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When business meets a better business idea: Think about it

I’m familiar with Slutty Vegan and while not quite a fan – all the yelling, not sure I get that – the concept is solid and the burgers are good. And whatever one may think about the sustainability of meat and particularly the way we ‘farm’ chickens at this point, ‘They pull their little beaks off’ is actually a thing, no matter how you may or may not feel about it. And of course, the practice has far worse ethical issues.

SV founder and CEO Aisha “Pinky” Cole elaborates on her plan to exploit this fact to continue building her business (paywalled):

When you get an order of chicken wings, how many chickens is that? Two and a half? Two? What? And how old are they? Are these babies? Are they middle-aged? Are they wealthy? Are they poor? I wanna know: Where are these chickens coming from? And how are y’all able to produce so much, so fast?

I stopped eating meat altogether in 2007. I got food poisoning after I went to a restaurant. I had a chicken sandwich, and I got super sick. I was like, “That’s it. I’m not eating no more meat.” A little shy of 10 years ago, I went cold turkey and never turned back. When I went vegan, I had a restaurant that sold meat. I was selling oxtails and jerk chicken. But I wasn’t in alignment because I didn’t eat it. So why was I selling it?

Veganism is closely associated to climate change and how it’s important to save the animals and make sure that you’re doing the right things so that animals can sustain. I started really researching those things and I’m like, “Oh, I have to use my voice a little bit differently.”

Fake burgers as lifestyle brand, y’all.

Do try to keep up.

More on SV here.

Image: Not a burger (Beef Wellington, actually), but I bet she’s working on it. via wiki commons

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X Marx the Spot

In the capital of capitalism, where capitalism is doing its greatest damage. You don’t have to be an American apostate to think this, just look around you.

Hunter-gatherers persisted in their way of life for thousands of years, slave cultures for almost as long and feudal societies for many centuries. In contrast, capitalism transforms everything it touches.

It’s not just brands that are constantly changing. Companies and industries are created and destroyed in an incessant stream of innovation, while human relationships are dissolved and reinvented in novel forms.

Capitalism has been described as a process of creative destruction, and no-one can deny that it has been prodigiously productive. Practically anyone who is alive in Britain today has a higher real income than they would have had if capitalism had never existed.

That’s from an article on Marx from the BBC, and that point would indeed be difficult to argue with. But of course, it’s not the end of the story – only an enticement to get you to embrace the system further, until the system begins to destroy everything that brought it about. Including democracy – it will have to kill that. In a capitalism vs. democracy cage match, doesn’t capitalism, to even be defined as true capitalism, doesn’t it have to win? What does this mean?