 So, as Janet mentioned, I work for the Humane Society of the United States and I work with institutions, schools, hospitals, colleges, universities and others to help them with adding more plant-based options to their menus and reducing the amount of meat that they're serving. But I haven't always been a vegetarian or vegan, I am now, but I started off as a little girl in Chesapeake, Virginia who just loved animals. Do any of you have older siblings? Yeah, okay. So I grew up with an older sister, you'll probably relate to this story. Her name is Jennifer and we grew up in Chesapeake, Virginia, which is the southern part of the state, so I'm from the south. Jennifer and I had three dogs, Pete, Casey and Tinkerbell and we loved those dogs. We considered them members of our family and everywhere we went, those dogs would be with us. Whether we were wedging out in front of MTV, which was new at the time when I was little, or we were riding our bicycles around the neighborhood. Tinkerbell was there and I would dress her up in my dolls' clothing and carry her around. I swear she liked it, but these dogs were just part of our family. I also learned to love to cook when I was a little girl. My uncle came to stay with us one summer and he taught us how to cook scrambled eggs. And therefore it became my favorite food because it was the only thing I knew how to cook. I just loved watching them go from goo to something that you could eat within just moments. So one day my older sister, as older siblings often do, was taunting me about the scrambled eggs that I was about to eat. And she said, you know what those are, right? Dead baby birds. And that news hit me. I didn't know if I could believe her or not, but I knew one thing for sure and that is I didn't want to eat dead baby birds because I loved animals. At the time I thought about the little ducklings that a friend of ours got for Easter that year. These little fluffy yellow things who were waddling around. So I decided I was not going to eat eggs anymore. I pushed them away and as of that day was done eating eggs. Little did I know as a young girl that they were in a lot of my favorite foods like cakes and cookies. So I'd continue eating them in those forms, but I stopped eating my scrambled eggs that I would make fried eggs. I wouldn't eat anything like that. Call me a late learner, but it wasn't until I was in college that I became vegetarian. And that's when a college marketing professor was describing euphemisms and how we use terms to sanitize things often. And the example that she provided was meat. She said what if we were to call it what it really is instead of just putting it in this tidy package. And meat is the flesh of dead animals. And so you know after that I started thinking about it and every time I would sit down to eat. I would try to eat a chicken sandwich or a hamburger and I thought this is not just meat. This was a living being and so I couldn't eat meat anymore. And at the time I had no idea that it wasn't just that we were eating animals, but that we were torturing them in ways that as somebody who cares about animals I didn't find acceptable. So I started investigating and I learned that the real problem with eggs is not that we are killing baby birds, although we do quite a bit of that, but rather that we are confining egg-laying hens. Chickens who are laying the millions of eggs that we eat every single year, we're confining them in tiny cages that are about the size of a desk door. Each bird has about as much space as an iPad on which to live her entire life. My next door neighbors have chickens and they come over every day because I feed the squirrels and they discover that the seeds fall on the ground. I come over and demand food and I get to see them and their interesting personalities. They're very inquisitive. They like to peck around searching for food when I've run out of food to give them. And they also have different preferences. One loves tomatoes, the other loves blueberries and they take dust baths. They fling dust up on their feathers and shake it off as a way to clean themselves. And they come to know chickens as beings who are capable of joy and suffering. But let's go back to those birds that I was describing in the cages. They're unable to do any of those things. They can't take dust baths. They can't perch. They can't choose where they want to spend their time. They're confined in these tiny cages for the duration of their egg-laying life for about 18 months and then they're eventually sent off to slaughter. They also learned about the way that we confine mother pigs in the pork industry. So these are the mothers who are breeding the babies that are going into the pork supply. They're confined in these cages that are about two feet wide by seven feet long, which is about the size of their bodies. These animals are confined there for the duration of their pregnancy, which lasts about four months. They're put into another crate to give birth. Their babies are taken away. They're re-impregnated and that cycle repeats for about four years. These are highly intelligent, very sensitive animals who in lab tests have outperformed dogs in terms of their intelligence. It's really hard to imagine a more miserable existence for these incredibly intelligent and sensitive animals. So when I learned all of those things, I decided to become vegan and to devote my life to