OK so... we have been suuuuuper lazy at posting, and it sucks that it takes a bit of bad news to awaken us from our bacon induced coma. But it is what it is.
I got a marketing email from Jason over at Lolyphile! and in his words it may be the worst marketing email ever written in the history of the internet. (Jason, while it is sad news and may be counter intuitive to business, it at least reads coherently and is not telling me how my manhood could be HUGE in some form of broken English.) For those of you that may not know, Lolyphile! was the first and I think one of the best bacon lollipops you could order online. The sad news, they are discontinuing their bacon products. :(
Rather than paraphrase, here is the email:
Dear All:
Please bear with. Everything will be fine.
It's not about health, no pork recall, no salmonella, nothing like that. It's just that in the wake of the whole horrible BP thing we've been doing a lot of thinking about the value of making money vs. the value of avoiding creating more damage in the world, and even in the face of our only using organic & sustainably-farmed bacon, and we've decided that we're not really comfortable with the latter. Please keep in mind that we very much don't want to come across as being judge-y or preachy. This isn't about you, your appetites, or your choices. It's about ours. If you're interested in more details about this decision, please see the postscript, in which Yours Truly will drop from second person to first and get very personal and maybe a little bit insecure.
We will be selling all of them off in four packs so that we can track stock levels and not oversell our inventory, and so everyone who wants a last crack at them can get it.
Here are the bacon flavors we have and the number of available four packs of each as of this writing:
We'll keep selling & making new flavors, we may even make a limited edition fake-bacon version of the above if there's any expressed interest, but once these guys are gone, they're all the way gone. Forever.
Feel free to use discount code somepig for 15% off your order.
Much love & xo.
//jason
Long-winded First-person Postscript: Seriously, I'm not being preachy. I grew up on a ranch in Texas. I know from eating meat. I've eaten lots and lots and lots of it. It tastes really, really good. But here's the thing- in January I went vegan for a month, mainly for vanity reasons, but at the beginning of February I kept with it, because it felt really nice in ways I hadn't expected: I had more energy, I looked healthier, I spent more time cooking and learning new ways of cooking... and as I was rereading my favorite book of essays, Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace, I decided to follow up on a book he'd referenced in the title essay- Animal Liberation by Peter Singer. It's a really amazing book. And it made me start taking veganism seriously as opposed to being a smart-ass about it when asked.
(I have no idea how interesting this is, by the way. I'm just aware that a) people tend to take decisions like this personally, b) that our bacon lollies are our best sellers, our most publicity-generating, and c) that if you remove the personal and ethical ramifications of this decision then the combination of a & b make me sound crazy. I'm not [I don't think]. I've talked this through with a lot of people and thought about it a lot before following through. And I'm concerned that those of you who are actually reading this footnote are either annoyed that I'm removing a product that many of you love or you're worried about my mental health. So I feel like I owe you an explanation.)
Anyhow, reading A.L. was, for me, kind of an important thing. And then this hideous BP thing happened and I realized that one thing that really bugged me about it was that while I was able to talk about the facts and work myself up into a self-righteous rage, I couldn't internalize it- it was too far away, too abstract, huge but not affecting me in any obvious direct way that made my day-to-day life any different. Like, the Gulf of Mexico is dying and I'm throwing frisbee for my dog. It seems so crazy.
So I started thinking about the things that I do that help the systems that make these kinds of things happen. And I'm working on changing a bunch of them- it's the least I can do, right? And I realized that one of the things I can do is stop supporting industrial farming. So this is it. I'm never going to write another check to a meat company. Or at least I'll be trying not to.
(I am also aware that this is literally the worst marketing email ever written in the history of the internet.)
Anyhow, that's more or less my reasoning. The other point I really want to make is that this isn't about you. I don't think it's wrong or bad to eat meat in general. I just feel like it's wrong for me to do so, and even worse for me not not eat it for philosophical reasons and then to make money off of it.
That's all. Thanks for reading.
xo//j
I have a ton of respect for them, some people would take the money and separate their personal beliefs from the business. Hats off to you sir.
