This was originally posted on blogger. It’s past midnight in Shanghai, China and I’m calling my friend Dean in San Francisco. He walks into a Jamba Juice and says “hey, how are you!” Not to a friend but to a complete stranger who is behind the cash register. Dean is vegan like me and likes that Jamba Juice has added Impossible Burger to their menu. He says so to the cashier, who I imagine is a hippie-ish dude with long curly hair and tattoos on his arms but not his legs, even though it has no relevance to his order. Dean proceeds to order something with granola in it, but, like me, he wants to know if the granola is made with honey. The cashier says it’s a good question and he’ll have to get back to Dean about that even though if it really is such a good question, why hasn’t he himself before today? The cashier goes to the back to check. Meanwhile a lady comes up to Dean and asks, “are you in line or have you paid?” Dean stumbles a little because the truthful answer is that he’s waiting on the cashier to look up whether the granola has traces of honey which is made from bees which suffer kind of at the merciless hands of humans but actually mostly from neglect during transfer of these insects in the honey-production process and so that means Dean is not in line but he also hasn’t paid so Dean doesn’t finish his sentence. “Nope, yeah, no honey. You’re all good,” says the cashier when he’s back. “Great, I’ll have that then. That’s Dean. D-E-A-N.”