WeWork Tells Employees Meat Is Permanently Off the Company Menu | Hacker News Reader

WeWork Tells Employees Meat Is Permanently Off the Company Menu

bloomberg.com

35 pointsawb57 comments

I would tell any company that tried to dictate the content of my expensed meals while traveling to go fuck themselves. Sadly I know that not everyone has the privilege of doing so

I want to know how they plan to enforce it. Let's say I'm traveling and eat at an airport restaurant in the departure area. The receipt says "burger". I say I ordered the tofurkey burger. How can they prove I didn't?

Take a picture of the menu after you double check your receipt, I guess. Or don't order risky items.

I doubt any restaurant would list a veggie burger as "Burger". There'd be a "V" or something, to explain why it was $2 extra.

I bet most waitresses/waiters would ring you up for some other dish that is the same price as the one you ordered for a decent tip.

Agreed, this is almost certainly meaningless 'virtue signaling' in practice... My main question is who is the intended audience? The 1.8% of the planet that is vegetarian?

edit: thanks for the downvote, was my comment and question offensive?

> The 1.8% of the planet that is vegetarian

I was curious about this. According to wikipedia (take with salt), 21% of the world population is vegetarian either by choice or necessity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism_by_country

There are some surprising results in the list, but the tl;dr is: India.

Even in India though, I think the percent of pure vegetarians is 50-60% (not all Hindus completely abstain from meat like fish/chicken, and Muslims don’t).

>who is the intended audience? The 1.8% of the planet that is vegetarian?

According to TFA they are doing it to reduce their environment footprint.

>thanks for the downvote, was my comment and question offensive?

"Virtue signaling" gets an automatic downvote from me.

That’s not always possible. Chain restaurants and such can’t do that because they use the sale records to decide what supplies to order for tomorrow, what items to remove from the menu, etc.

It's pretty easy to avoid chain restaurants..

Sure, but I still don’t like the idea of a customer badgering a waiter to do something that could get them fired, especially because their wages are tip based.

Nothing is stopping you from talking to the manager..

As a vegetarian, this is pretty dumb. I could see not serving meat at the company, but not allowing people to expense it? That’s just weird and feels overly dranconian. If they are so concerned with environmental impact, do their other company policies extend this level of control? (Require carbon neutral transport, environmentally friendly electronics? What about building materials? Furnishings?). I don’t think like they are going to convert anyone to vegan/vegetarian this way, and probably encourage the opposite.

I give it six months until they get sued by a Muslim employee. Culturally and religiously eating meat is pretty much required in Pakistan.

The article seems to suggest that religious needs etc would be met.

Does one have to prove membership, or can one just claim it, I wonder? Will they be asking to see tithing records?

And that’s how overnight, 2/3rds of WeWork employees became religious/Ill.

That is a weird comment.

I mean I am Indian and know plenty of Muslims. In fact some of them are my closest pals. I understand they eat meat regularly but I don't understand how eating meat regularly is required?

As a matter of fact, I have lived with 2 muslim guys for 4 years and I never felt like they feel the need to eat meat. All those years, they ate veg food (except when they visited their home).

From TFA:

> Individuals requiring "medical or religious" allowances are being referred to the company’s policy team to discuss options.

Sure, there are strong environmental and ethical reasons against eating meat.

But do we really want to applaud companies dictating what their employees do in their down time?

Keep in mind this policy covers travel expenses, so if you have to travel for work, you must eat the vegetarian option while traveling or you will pay out of pocket. Even if the only vegetarian option is fries, which is not uncommon.

They're not dictating what employees can do on their own time, only what they can use company resources for. You can always find a restaurant with good vegan/veg options, although its admittedly harder in europe.

So you fly away from your family to spend the night closing a deal for your employer and after a long day of meetings you sit down and have to order tofu because the latest Richard Hendricks of the hour started dating a vegan. Fuck this whole idea and fuck WeWork.

Would you be so understanding of this rule if it was the other way around? If you were only able to expense meals including meat, and vegetarian options were carefully excluded at WeWork events?

I was a vegetarian for years and it fell apart when I spent 6 months as a music tour manager. When you are on the road you need to work with what's available. I support being vegetarian and even encouraging this among employees somehow, but maybe there's a way that's more considerate and practical.

The purpose of expensing meals is to compensate employees for the greatly increased cost of eating that is imposed by travel taking them away from their normal food storage and preparation facilities. It shouldn't be regarded as using company resources to purchase food. It should be treated as a form of employee compensation.

There are also strong environmental and ethical reasons against eating soy and other mass-produced crops in lieu of meat.

The best ethical option is to eat organic foods grown/reared by yourself or someone close by, but that option doesn't scale so well in our current economy.

First off, I think this is a bad business decision.

But

>Even if the only vegetarian option is fries, which is not uncommon.

Is not true in my experience.

I'm a vegetarian and I only very rarely have problems finding something to eat at restaurants, and not fries, I don't even like fries. Though sometimes I have to ask for substitutions.

I admit, if you are not actually open to eating non-meat products you'd have issues.

This is how corporations are like autocratic governments. And the larger they get, the harder it is to get away from their spheres of influence (if you’re a software engineer in Seattle, by rejecting Amazon as an employer you wrote yourself out of 90% of the open hiring reqs in the city).

Can’t see how a company can do this and then meaningfully claim to care about “diversity.” Also worth noting that this decision falls wholly on employees and not at all on customers — best to abuse the people who will find it much harder to quit you.

