Douglas Rushkoff has posted up an excerpt from his new book, Get Back In the Box, and it looks at how Ben & Jerry's position themselves as an ethical company while selling fattening luxury food:
[T]he company agreed to be acquired by Unilever in 2000. [...] Ben and Jerry attempted to reassure their remaining fans, explaining that theirs would remain a separate company with its own governing board. Of course, the truly radical move would have been to infect Unilever with a bit of Ben and Jerry's ethos from the inside out. By agreeing to be sectioned off, behemoth Unilever's standard operating procedures could remain unchallenged. Meanwhile, Ben and Jerry's adds yet another layer of contradiction to its already ambiguous mission: a socially conscious company selling sugar and fat to Americans, in the service of a Big Food conglomerate whose own practices Ben and Jerry's was originally born to contest.
Via Boing Boing
2 comments:
I'm sorry it was only a throw away comment on the fact that your longest posting in a long time was on a sci-fi movie - nothing wrong with that. The comment by Peter was equally as long. I guess the comment was on the length of time spent posting the comment rather than your ability to go out into the big scary world, locate a cinema and watch a film. I didn't realise you and Peter would take it all so personally.
The problem I see here is that I don't do emoticons. If I did that parenthetical comment would have come with whatever signifies an arched eyebrow...
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