Lady Business: Swan songs, sausage-making, and “some personal news”

Hello and welcome to Lady Business, a weekly newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the 82nd issue, published September 26, 2019. 
 

Duck Duck Go

“It’s the hallway of death!” As I mentioned last week, one of the anchors of Inc.’s 2019 Female Founders 100 package was my feature profile of Ariane Daguin -- the 61-year-old, six-foot-tall, delightfully blunt and party-loving CEO and cofounder behind influential gourmet-meat company D’Artagnan. Reporting this story on and off for much of the past year was clearly a chore:
 

"Champagne?"

"Non! Shots!"

Daguin is standing at the front of a large black bus, of the sort rented out for wine tours and bachelorette parties, pouring generous splashes of sinus-stripping white Armagnac into plastic cups. "You drink this, and all the calories disappear," she jokes, an unlikely party animal in a duck-printed scarf and mom jeans. "Okaaay, bottoms up!"

This is her "Cassoulet Crawl"--a gut-busting Manhattan restaurant tour tied to a competition over the hearty French stew that's largely made from several kinds of D'Artagnan-endorsed fatty meats. It's February, and Daguin's fifth year organizing and judging the showdown, one overseen by an official French body called the Great Brotherhood of the Cassoulet. (Really. Because France.)

The Great Brothers on hand, in red velvet robes accented with yellow trim and cassole-shaped hats, resemble an order of Harry Potter wizards devoted to duck fat and slow-cooked white beans--especially when they bestow an honorary membership upon John Lithgow, who's come straight from rehearsing a new Broadway play, and who accepts this silly honor with a sincere speech in decent French. If he's charmingly bemused by the whole thing, he's also unstinting in admiring his friend, its organizer. "Ariane," he says, "is a force of nature."

Before I started reporting this story, I knew of D’Artagnan as one of the purveyors of fancy sausages in my local Fairway; I didn’t realize that the company had been around for almost 35 years and slowly expanding to more than $130 million in annual sales; that Daguin had retained control of it after a dramatic and bitter breakup with her business partner; or that she hangs out with Lithgow, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, and of course, plenty of food-world boldfaced names (Daniel Boulud, Danny Meyer, the late Anthony Bourdain).
 
But beyond giving me an excuse to report from some pretty amazing parties, writing this story also gave me a window into a niche, but fierce, regulatory battle: the ongoing efforts to ban foie gras, the duck-liver luxury that’s widely detested by animal-rights activists and that became the target of a proposed New York City ban this summer.
 
With its fancy French name and its expensive price tag, foie gras is unquestionably elitist. And the optics of how it’s made -- by force-feeding ducks so that their livers enlarge -- just aren’t great, even under the best of circumstances. But if you care about animal welfare, or the environmental impact of eating meat, foie gras is so not the problem:
 

Yet foie gras is, at most, an asterisk to the meat industry's substantial systemic issues, which have the United Nations and international coalitions of scientists sounding alarms. "I can't believe we're going through this again," says Marion Nestle, the author and nutrition expert. "Other issues in meat-raising are much more critical."
 
…Large factory farms have been widely criticized for releasing immense amounts of waste and pollutants into our air and water; for juicing their livestock with so many antibiotics that bacteria become resistant to their effects, causing potential health crises for humans; and for raising their animals in cramped, filthy, torturous conditions. And while Yanay processes maybe 500,000 ducks per year, factory farming churns through about nine billion chickens in the U.S. annually, and roughly 32 million cows.
 
Those are the horrific processes that Daguin has dedicated her life and her company to countering, and for which she provides her widely praised alternatives. But her fierce allegiance to foie gras--and the production process that sounds so inhumane, for what's essentially a food for the 1 percent--puts her company in the cross hairs of the animal activists with whom she otherwise claims common ground. "My animals have one bad day," she insists while driving to the farm, her long frame folded into the red Mini Cooper her daughter decorated with duck decals.

 
Anyway, I learned a ton while reporting this story, wrote and revised it during a fairly intense summer at work, and am thrilled to have it in Inc.’s Female Founders 100 issue and out in the world.

It’s also, no pun intended, a fitting swan song for my time at Inc. I’m delighted to announce that I’m joining Fortune magazine as a senior writer, starting in a few weeks. I’ll be writing features and analysis about finance and the intersection of policy and business -- and, I’m sure, finding ample opportunity to incorporate coverage of gender, tech, and startups into those beats. (See also: Everything WeWork this week.)
 
So I’m pretty excited about this new opportunity and thrilled to join the terrific team at Fortune, though I will miss my Inc. colleagues and all the great work we’ve accomplished during my five-plus years there. (I still can’t quite believe I got to report from Saudi Arabia for this story.) Lady Business will continue, of course, though I may be playing around with the frequency or day that it comes out; more to come after I’m back from a much-needed beach trip next week!
 

Lady Bits

 
--Speaking of performative veganism … this is a fascinating Wall Street Journal article about how JPMorgan Chase enabled some of the WeWork financial craziness that lost founder/CEO/notably anti-meat pro-toxicity tech bro Adam Neumann his job this week. But I raise a Vulcan-level eyebrow at the quote from Sam Zell, a real estate mogul known himself for some toxic personal behavior and terrible financial management, who’s now endangering his glass walls by throwing stones about how WeWork had “no adults in the room.”
 
--Way back in 2006, I wrote this piece for The New York Times about the growing tension between TV writers and their shows’ fans, as “television viewers are migrating en masse to the Internet, looking not only to watch their favorite shows online but also for ways to discuss and engage with those shows.” Here are 5200 more recent New Yorker words about the post-Gamergate, post-Game of Thrones, post-Twitter-swarm version of the phenomenon.
 
--Lady Business will be in Costa Rica next week, trying to learn how to surf. We’ll be back in mid-October!
 
Thank you for reading, commenting, and subscribing to this newsletter! Please tell your friends to sign up here, let me know what you think about this week's issue, and what else you'd like to see me write about: maria.aspan@gmail.com