In an exciting announcement from Helena, MT, the company BeanBurger has finally found a way to capture the quintessential quality of real meat: The treatment of its beans is extremely cruel and exploitative.
“We’ve heard your complaints that our product didn’t taste enough like a burger, and we’ve finally pinpointed why,” said head of Product Design, Matthew Yoo. “It’s because we’ve been too nice to our beans, and as a result, they contain no trace of the physical and psychological violence you know and love from your meat packing industry products.”
To amend this, BeanBurger has instituted a series of company-wide reforms to ensure its beans “taste abused.”
“We promise to spend 40 minutes lightly punching our beans every day as well as at least two hours calling them mean names,” continued Yoo. These mean names include ‘tiny pathetic bean,’ ‘itty bitty stupid bean,’ and ‘slut’, before throwing the tiniest and sluttiest beans in the incinerator.”
“I’ve been trying to get creative with the cruelty,” said BeanBurger’s new Bean Efficiency Coordinator, Michelle Fontaine. “Like yesterday, we let the beans watch Inception, but only the first hour, just enough where everything is confusing and nothing is resolved.”
Sources report that if nothing else works, the company will default to telling the beans they’ll “always be good, but never great” and that usually gets the job done.
Ouch! However, customers confirm that BeanBurgers have never tasted better.
“The difference is staggering,” said Maggie Lynch. “You can really tell these beans have been subject to verbal, physical, and psychological torture.”
Blind taste-tester Ryan Rudolpho weighed in on this remarkable scientific advancement:
“Normally, you can tell the difference between real meat and vegan burgers because real meat tastes upset and bean burgers taste like they’ve had a super relaxed life. But BeanBurger has finally leveled the playing field by being super mean to their beans.”
But not everyone has been a fan of BeanBurgers’ new approach, especially advocates against bean cruelty.
“Yes, I want a bean burger that tastes like meat, but at what cost?” said notable bean activist Lyanne Wright. “I don’t want to eat a bean that’s had a hard life. Not if it had to listen to an hour of hyperpop. Not if it had to watch a middle school production of Chicago. That’s just not who I am.”
At press time, BeanBurger announced plans to expand its cruelty protocol to tofu, tempeh, and seitan. Meanwhile, advocates have urged people to switch from imitation meat to imitation-imitation meat, which tastes like bean burgers but is made out of cows.