helping animals. And I'm very fortunate to have been able to do that for about the last 20 years. You can guess how old I am. But I learned along the way that it's not just good for animals to eat none of them or fewer of them, but it's also good for the planet. In the book I share the story of a woman named Lita Galicia now. She met her husband Sam during the war. He was in the Philippines and that's where she grew up. He liberated her hometown and that's where they fell in love. They decided to get married. And they wanted to move back to the United States where they would raise a family in true village style. So they pulled their money together with some other families and they bought a plot of land out in Lathrop, which is in the Central Valley, about 60 miles east of here. And they were able to do that living very peacefully for many years. There was a small egg farm down the street from their house that was eventually bought out by Olivera Egg Ranch. Olivera Egg Ranch probably conjures an image of a red barn, rolling green hills, chickens pecking out in the pasture. But this facility was nothing like that. Imagine 700,000 egg laying hens in those cages that I just described to you right outside your door, essentially. There were massive warehouses that were the length of football fields containing 700,000 egg laying hens that was at the foot of their driveway. And so for the animals, of course, it was a travesty. For Lita and her neighbors, they had to live with the stench of 700,000 birds right outside of their home. Sometimes the air was so thick with flies, they couldn't even open their window. You all were outside today. Imagine how hot it is in the Central Valley right now and the smell of ammonia fumes. Sometimes the air was so thick with the ammonia that they couldn't open their windows. Ammonia from the chicken manure, the smell. So it caused their eyes to burn. It caused their lungs to burn. They were nauseated. They reached out to the Humane Society and we have a litigation team that sued on their behalf claiming that this was a nuisance and we prevailed getting a settlement out of court. So Lita and her neighbors got a financial settlement and some people might say, well, they won. But in the end, they lost years of quality of life because they couldn't even enjoy their home. They couldn't enjoy the outdoors. And we are all losing because that's still the way the vast majority of animal agribusiness disposes of their waste. They put it in these massive manure lagoons. So it's just a cesspool of waste that says they're completely untreated. And of course we could never do that with human waste but that is the way that animal agriculture disposes of its waste. And so we know that it's very wasteful to raise animals. We're putting lots of land, water, fertilizers, oil and all these resources into raising animals instead of consuming those foods directly, the grains, the pulses that we're feeding to the animals we could be eating ourselves. But it also obviously produces a tremendous amount of waste. I also learned about the health benefits of eating more plant-based foods. So a lot of people do it for animals. A lot of people do it for the environment. Some people are eating that way for their health. And in the book I share the story of Ken Chadwick who is a food service director at American University. So as I mentioned, we travel around, we work with schools and other institutions to help them get more plant-based foods on their menus. So we met Ken after he had already gone through this incredible transition. Ken was working at American University and he had worked at other universities in the Washington, D.C. area, one of the nation's most prestigious universities, Georgetown GW. And he had been working in the food service industry for a long time. So he knew about the demand for plant-based foods and students were routinely coming to him saying they wanted more vegetarian options, they wanted more vegan options. And his answer had traditionally been, we have a great salad bar. But if you're a vegetarian or vegan and you want to eat that way some of the time, you know that you don't want to just eat salad. Salad's great, but you want to have a greater variety of food in your diet. So when Ken got to American University, he had students saying, we want more vegan options. And his answer, he realized, was not sufficient. And so he decided that he would do something really unusual and that was that as of the next day he would become vegan. So he could see what it would be like to eat vegan on campus. He wanted to be able to relate to the students he was there to serve. So a little bit about Ken. When this whole journey started, he was 327 pounds. He said that he had aches and pains in his entire body. His joints hurt. He also had to undergo gallbladder surgery and have his gallbladder removed because it was 97% inoperable. His doctor was worried that he would die on the operating table because he was so unhealthy. But because his gallbladder wasn't working anymore, they had no other choice but to operate. He was in his late 30s. He's a young guy. So he said that he would do various things to try to lose weight. He started walking and then later running and he could run a mile and then just collapse. It was everything he could do not to gain more weight but to maintain that 327 pounds. And he shared a really sad story. He said