I don't know a lot about veganism, but the idea that you don't eat eggs suprises me. I mean, the chickens lay them anyway. Is there some objection to how chickens are raised and forced to lay? What about free-range chickens? which I bring up since Hil mentioned how many eggs would have been in a flourless chocolate torte.

For the eggs, it's largely about the treatment of the chickens. (Basically, treated horribly, even free-range ones, and generally killed when they're too old to lay eggs anymore.) I've seen vegan message boards get into epic wars over whether someone who keeps his or her own chickens as pets, takes very good care of them, cares about them, lets them have a huge yard to run around in, and eats their eggs, can still call him or herself vegan. The general consensus on that one seems to be that the chicken-keeper is not unethical, but does not fit into the definition of "vegan" anymore, either. At one point, I saw this get into an argument about whether it was vegan to take the eggs from the pet chickens and feed them to your pet dogs. (A lot of the definition protection comes from people getting frustrated with friends or restaurants giving them some food that contains eggs or dairy and justifying it with "My sister/cousin/whatever is vegan and she'll eat that!" So a lot of vegans get kind of antsy when they see the label "vegan" being applied to people who eat things that they won't eat.)

As for the honey, it's exploitation of the bees. (I do eat honey, and know several other people who call themselves vegan who do, too.) The basic argument would be that making honey is something that the bees do naturally, for the survival of their own hive and species, and it's wrong and selfish for humans to take advantage of their labor for our own wants.

Some vegans -- who usually term themselves animal liberationists or animal abolitionists -- even say that keeping pets is wrong, because you're subjecting the pet to your own schedule and wants. (If you actually follow these arguments all the way through, they usually end up at saying that domesticating those animals was wrong in the first place, and what we should be doing is spaying and neutering as many pets as possible, so that there won't be more animals born into that life. I disagree, and this is far enough from my own position that I haven't really read into it fully and can't totally explain the arguments, and I'm sure that someone who knows more about it would probably point out a ton of errors in this paragraph.)

(I really have no stake in the argument over the eggs from the pet chickens. I won't eat eggs from farmed chickens, and I've never known anyone who kept pet chickens, so it hasn't come up. Also, I got food poisoning from an egg sandwich several years ago, and the smell of cooked eggs has made me feel sick since then, so I probably wouldn't even get to the point of making that decision anyway.)

Thanks for explaining, Hil.

I've been a vegetarian, but I was always a little confused about vegans. The non-dairy stuff made some kind of sense, it's milk that wasn't intended for humans, the eggs were intended to be chicken embryos, but the honey never made sense.

If you really want to start a vegan war sometime, call someone a welfarist. "Welfarist" is the term that the animal abolitionist people use to describe people like me who think that, while it would be great if everyone would stop eating meat, that's not going to happen any time soon, and passing laws banning gestation crates or mandating a certain amount of land per animal on a farm and other things like that are useful and good things to work on in the meantime. They use the same word to describe someone who goes hunting on weekends, has a pet dog, and sends a check for $20 to the ASPCA every once in a while. They'd say that laws about the treatment of farm animals that still allow those animals to be killed just let omnivores think, "Well, it's OK to eat that meat, because it comes from a happy cow," and that advocating those sort of measures is ultimately counterproductive.

Also, although it's not an "official" part of veganism, a lot of vegans will try to buy organic produce and produce from smaller farms as much as possible, and one of the reasons is that the larger farms are often pretty sketchy with following labor laws and the farm workers at non-organic farms are often exposed to dangerous levels of pesticides. With the way our food system is structured, where you can buy a jar of spaghetti sauce that might have ingredients grown in seven different countries, trying to have a diet free of human exploitation is actually much more difficult than trying to have a diet free of animal exploitation, since, unless you're a locavore, it's nearly impossible to actually find out about the conditions of the workers who grew and processed everything you're eating.

Wow, America is weird. Kayla's in LAST place?

I'm really nervous about these results.

Amy,

Nigel has admitted (at least one previous season) that the order in which people are excused in the final 4 show may not reflect the "real" rankings.

I don't know what to think about that.

Thank you, America!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Nigel has admitted (at least one previous season) that the order in which people are excused in the final 4 show may not reflect the "real" rankings.

Seriously? That's ... unsettling.

Guess Evan's not winning. I'm okay with that.

when kat shows up (she of the memory like a steel trap), might remember what I'm talking about. I think it was Lacey's season, but I'm not sure.