People seem to love hating on vegans.

To be fair, they don’t do themselves any favours when they get into public spats with famous chefs, or take legal action against their neighbours for hosting a braai, but that’s a small subset of the group.

For the most part, vegans are just like you and me, except without bacon.

If you know a vegan, or you’ve met a vegan, they’ve probably already told you about what they do and don’t eat (sometimes unprovoked, and at length).

It’s all plant-based, there are no animal products, and so on.

But there’s one food that seems to exist in the grey zone – the unfertilised egg – and some vegans are playing fast and loose with the rules.

HowStuffWorks looked into the rise of the ‘veggan’, a vegan who eats the occasional egg.

For people who spend a lot of time thinking about the ethics of eating, eggs can be a sticking point: chickens lay eggs regardless of whether they’re fertilized by a rooster. And since an unfertilized egg doesn’t have any prospects for hatching into a chicken, and the chicken probably doesn’t have any plans for it other than getting the thing out of its cloaca, it should be up for grabs, right? Hurting no one?

The answer is a clear “maybe” for the ‘veggan’. For the OG vegan, it’s a hard “no”.

For a vegan, breeding chickens for eggs is ethically akin to breeding humans in order to harvest their fingernails. Sure, we don’t really need our fingernails, but we can agree breeding a person just for their fingernails would be exceptionally lame — almost as lame as the conditions would probably be in the hypothetical factory farms full of millions of fingernail-growing humans.

“Even hens who live on small, outdoor, ‘humane’ farms are usually killed after two to five years, as their egg production naturally goes down as they age,” says Lenore Braford, founder of the Piedmont Farm Animal Refuge in Pittsboro, North Carolina. “It is a simple fact that farmers, whose bottom line is profit, won’t continue to spend money feeding birds who are not producing a large number of eggs for them to sell.”

Even cage-free, free-range, organic egg companies consider male chicks a byproduct of their industry, and millions of them are killed each year.

Well, that’s depressing.

So what do we do with all of those inevitable chicken eggs?

“Many chickens benefit greatly from eating cooked eggs,” she says. “This is important for them because a large amount of the calories they are eating are put into producing the daily egg, and not into their own bodies. It is common practice for farm animal sanctuaries to feed eggs back to their rescued chickens, as it has shown to help them live longer and healthier lives. Chickens are the ones who need eggs the most!”

Best not to think too hard about that one.

As for the ‘veggans’ – I’m sorry to tell you that vegans probably won’t be welcoming you into their ranks anytime soon.

[source:howstuffworks]