that there was one day when he was just putting on a sock and he had to lie on his side, on the bed, get it on his toe and then shimmy the sock up his foot and his wife walked in when he was doing it. She's like, baby, you're getting winded just putting your sock on. And it was really embarrassing as you can imagine and he felt terrible for this. So Ken obviously needed to experience some changes in his life. And so when he started going vegan, the weight just started rapidly dropping off of him so quickly that the students on campus called him the Incredible Shrinking Man. So within just a few months he had lost tens of pounds and by the end of this whole transition he's still eating mostly vegan and I'll share a bit about that here in just a second. He was down to about 200 pounds so he lost a tremendous amount of weight by eating this way. And of course he was able to get off of his medication for high blood pressure and all of the joint pains and aches that he was experiencing went away. As you can imagine, the students also benefited because you have a guy who now sees the benefits himself. They started doing Meatless Monday on campus where all of their main entrees would be meatless. His dining team teamed up with our culinary professionals and they opened a vegan restaurant on campus and another incredible turn of events is that he no longer works at American University. He's now working for the Humane Society International in Mexico where he's doing exactly what my team is doing and trying to spread the word to that country there because he's become a true believer. Now this is one person who is serving thousands of meals every single day at American and he realizes that the students who are eating there are in a tremendous position to be today's students but tomorrow's thought leaders. So he's educating them on the benefits of introducing them to this whole other way of eating. So I feel like that's a tremendous success story in itself. Now I'll share one final story with you of another individual because as I mentioned Ken is eating mostly vegan and I should add that he realizes now the impacts of his diet choices not just on his own health but on the planet, on animals, on workers and all of the other things that we impact on every single meal that we're eating but that he no longer eating mindlessly. I think that's something that people don't think about when we're eating unconsciously that sometimes we're just shoving food in our mouths and he said that's what he used to do but now he's thinking about the impacts that his food has on himself and the planet. So he eats vegan most of the time but if there's a favorite food that he feels like he can't pass up like soft shell crabs was the example that he gave to me. It's in season for two weeks out of the year and it's a favorite food so he might have one but he's eating vegan most of the time. Now there was another person who I interviewed for the book his name is Anthony Williams and he was a California Fish and Game Commissioner who for many years had tried to eat a vegan diet or a vegetarian diet. The first time was after he saw the film I'm going to supersize me Borgans Burlach's film, any of you see that? So for those of you who didn't see it it's a film about a guy who just goes on a 30 day binge eating all of his meals at McDonald's and he undergoes some pretty severe health consequences and he has another documentary coming out eminently in the film they show footage of factory farming and so Anthony saw that and he decided he would like to become vegetarian so he did and he got his wife to join him and they ate that way for about nine months until they were going to visit her family in Japan and they realized that it might be culturally insensitive or at least that's what they thought to show up and say we don't eat certain foods so they slowly started integrating more meat back into their diets and when they came home from their visit they continued to eat meat. A couple of years later they had gotten married they had raised a family and he was moving to from Southern California to Northern California just staying back at home with the kids watched the documentary Food Inc did any of you see that film? So they saw that and then she called him up and said honey we're going vegetarian again so they tried the diet they tried two diet eating a vegetarian diet with their kids and they realized that when life got really busy that they just started falling off the wagon and once they fell off they didn't stick with it they were like we failed so we're just back to our regular diet and so Anthony came to a gala that the Humane Society organized a couple of years ago and that's where he learned about Meatless Monday it's a program that was started by the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health that encourages people to eat meat free at least one day a week for their health, for animals, for the environment it just gets your week off to a healthy start and you know that at least one seventh of your meals that week will be meat free so he learned about that and he thought that's doable that's something that I think I can stick with and who can't eat meat free just one day a week so he went back home from that event and he talked to his family and it turned out that his kids school was participating in Meatless Monday so what they agreed to do is a Meatless Monday plus