subject is the American honey industry which at the sharp end has a similar greedy sales imperative to MeliBio: get big, then bigger, and bigger still until you don't know when to stop. In essence, they're all no different from Tesco or BP or Amazon.
More wacky factoids if you plough through that site; here's a sample from
Is Honey Vegan?
1 make royal jelly, also called “bee milk”... It’s harvested from the glands of queen honeybees
2 The structure contains horizontal sheets
3 Bees, of course, build hives and carry out their nectar and pollen routines naturally in the wild
As we know, royal jelly is produced by workers, the hive has vertical sheets and bees build nests and do not use saw, wood, hammer and nails, but this is not known to a vegan diehard who would likely reject it as TMI*, and unable to recalibrate their ideas in the light of new facts, stick with this sort of polemical doctrine:
honey is “their fuel and their life’s work and rightly belongs to them, not us.”
With that weak ethical argument it won't be long before a zealot argues that carrots are meant to produce carrots and are not for cruel human consumption.
*too much information, darling!
