On the flight I read the story in The Atlantic about this funny kid in the Silicone Valley who sells vegan mayonnaise and markets his company as some sort of a hugely important tech thing that will save the world. The reporter pokes merciless fun at the fellow who represents the Valley culture of crazy startups where kids like him roll out grandiose ideas to get enormous amounts of funding from venture capitalists. For the most part, all they end up producing is rhetoric and vapid dreams.
I think what the kid is doing is cute and the Valley culture he embodies is not a bad thing. Where I come from the mega rich waste money on nothing but solid gold diamond-encrusted bidets and million-dollar cars they race down city streets mowing down pedestrians and folks in cheap vehicles. It’s great that there’s a place where the very rich are sated enough that they feel like donating part of their crazy riches to fund the dreams of kids from Southwestern Podunkburg. Once these kids get fed and have “a room of their own”, they might actually come up with something useful. Even if it’s just a jar of mayo.
Also, for as long as these rich bastards are distracted by fantasies of ultra special super duper techy mayonnaise, they’ll stay out of messing with public education even more than they already do, fuck their idiotic minds. So yeah, let them all congregate in their very funny little reservation and try to outcrazy each other into a stupor. I find it all to be very cute.
Clarissa's Blog 
These wealthy types live in their own microcosmic world, for sure.
Personally, I think that’s more the REAL inequality, rather than the differences in race and ancestry.
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The guy in the article is from a poor family.
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Oh come on. The man is a good looking flim-flam artist who has retained his hair. If he’s a “kid”– come on.
That work trajectory is not someone who comes from a poor family. Nobody responds to a string of fuckups with, “Yes, I will give you lots of money” for people from poor families. Poor people are not “kids” at the age of 37.
As he tells “folks” in his slight southern drawl, he was raised in Birmingham, Alabama, by a mother who worked as a hairdresser and a father who was often unemployed, which meant his family was “on food stamps for most of our life.” (His mother remembers it as “maybe like two weeks or three weeks.” His father could not be reached for comment.)
As a child I took baths from a bucket. I had to heat water on a stove for my bath and I’d get eaten by mosquitoes every single time. I milked a cow. My father didn’t ride in a car until he was 16. My grandfather lost his shoes when he was five and his father refused to replace them until he got a tetanus infection. Clearly I have overcome great adversity. (rolleyes).
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At my stage in life, anybody who speaks like he does is a kid. Even if he’s 90.
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I love this line from the article:
“He has said he drew inspiration for Hampton Creek from his seven years in sub-Saharan Africa (three of which he passed, for the most part, in law school at the University of Michigan).”
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And the entire childhood on food stamps that turned out to be just a couple of weeks. Poor guy.
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