to make veganism inclusive—even of nonvegans. Rather than engage in a debate, it created a narrative where veganism was palatable, fun, even funny. If the fast food chain was using clowns and playgrounds to promote its food, why couldn’t Ori do the same?
Wearing T-shirts bearing the golden arches and accompanied by the McVegan mascot, Reggie McVeggie, Ori’s group gave out free veggie burgers. And after months and months of tabling for animal rights only to be ignored, suddenly the McVegan stand was mobbed by curious students.
Within an hour, they had given out more than a thousand veggie burgers. Moreover, even nonvegans, ye olde carnivores, loved the T-shirts so much that they asked to buy them. All of a sudden people loved the activists; veganism was becoming a cool, fun counterculture movement. And no one was spitting in anyone’s face.
Leor and Ori printed colorful T-shirts and stickers and started selling them to punk-rock kids at concerts. The kids would stick them on their shoes, their bikes, their hats. The logo was becoming a fun fashion accessory.
One day Ori spotted a kid on a bike with a McVegan sticker.
“Did you get that at Gilman?” he asked the kid.
“At where?” the kid answered, unaware of the alternative venue where punk rock bands like Green Day performed before they made it big. “No, dude, I got it from my friend. He gave it to me because I work at McDonald’s.”
McVegan was equally appealing to punk rockers, to people who didn’t like the idea of corporate fast food, to kids who wanted to rebel, and to those who just thought it was funny. You could wear a McVegan T-shirt and still eat a Big Mac.
Soon other colleges held their own McVegan events, inspired by the narrative.
But not everyone thought it was funny.
Many of Ori’s friends in the environmental movement argued that McVegan still encouraged consumerism. They argued that McVegan belittled a serious issue. The fact that someone could wear a T-shirt and still consume meat was evidence, they argued, that the path to societal change was to defend the facts and work toward policy changes.
The other folks who weren’t amused, unsurprisingly, were McDonald’s executives and lawyers. Just as McVegan was gaining a little bit of attention, McDonald’s threatened to sue for trademark infringement.
Uh-oh.
How can you possibly win a legal battle against McDonald’s? Leor, Ori, and Mark huddled and ultimately made the decision based on their bicycles. Specifically, the bikes were pretty much their only possessions, so what did they have to lose?
They decided to fight back, but not in the way you’d expect. They realized that, unlike their previous protests, this wouldn’t be a debate.
McVegan and Reggie McVeggie were literal clowns who were causing McDonald’s a whole lot of grief. At that point, McDonald’s had to make a choice. The natural inclination—the obvious strategy—was to get rid of the clowns, to silence them.
Indeed, that’s what McDonald’s tried to do. That’s when something weird happened. By attacking McVegan, McDonald’s was only shining light on Reggie McVeggie, only giving him more prominence and inadvertently amplifying the narrative. And McVegan was simply more fun and more hip than McDonald’s.
All of a sudden T-shirt and sticker orders were coming in from around the world.
That’s when Ori had a fundamental realization: as the under-dog, it’s easier to engage in a war of narratives than it is to win a debate on the merits.
Because McVegan was inclusive, because anyone could be a part of it, there was no one (other than McDonald’s) who was terribly offended by it or set against it. After a number of positive news stories broke, reporters were calling to get the McVegan side of the story. But rather than engage in a debate, Ori dressed up as Reggie McVeggie and held a press conference.
The next day McDonald’s dropped its case.
Now, what if McDonald’s had chosen a different strategy? Rather than trying to win the debate, what if it had recognized that it was engaged in a battle of narratives?
This is the first major element of the new environment shaping our world. Narratives, as we’ll see, are having greater and greater impact in industries and on the world political stage alike. More specifically, the world is moving from debates about facts to battles of narratives.
Facts are about being right or wrong. McDonald’s believed it was wrong for McVegan to have infringed the trademark. But narratives aren’t as concerned with who is right and who is wrong; they’re focused on who’s more interesting.
Facts are by definition grounded in logic. Narratives, however, are based on emotions. McVegan wasn’t about whether it’s logical to eat a beef burger or a soy alternative. It was simply declaring that the alternative was fun. McVegan was powerful in the same way that a clown in a circus has power, or a jester in a royal court. A jester could mock the king by distilling one attribute, twisting it, and giving it a new (and funny) interpretation. Reggie McVeggie gave a new spin to Ronald McDonald: what if healthy eating were fun?
Facts need to be verified in order to have utility. But narratives gain power merely by spreading. Each punk-rock kid who put a McVegan sticker on his or her bike to protest commercialism spread the narrative; as did each McDonald’s employee who did so as a joke. Thus McVegan mutated and could be both a critique of fast food and a good-natured spoof.
Unlike facts, no one expects narratives to be exacting. They are derivatives of the truth, not pure versions of it. Thus they’re allowed to be more flexible and agile, because they spread by being interesting, not necessarily by being accurate. They don’t have to be scientifically on point; they just need to have a compelling plot.
This brings us to the core of the issue. Facts depend on expert validation to persist, while narratives simply need to be retold. That means that you can’t win a narrative battle by simply proving that the opposing narrative is in some way inaccurate. A narrative battle is won by drowning out the countermessage.
Imagine if instead of viewing McVegan and Reggie McVeggie as adversaries to be silenced, McDonald’s had taken a page from Shakespeare’s King Lear, who noted that “jesters do oft prove prophets.” In other words, what if McVegan was onto an emerging trend?
Indeed, while Ori hasn’t done any work on McVegan since 1995, the concept endured. In 2015 industry publication AgWeb posted an article with a title that would have seemed impossible two decades earlier: “McVegan: Former McDonald’s CEO Joining Board of Beyond Meat” (a veggie burger maker). Don Thompson, former McDonald’s CEO, had turned veggie burger enthusiast.
It wasn’t necessarily that Thompson had a philosophical change of heart about burgers—rather, he was following market demands. He wasn’t the only business executive who warmed up to veggie burgers. Bill Gates joined a version of the McVegan campaign as well. More on that later. The point is that veganism, thanks to inclusive narratives, is no longer on the fringe of society. In fact, just a few weeks before this book went to press, news broke that McDonald’s itself was testing a new vegan burger. Its name? The McVegan.3
What if McDonald’s had amplified rather than tried to squelch McVegan, and what if it had developed the veggie burger first
