A Company That Bans Meat Deserves to be Grilled

Last week the cofounder of WeWork issued a company-wide memo, exclusively obtained by Bloomberg, explaining that from here on in, catered events will not feature any morsel of meat. No chicken, no beef, no lamb, no pork. What’s more, meals containing these ingredients may no longer be expensed. “New research indicates that avoiding meat is one of the biggest things an individual can do to reduce their personal environmental impact,” Miguel McKelvey informed his employees, “even more than switching to a hybrid car.”

If this were a small outfit, the story wouldn’t deserve more than an eye roll. I once met a distiller who bragged that his vodka was the only one of its kind—“we’re gay-owned and operated,” he told me. This would have been bigger news had there been more than four employees. WeWork, on the other hand, is an office-space giant with 6,000 employees spanning the globe, valued at $20 billion. Its decision to go meatless in order to bolster its sustainability could influence (or guilt) other big businesses into doing something similar.

It could, mind you, but it shouldn’t.

To be clear, WeWork isn’t preventing its employees from eating meat—it’s just not paying for it. And obviously it is not the first company to boldly signal its virtues. Remember when Deutsche Bank chose not to expand hiring near Raleigh, N.C., because of a transgender bathroom bill in the state but maintained its lucrative business in Saudi Arabia? In addition, as Nate Lanxon observed in Bloomberg, “Juicero, a failed maker of high-priced juice machines, had instituted a similar ban on reimbursing employee expenses for meals at non-vegan restaurants,” while “American Airlines Group Inc. and Starbucks Corp. recently joined the chorus of companies pledging to phase out plastic straws and drink stirrers.” But a multibillion-dollar corporate giant’s attempts to curb personal meat consumption brings to mind the Office of Price Administration’s rationing of meat in 1943 in the midst of a world war. WeWork’s executives, no doubt, would argue that they too are at war—to save the planet.

So how effective is the current meatless campaign? “It bans lamb, for instance, and it bans chicken, but it doesn’t ban eggs. Eggs cause just as much environmental damage as chickens do, and much less than lamb does,” writes Felix Salmon in Slate. “It’s hard to see much environmental logic in a policy that’s fine with factory-farmed salmon but that forbids people from eating pigeon. (There are far too many pigeons in the world, eat as many as you want.)” WeWork might as well go full vegan or even—just to be safe—full fruitarian, like the girl from Notting Hill. “We only eat things that have actually fallen from the tree or bush and that are, in fact, dead already.”

Even assuming submitted receipts must be itemized, problems persist. Will WeWork’s expense monitors know that any order of pasta carbonara contains pancetta—and will they know pancetta is pork belly? Or that, as a cooking instructor informed Michael Ruhlman in The Making of a Chef, “Classical chowders always have pork”? In other words, any orders of New England, Manhattan, and maybe even Rhode Island clam chowder are suspect and therefore should not be expensed. The same goes for that side order of peas and onions at the Palm Steakhouse, which are bathed in au jus.

And forget about receipts from ethnic establishments—I’m betting an order of vitello saltimbocca or Ethiopian tibs will be able to slip past the expense guards. If you are truly daring, order the Happy Family at a Chinese restaurant. Can you tell from the name if it contains beef, chicken, or pork? (Trick question: The answer is all three!) So there are going to be serious flaws in the verification process.

If WeWork is truly concerned about reducing its environmental impact, there are alternatives. “It manages 10 million square feet of office space in 76 cities around the world, including Warsaw and Chengdu; across its 406 locations, some have much higher carbon footprints than others,” Salmon points out in Slate. He recommends the company “confine itself to LEED-certified buildings. That way, landlords would have a strong economic incentive to make their buildings energy-efficient and therefore attractive to WeWork and other environmentally conscious tenants.” Of course, that might cut into the bottom line—rents would no doubt be higher.

Instead, we have virtue signaling from a company that describes itself as “a place you join as an individual ‘me,’ but where you become a part of a greater ‘we.’ ” Which sounds like something the Borg from Star Trek might say, right before they turn you into a drone. “From now on you’re eating exclusively quinoa and kale. Resistance is futile.”

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