...and a new cohort of coworking spaces kickoff with the investor pitch " 'we're the wework of the coworking spaces with meat' industry"

A few more details from an article in the Guardian:

---

The Guardian US is based at one of the many offices run by WeWork in New York City. Currently on the event schedule is a TGIM with Capital One event that promises “mini doughnuts and bacon, bacon, bacon”. This is one of many events promising to serve meat at WeWorks across the world – even as the policy was being announced, at the Corrigan Station WeWork in Kansas City lunch is being provided from Monk’s Roast Beef as part of “food truck Friday”, for example.

When the Guardian spoke to WeWork about whether these events would be cancelled, a spokesperson said they would not, and clarified: “This policy only applies to events paid for by WeWork. Members and employees are welcome to bring in meat for meals, and members are welcome to serve meat at events they host … we are working with vendors to align our commitment for previously scheduled events, and meat will not be served at events hosted by WeWork moving forward.”

---

Not paying for people to buy meat is perfectly reasonable. It's your money and you can decide how you spend it. It's like not paying for birth control as part of a company health plan.

But having a company event, a "summer camp," with no meat food options might be incredibly fucked up.

It's legal, but it is in fact not reasonable.

> It's like not paying for birth control as part of a company health plan.

That's not reasonable either.

I don't understand why so many people think that "not actually illegal" is the same thing as "perfectly acceptable."

Well, I'm not paying for your birth control and I'm not buying you any meat either. I don't see anything wrong with either, for the same reason.

And that's fine, as long as you're not running a company.

More discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17526695

Meat is too expensive!

Ramen it will be. And it will teach them startup spirit!

biggest discussion ended up here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17526695

hippies

Obligatory: "this is why Trump won."

Well, I can sort of see if the founder is a vegetatian and has issues with meat consumption.... but at the same time it’s dictatorial and patronizing and, to many, off putting.

Not as offputting as let’s say an omnivore or meat eater insisting on others all eating meat centric dishes, but still very jarring.

It’s very cause oriented.

When I see stuff like this I do get about a 500 millisecond urge to vote for Trump in 2020 just to give a big middle finger to people like this CEO. Then I realize the cost of that middle finger and it’s too expensive for my tastes.

That's pretty much why we got Trump in the first place. A lot of disgruntled Bernie fans who decided they'd rather watch the world burn than accept the lesser of two evils.

Good bye WeWork. Just another crazy idea by the environmentalists, right after feeding babies with orange juice instead of milk. Btw, human DNA contains 50% of proteins obtainable only from meat. Make your own conclusions.

This is a dumb idea, but you're being just as ideological and silly as they are. It's quite possible for modern humans to be healthy without eating meat.

>"New research indicates that avoiding meat is one of the biggest things an individual can do to reduce their personal environmental impact"

Not nearly as much impact as not having kids.

Meat vs. non-meat is not the right lens through which to judge the environmental impact of your diet. Cost per calorie is.

For instance, whole chickens provide about about 1200 calories/dollar, whereas leafy green vegetables all provide under 100 calories/dollar. That means there is a 12x difference in the amount of resources required per calorie provided. You can go on about the externalities of meat all you want, but a 12x difference almost certainly makes up for them.

So if you switch from eating lots of meat to eating lots of leafy green vegetables and berries, you probably aren't making much of a difference. The better heuristic to follow is to just pay attention to how much your food costs. Less money spent on food = lower environmental impact.

If you're interested, I go pretty deep down this rabbit hole here: http://www.thinkfundamental.org/why-kale-is-actually-terribl...

What? No. This ignores subsidies, markup, shelf space, and that you probably shouldn't be going for the cheapest calorie per dollar anyway. Following your argument, we should all just eat pure sugar and butter.

I read your site, and it's all just FUD. You mention in passing how you'd need to grow agriculture to feed animals anyway, and then completely ignore that fact through the rest of your writing. You don't cite any actual environmental numbers, pull some out of your ass, and then hand wave your way through your position.

> sugar and butter

GP is talking about environmental impact, not health.

Look, calories per $ is a crude metric that I would not put forward as useful for food items which are within 2x of each other in terms of calories per $. But when you're talking about a 12x difference, I think you have to engage in serious denial to dismiss it.

> You mention in passing how you'd need to grow agriculture to feed animals anyway, and then completely ignore that fact through the rest of your writing.

I'm not sure what you think I should have addressed about this, but I have had people try to claim that meat cannot possibly be easier on the environment than plants, since animals consume plants and there is energy loss in that process, so I'll assume that's your objection. And the answer is that animals are fed plants which provide a lot of calories per $. If you were to base your diet on those plants (grains, essentially), then, yes, it would be better for the environment than eating meat. But I was specifically pointing out that there are classes of plants (leafy greens and berries) which are worse for the environment than some meat (chicken). There are also classes of meat (red meat; 50-400 calories per $) that are worse than certain classes of plants (potatoes, grains, and nut & vegetable oils; 800-3000 calories per $).

The argument is thermodynamic: meat will never provide more calories than it requires.

Plants, as a class, have a cost per calorie with a 60x range (from about 50 to 3000 calories per $). Animals are fed with plants at the higher end of that range. If you replace your meat consumption with plants at the lower end of that scale, it does not result in lower resource consumption.

In the case of leafy greens, most of the energy will be tied up in cellulose that will pass straight though a human digestive system undigested.

Any model that treats a human body as a perfectly efficient bomb calorimeter will produce such inaccurate results as to be virtually useless.

> Meat vs. non-meat is not the right lens through which to judge the environmental impact of your diet. Cost per calorie is.

Only if you pretend that the entire supply chain is an idealized free market without externalities, which is wrong in basically every possible way when it comes to food, everywhere in the world.

Yeah, my whole point is that when you have an order of magnitude difference in cost per calorie between two food items, that allows for an order of magnitude difference in externalities/subsidies/whatever.

If you meausred just calories per dollar you'd have everyone eating out of a communal 20 kilogram bucket of pure lard.

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