with the block-letter words BERKELEY STUDENTS FOR ANIMAL LIBERATION underneath.
He sighed. It was time for the debates to start. Ironically, Ori had joined the group to meet new people. He was putting himself through college, and to save money, rather than splurge on a dorm room, he lived on the wrong side of town with a schizophrenic who spent nights arguing with the voices in his head.
A freshman living off campus and a committed vegan, Ori had hoped he’d meet like-minded friends. Instead, here he was engaging in a debate with a biochemistry PhD candidate about the efficacy of animal studies.
“You’re all idealists who don’t know what you’re talking about,” the scientist said, his voice rising.
Ori tried to take a reasoned approach, but the tension only mounted. Meanwhile, the guy at the lacrosse table was engaged in a lengthy conversation with a tanned freshman interested in joining intramural sessions.
How Ori wished he had joined lacrosse, or even the environmental club, where a group of hippies were talking about a beach cleanup project. At least those two groups attracted potential members.
Things came to a head a few weeks later, when BSAL organized its first protest of the semester. After doing rigorous recruiting, making special signs, and obtaining a permit from the city, BSAL staged a daylong protest outside a McDonald’s. Out of the tens of thousands of Berkeley students, seven people showed up.
The tiny group held up signs showing photographs taken in slaughterhouses and gave out pamphlets describing the difficult conditions within them. The hope was that the graphic imagery would sway opinions. “Wait a second,” a passer-by might say. “I respect animals and this place tortures them?”
That conversation never happened.
Instead people engaged Ori in so-called debates, which were more like one-sided tirades about why he was wrong and/or crazy. And those who didn’t engage in such debates—the vast majority of people, that is—ignored him and his fellow protesters. And when we say ignore, we mean ignore. It was as if the animal rights activists were phantoms.
But Ori was undeterred.
By noon, the group had stood out in front of McDonald’s for three hours. They had given out hundreds of flyers but hadn’t actually dissuaded anyone from going in. Then a middle-aged woman, her kid in tow, walked toward the group.
She looked like she could be one of Ori’s mom’s friends: friendly and kind, a woman in whose home he could have grown up. The nice lady approached the group, and Ori and his peers smiled at her. Finally, here’s someone on our side, they thought. But the woman said nothing. Instead she came up to the guy standing next to Ori and literally spit in his face.
As she walked away, she yelled toward the stunned protesters, “Stuck-up elitists!”
It was an ironic epithet to hurl at a group of activists who wore secondhand clothes and persisted primarily on lentils and cabbage. But at the same time, whatever you might think of the politeness of spitting in someone’s face, the woman came from an understandable place.
Here she was trying to take her kid out for a fun, affordable meal, and a bunch of protesters were calling her immoral. Let’s face it: health food is more expensive and difficult to find than ubiquitous McDonald’s restaurants. What gave these holier-than-thou protesters the right to tell her what she should do?
If mothers were spitting at you, Ori reasoned, clearly something needed to change. He realized that he and his fellow BSAL members were losing the debate.
Over the next months, they put the protests on hold and strategized about how to actually make a difference—how to get through to the people they were trying to reach. The group came up with a number of ideas for new tactics, but Ori realized that no matter what they did, BSAL couldn’t compete with groups like the lacrosse club. It just wasn’t as . . . fun.
Then one evening Ori and his friend Leor Jacobi allowed themselves to dream.
“Imagine if we opened up a veggie burger place across from McDonald’s,” Ori said.
“With an even better playground outside,” Leor added.
“Yeah,” Ori continued. “We’d call it McVegan.”
There was a pause. A smile spreading across his face, Leor said, “We can do that.”
“Open a restaurant?” Ori asked.
“No, create the parody.” Leor spoke with alacrity. “Give veggie burgers away on Sproul.”
Leor sat down at his Mac that night and stayed glued to Photoshop for the next couple of days. The design he came up with featured the famous golden arches, but instead of the familiar slogan, it read “McVegan: Billions and Billions Saved.”
It’s important to note that just a few years earlier, unless he worked at an ad agency, Leor wouldn’t have had access to a computer able to perform this design work. But now, working in his little room at home, what he produced was . . . perfect.
McVegan represented a new tactic: create a positive narrative around being vegan. Being vegan is fun! It’s hip! All your friends are doing it! The next day Ori, Leor, and their friend Mark Schlosberg started vegan.org.
It was also the day that Ori killed BSAL. Immediately the president of every major animal rights group called him to yell at him: “You’re killing the animal rights movement!”
“Yes, that’s the idea,” he responded.
It wasn’t that he had anything against animal rights; it was just that he’d realized that the debate couldn’t be won because of the barriers it erected.
For one thing, scientists who used animals in their labs could not, by definition, be a part of the movement. That left an entire group—a group of very smart people, many of whom conducted their research in hopes of helping other people by curing a disease or gaining knowledge about health—inherently excluded. What’s more, in a debate about morality and the role of animals, could you say for sure that you were right and that the other side was wrong?
Let’s pause for a moment. Ask yourself, how many times during your personal or professional life have you been on the right side of an argument but been unable to convince others around you?
How many teams have you been a part of that felt excluded from the overall organization?
And even if you’ve never held a protest sign in your life, how many times have you felt that you were speaking to deaf ears?
Now imagine what a pain it was to teach people about veganism, of all things.
Remember that at the time, in the mid-1990s, very few people even knew the word “vegan.” This was long before the numerous studies showing the benefits of a plant-based diet. Most people knew that vegetarianism meant not eating animals, but vegans avoid all animal-derived products—no eggs, dairy, or leather.
To add to the challenges, “vegan” is not exactly a melodious word that rolls off your tongue. It’s a branding choice no marketing person would ever come up with. Ori realized that either he could earnestly make the case for giving up animal products or he could take a page from McDonald’s
