Why We Don ’t Need Animals to Keep Enjoying Meat

The founder of Beyond Meat, the plant-based-meat company that recently went public, on a future without eating animals How did spending time on a farm as a child shape your views about animals and meat? I grew up in the city, in Washington, D.C., and College Park, Md. But my dad grew up in the country and bought a farm to start a weekend dairy operation with less than 100 Holstein cows. I fell in love with life outdoors and the animals that surrounded us. I began to question the difference between animals in the agricultural system and the ones we kept as pets. And as I became an adult, I understood that it was a cultural, and not biological, justification for the difference. You began your career in renewable energy around the time of the California energy crisis in 2000. What brought you from fuel cells to meat? For me it wasn’t wildly different to think about how we create food to fuel our body that has less impact on the earth–it was simply a question of energy use. I began to understand the role livestock plays in climate. It’s not necessarily just the car you drive or the light bulb you screw in. It’s also very much the protein you put in the center of your plate. It dawned on me that if we want to solve climate, we have to solve livestock. And we were having these discussions over steak. Why is it so important to move away from animal meat? It’s four major issues. There is a global problem that we can’t support the number of livesto...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized diet Source Type: news