Ethan Brown says this about his process of becoming a vegan:
When I was growing up, my dad taught at the University of Maryland (he founded the School of Public Policy there). In has ‘spare’ time he bought a farm in beautiful Western Maryland and started a large Holstein dairy business. His passion for agriculture, land, and the outdoors shaped much of my early life and introduced me to farm animals. Hanging around them, I couldn’t help but notice that while there were differences in appearance, personality, and intelligence between say a calf and my beloved dogs, none were significant enough for me to justify moral consideration to one and deny it to the other.
As I got older, I never was able to find a rational answer to the question “which do you cut and which do you cuddle?” Yet, as with lots of folks, my ability to integrate this belief into my daily behavior was at first limited and I continued to fish, eat meat, and wear leather. I think my evolution to become vegan was a process of retiring each inconsistency as my discomfort spoke to me loudly enough.
Ethan Brown is the founder of Beyond Meat, a company making a plant-based product that many find is so similar in texture and taste to chicken that the difference is impossible to tell. We quote him from page 12 of Compassionate Action, winter issue, 2012, published by the organization Compassion Over Killing.
For a brief biography of Ethan Brown and Beyond Meat’s website, click here. For Compassion Over Killing’s website, click here.
When I was growing up, my dad taught at the University of Maryland (he founded the School of Public Policy there). In has ‘spare’ time he bought a farm in beautiful Western Maryland and started a large Holstein dairy business. His passion for agriculture, land, and the outdoors shaped much of my early life and introduced me to farm animals. Hanging around them, I couldn’t help but notice that while there were differences in appearance, personality, and intelligence between say a calf and my beloved dogs, none were significant enough for me to justify moral consideration to one and deny it to the other.
As I got older, I never was able to find a rational answer to the question “which do you cut and which do you cuddle?” Yet, as with lots of folks, my ability to integrate this belief into my daily behavior was at first limited and I continued to fish, eat meat, and wear leather. I think my evolution to become vegan was a process of retiring each inconsistency as my discomfort spoke to me loudly enough.
Ethan Brown is the founder of Beyond Meat, a company making a plant-based product that many find is so similar in texture and taste to chicken that the difference is impossible to tell. We quote him from page 12 of Compassionate Action, winter issue, 2012, published by the organization Compassion Over Killing.
For a brief biography of Ethan Brown and Beyond Meat’s website, click here. For Compassion Over Killing’s website, click here.
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