Brandjack News

By Quentin Langley

Mark Zuckerberg – the founder of Facebook, and a multi-billionaire who is irritatingly twenty years younger than I am – is at the heart of a contoversy surrounding his policy of deciding to only eat animals he has personally killed.

Some people are disconcerted by this, and interpret it as a statement that he is going to start killing a lot of animals. Others take exception to his claim that this will make him "virtually vegetarian". 

Plainly, you can't be a vegetarian and eat meat. Yet it is also pretty obvious that, for the vast majority of people, adopting such a policy would mean eating a great deal less meat. While film footage of Zuckerberg personally killing animals would undoubtedly distress people, it is difficult for meat eaters to sneer at the work of slaughter houses and butchers. (Full disclosure: this author is not a meat eater.)

This is a sensitve issue, because many people live such sanitised lives. We pay others to do most dirty, smelly, and distasteful jobs for us. This is not unreasonable, indeed most of us more comfortable lives as a result. But with meat, English speakers have another layer of protection. The meat on your table is not 'cow' or 'pig' it is 'beef' or 'pork'. Of course with lamb – much the cutest animal routinely eaten in Anglo-Saxon countries – there is no such protection. 

Zuckerberg is setting an interesting example. If others followed it, a great deal less meat would be eaten, with all the consequent reduction in the carbon footprint of your food.