The saccharine “piggy” (“Schweinchen”), released in 1968 on the White Album, is not necessarily one of the best-known songs of the beatles. But certainly among the most unappetizing.
Five years earlier, when the band was still quite radically concerned with the carefree everyday issues of young people (“Please please me”, “Love me do”, “PS I Love you”), one drum kit, one bass and two guitars were enough and polyphonic singing to accommodate teenage anthems. With “Piggies” a caressing harpsichord was mixed with rustic pig grunts on what was, by Beatles standards, a rather baroque two-minute record, while the lyrics were about the “little pigs”. How they “dig in the dirt” and sit at dinner (“with their pig wives”). And then how they eat “their bacon” with a fork and knife. cannibalism? No, even then, Beatles exegetes knew what it was really about: greed, the mean bourgeoisie, the British class system, the Vietnam War and of course everything else that you wanted to interpret into the little pigs.
In the mid-1970s, meat was gone
But maybe it was an early sign. A farewell, so to speak, to bacon, schnitzel, roasts and burgers. Only a few years later, it must have been around 1975, the great Beatle Paul McCartney decided to feed himself and his family only vegetarian from then on. This then continued with the “Meatless Monday” campaign and the message that six days of meat a week was probably more than enough. This was followed by a vegetarian cookbook and a speech to the EU Parliament on the same subject.
Now the now 79-year-old ex-Beatle has acquired a stake in the Singapore-based meat substitute company Next Gen Foods through his London investment company MPL Ventures, as the start-up announced on Tuesday. The company was founded in 2020 by German-born Timo Recker, who offers a plant-based chicken meat substitute under the product name “Tindle”. After a series of restaurants in Asia, the entrepreneur is now entering the American market with branches in Los Angeles and New York, among other places. A current round of financing should help, in which the start-up has now raised a total of 100 million dollars – including funds from the McCartney fund MPL Ventures. The start-up writes on its website that it is the highest sum that investors have ever invested in a manufacturer of plant-based meat substitutes in such a financing round. After all, the newcomer’s goals are not exactly low: at least for products with plant-based chicken alternatives, they want to be number one worldwide.
Address: Soho Square, London
And McCartney, the veteran vegetarian? His investment vehicle with the company address “1 Soho Square, London, W1D 3BQ” was founded on November 3, 2020, according to an official British website. Director of the company: James Paul McCartney, born in June 1942. So far, according to entries on the Internet, MPL Ventures has been interested in start-ups in the field of music and audio platforms. With his latest investment in the food tech start-up scene, Sir Paul is bringing things together in business – decades after the “Piggies”: music and a vegetarian lifestyle.