Please spare a thought for Douglas Ramsey, chief operating officer of mystery “meat” firm, Beyond Meat. Ramsey has endured a terrible week.
First came the incredible news that a species that owes its remarkable brain to eating meat has little interest in eating pretend, plant-based “meat.” Second, poor famished Ramsey got so hungry he allegedly tried to bite off another man’s nose after mistaking it for pork knuckle, a hearty yet delicate Czech dish of considerable taste.
I’m assuming Ramsey is vegan. Surely one couldn’t helm Beyond Meat and herald the end of meat whilst eating flesh, the product of murder? Surely those who know better practice what they preach?
I don’t wish to debone, filet, spatchcock, or broil Ramsey, but satire comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable. The comfortable push their fake meat onto the afflicted. The afflicted finds this rather uncomfortable.
Apparently, Ramsey left a college football game before getting into a fight and trying to bite off a man’s nose. Thwarted in this bout of recreational cannibalism, Ramsey put his fist through his alleged victim’s car window and beat him around the head.
So many questions abound. First, this psychotic break is not the act of a paltry, plant-based person: from where did Ramsey muster the strength to walk from his car to the football stadium? And from where did Ramsey collect the brute strength to smash his fist through a car window?
Perhaps Ramsey broke ranks at the football game, devouring with bulimic glee seven hot dogs. From those hot dogs, Ramsey absorbed the violence, the fear, the pain, the terror, and the trauma of the slaughtered.
Beyond Meat has yet to comment upon the particulars of this brouhaha. If I were their PR team, I’d reheat the above claim that meat-eaters ingest the violence meted upon their food.
Ramsey’s violent outburst, then, is proof everyone should eat only Beyond Meat products to make the world a safer, less nose-bitey place.
Perhaps Ramsey went roid-rage after seeing the state of Beyond Meat stocks. Since the highs of 2019, they’ve crashed 75 percent.
Despite big money, big tech, and big endorsements, Beyond Meat is beyond hope. I find this beyond hilarious.
Not long ago, Beyond Meat was the future. Like all fancies and follies, Beyond Meat would change the world. History is littered with the gravestones of such “inevitable” movements.
The premise of Beyond Meat was a perfect illustration of Swiftian folly: burgers made from plants save mankind from an Armageddon occasioned by cow farts. But the meat-eating 95 percent choose Armageddon and ribeye over utopia and pretend meat. If only Jonathan Swift were alive today . . .
Read the rest at Christopher Gage’s Substack, Oxford Sour. And please subscribe.