A vegan diet by definition excludes all animal products, so for this reason eggs can never be vegan. That's why I'm bringing you vegan versions of your favorite dishes like scrambled eggs, vegan omelette, and vegan quiche! But now the serious bit, for those of you who might not know and are wondering what's so wrong with consuming eggs.  The egg industry is a particularly cruel one with female chickens bred to lay way more eggs than nature intended. Naturally, with no manipulation, chickens lay roughly 15 to 20 eggs a year. On egg farms, they produce 250 to 300 eggs per year.  This means they spend their entire lives suffering.  Egg-laying hens are almost always kept in very poor conditions and after 18 months, are classed as "spent" because their little bodies can no longer keep up with the demand of laying an unnaturally high number of eggs. They are sent to slaughter when naturally they could live for around 12 years.  In hatcheries, hens are needed because they lay eggs. Males are surplus to requirements which means that as soon as they hatch, they become a waste product. They are either ground up alive in a macerator or gassed to death, usually within 15 minutes of hatching from their egg. Whether from a battery farm, a free-range farm, or an organic farm, all the hens and the chicks face the same fate, and even well-meaning people who keep chickens in good conditions at home often end up purchasing chickens from a hatchery, or chickens that originated from a hatchery, so are still inadvertently funding their barbaric practices.  We all vote with our dollars and by avoiding eggs, we are sending the message that we won't support the egg industry. And to be absolutely honest, we really don't need them. There are many vegan substitutes for eggs and it is possible to make great versions of just about all recipes that traditionally use eggs. For some of my recipes, check out the links at the end of this post.