every single day of the week at least one of their meals would be meat free and this has been over two years and Anthony said that not only he's doing Meatless Monday and continuing to stick with that one meal per day that's meat free but that most of their meals throughout the week are meatless and when his wife does cook meat she does most of the cooking in the house that she uses much smaller portions so they found that that works for them so I share that this because I want to emphasize that 100% doesn't work for everybody I'm vegan but I didn't become vegan overnight I stopped eating eggs I became vegetarian in college and then I later became vegan but that doesn't work for everyone I know some people who became vegan overnight and others who are still eating Meatless on Mondays or who are trying to eat more meat free meals throughout the week and so I encourage everybody to find what works for you and make that your routine make that your habit I recognize that changing your diet can sometimes be difficult there are a lot of obstacles to change does anybody know what some of those obstacles are time? time, convenience another big obstacle is I think a misconception or perception that we have to do it all at once so in the book I share some advice from a friend of mine Melina Escherich she's the head of the psychology school over at the Wright Institute in Berkeley and she studies behavior change and she talks about just trying to shrink the change because if you've been eating a certain way your entire life you've been eating a very standard American diet lots of meat, lots of eggs, lots of dairy and then you go to eating brown rice in broccoli because you think that's what vegans eat you're not going to feel satisfied it's going to feel way too overwhelming so shrink it into more bite-sized chunks start out with the Meatless Monday or do what Mark Bitman who was former New York Times columnist suggest which is eat vegan before six so at least two thirds of your meals are vegan and then build on it from there then do a Meatless Monday through Friday and then add in Saturday and Sunday but breaking it up into smaller bite-sized pieces makes it feel more doable and less overwhelming another big obstacle is our community so we tend to eat like our friends and our family members do all of you can probably think about a meal that you've had when a server comes over and says do you want dessert and you look at the person across the table from you and say I don't know you're going to have dessert because if you have dessert I'll have dessert so we're very influenced by the way that our friends, our family and our community eat and so it's very difficult in many instances to be the only person in your family in your community who's eating a vegan or vegetarian diet there was research that was published in the New England Journal of Clinical Nutrition that found that if you have a spouse who is overweight or obese that your chance goes up to by 30% of being overweight or obese and if you have a friend, a very close friend who is it goes up by 50% so Dr. Walter Willett who is the most cited nutritionist in the world and I'm just continuing to add to that has said that obesity is contagious but so can physical activity and healthy eating be we can also use our communities and our friends for good so a word of advice is if you're going to try to eat vegetarian or vegan or do Meatless Monday get your friends and family to join you get your office to do Meatless Monday potlucks or otherwise be there to support you because not only will it help with ensuring your success but it also adds then multiplies the benefits of what you're intending to do and then of course the time, the cost, all of those things that I think are common misperceptions sometimes when I get home if I don't feel like cooking I might decide alright I'm going to call and get takeout or something but in the time it takes to do that often I could have prepared something really quick, simple and healthy so it's just a matter of getting to know what those options are with respect to the cost again, it can be very expensive to order takeout and we're not talking about just the cost that you're paying there at the register but the added cost of the health problems that you might experience later when you're paying for insurance or paying for doctor visits because you're not feeling very good there's a wonderful website called Plant Based on the Budget that has meal plans for all of your groceries for an entire week for $20 so it can be very inexpensive to eat a plant based diet because when you think about it beans, pulses, legumes, those foods you can purchase in bulk you can buy dried beans you can store them for a long time they have long shelf life and they're very nutrient dense foods the website it's a website called Plant Based on a Budget so I will just wrap up by sharing that there are very few things that we do every single day that have such an incredible impact on the world on our health on animals on workers as when we eat we can sit down to eat and make decisions that are going to have a positive impact or a detrimental impact but every time we eat we are having an impact our forks and knives are incredibly incredibly powerful tools I don't think people think of them as that but they are these incredibly powerful tools so I hope that all of us will use them for good thank you