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The Rainbow Vegetarian Café in Cambridge, England, has announced that it will not accept the new £5 polymer notes, introduced by the Bank of England in September. Last week the British vegan community discovered that the notes contain trace amounts of beef tallow, which is animal fat, and are therefore unacceptable by their cruelty-free standards. A heated online controversy has resulted, including a petition asking the Bank to remove tallow from the polymer.
The Rainbow Café's owner, Sharon Meijland, told The Telegraph that her stance was announced last Wednesday, at the end of a BBC radio interview on the unrelated topic of Christmas food.
"We sponsor the Vegan Fair and announced on Wednesday we would not be accepting the £5 notes because they are dubious ethically. We have been providing food for vegans for 30 years and have tried to be as ethical as we possibly can...This is not just a restaurant, it's a restaurant where tiny details like this are really important."
Is any of our money cruelty-free?
(Score: 1) by Francis on Wednesday December 07 2016, @04:04AM
Money was invented because society needed a way of storing funds. Prior to the invention of money, you had to barter for the things you needed. If you didn't need something right then or know what you'd need in the future, you had a bit of a problem. Plus, if you got into a bad situation because you forgot or didn't offer anything of value, you couldn't get your way out of it.
With money, we can earn money and then spend it at a time when it's more convenient. Which is rather hard to do with milk, pork bellies or goats. And good luck if you needed to spllit a cow between two people that didn't want their share at the same time. Money fixes all that fairly conveniently.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday December 07 2016, @07:04PM
That's why money was more generally useful than the prior systems, but IOUs, or contracts for payment, predate money, and were transferable. The thing is, "If some one promises a donkey in exchange for the IOU, do you trust him to trade you a donkey that isn't at death's door?". The guy who makes the original deal may have reason to trust the guy he makes the deal with, but what about a guy who trades with him? So things like lumps of metal that were presumably trustworthy were traded (i.e., actual goods) rather than IOUs when it was feasible. But then impure hunks of metal that were hard to tell from the good stuff started being traded by some who were less than totally honest. So somebody put his name on the line, and started marking hunks of metal with his seal (for a price) as a guarantee of purity. Which is when I decided to call it money. But you could really point at any point of the development and say "That's when I start calling it money.". The exact point of demarcation is nearly arbitrary. Some people are uncomfortable calling it money until it's in the form of coins, and that's OK as long as they make clear what they mean. The classical Greeks, however, decided to say that the division came when this family started putting their seal on bars of gold, and that's as good a marker as any.
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