 So, first off, we want to welcome you for being here. This is part of our summer stride. If you don't know what summer stride is, it is a reading, learning, growing, watching, exploring. Not just for kids, because you're all adults here, I see. So what happens, you do 20 hours of all that, you get an iconic SFPL tote bag for free, which you can claim at any SFPL location, 28 locations plus four bookmobiles all have the tote bag. There are trackers in the back if you want to do that, but honestly, if you walk into any library and say, I've done my 20 hours of summer learning, exploring, you get your tote bag. So August is all about food. You've seen the things going by. We have some amazing two great programs left. One is postpone and kick till September, but it's still, we're gonna call it summer stride anyway. But on the 21st, I wanna say, we have a food co-op, Bay Area Food Co-op Program, exploring past, present, and future of food co-ops in the Bay Area. And that's gonna include Eris Mindy, Yum, The Deep, which is a grocery out of Oakland, Community Cultivate out of Benisha, and of course, The Amazing Other Avenues, which is legendary in San Francisco. So if you don't know other avenues, it's all the way out in the avenues. On the J line, go check it out. The first co-op I ever saw in San Francisco, and that was a thousand years ago. So check it out. One other thing I wanna talk to you about is some reading campaigns we have going on. We have something called On The Same Page, which is a bi-monthly read curated by our Readers Advisory Committee. We have The Amazing, Beverly Jenkins, and a summer sizzle read called Wild Rain. We have not ever picked a bodice ripper, as they're called in the industry, but this one has feminism, family planning, and historical turn to it. There it is right there. She'll be in combo in our virtual library on the 23rd. So come check that out. And tomorrow, you can check out our last installment with nomadic press poets talking about food. And then the last thing I wanna mention is our One City One Book campaign, which is our largest literary campaign. Lots of amazing sponsorship from our friends at the library. We'll be celebrating one Ear Hustle, unflinching stories from behind the prison lines. And it's the podcast, if you don't know Ear Hustle, check it out. Nigel and Erlon will be on this stage with Piper Kerman from Orange is the New Black, November 3rd. I wanna see this place filled. So come on. And books will land in the library, September, mid-September, you'll see a ton of them. Check it out. Also, the audio book is really good because it's a podcast-based program. All right, with how further ado, we are here to hear Miyoko Shiner discuss her journey in the dairy and cheese industry in the Bay Area. Miyoko is recognized by the United Nations as a vegan revolutionary in the future of women global initiative. Shiner is the compassionate, phenomenally vegan founder and CEO of Miyoko's Creamery, the leading plant milk dairy brand founded on the principle of compassion and with the vision of building an animal-free food system. A cheese maker, cult celebrity chef, best-selling cookbook author, animal advocate, environmentalist, global speaker, and entrepreneur. Shiner is an Epicurean activist who is leading the animal-free transformation of the dairy industry. The company's growing selection of product offering include European-style vegan butter, cheeses, cheese wheels, mozzarella, and she has a product in more than 30,000 retail stores now. Miyoko founded Rancho Compassion with her husband Michael to provide a loving lifelong home for rescued farm animals and to change public perception about animals typically viewed as food. The sanctuary promotes a compassionate and sustainable lifestyle for animals, our planet, and our health. Miyoko's Creamery was founded by visionary CEO Shiner who has dedicated her life to advancing the vegan food movement and advocating for animals as satient beings. She's published seven vegan cookbooks all available on our fourth floor. If you haven't checked out our cookbook section, it's phenomenal. And most recently has become an outspoken leading advocate for the right of vegan food products to use traditional meat and dairy terms on their labels. A pioneer who is continuing to advance the industry through innovations in plant milk dairy, CEO Shiner has been named an industry game changer by Food and Wide Magazine and is a member of the Forbes 50 over 50 women in the business class. All right, without further ado, Miyoko Shiner. All right, well, how many of you brave the traffic to get here? Because I almost didn't make it, so. And then they tried to block me off of Hyde Street and Lexi, Anissa was, Anissa is all right. Alisa was there waving her arm and the cop wouldn't let me, the traffic cop wouldn't let me through. And I was like, I have to give a talk in three minutes of the public library. And finally they let me in. So that's why I don't live in the city anymore. But anyway, I made my way from Marin this morning. And I wanna thank all of you for coming out. So, as I thought about this talk today, I started putting some slides together and I thought, why am I doing this? I'm giving a talk at the library where they have books and stories. So I decided to do something I've never done before. I'm very good at just speaking extemporaneously, very comfortable with that or showing slides and just going off the rail, but I decided to write a story. So I'm going to read the story to you today. And this is a love story. You know the kind where the first impression of the guy is slightly unsavory, but over time he grows on you. And in the end, your head over heels in love with him. He's the kind of guy that can show up at a party all poised and suave with women and men swooning by side. And other times stink like a wet dog rolling in something whom only the devoted few would venture near. My first encounter with my love was when I was only seven years old. I had but a few months earlier moved to a sleepy town in California, not so sleepy now, from an even sleepier village in Japan. So everything I saw here was exotic and beautiful. My mom and I would walk down to Bill's corner store across the street from my elementary school and she'd treat me to pixie sticks. Those straws with a colorful powder in them that would tingle in your mouth, pure magic. I would stare at blue-eyed blonde children. I was convinced they were made from angel dust. Instead, with my black hair and flat face, I knew I'd been made of soy sauce and rice. One day my mother told me I'd been invited to a birthday party of a Japanese-American girl in San Francisco. I knew something amazing would happen that day and I was filled with excitement. Even though they were Japanese, I'd heard they would have all sorts of American food because you see at our house, we still ate fried rice, miso soup and pickles. I was nervous and excited at the same time. There, I first set eyes on my love whom I obviously would not recognize as such at that time. He glistened with oil and was weirdly stretchy, a strange first impression, but he was clearly popular with the kids who clamored around him devouring him with gusto. What was his name you ask? Ah, I forgot to mention something important. He wasn't a person, he was cheese. On this particular occasion, he was mozzarella melting on a pizza, a fantasy food I had only heard about but never tasted. But this was to be the moment when I too would become like the other kids, when I would reach for a slice of America and perhaps become a true American. This was to be like my first kiss, something resplendent and beautiful. Just like the other kids, I reached for a slice and joyously took a bite. The oil dripped down my mouth and coated my throat. I gagged. I didn't understand. How could anyone like something so disgusting? My first experience with what was to become a great love was like what some of us less popular girls might have experienced in middle school, desperate to kiss a guy so we can join the cool club. We give ourselves to the skinny pimply boys still expecting something sweet from our first kiss, only to discover bad breath braces in an annoying tongue. Fast forward to high school. I had moved on beyond Onigiri and Umeboshi. By then I had become a bona fide cheese lover. This was the 1970s. And while most of my friends stuck to Cheddar, Monterey, Jack and Swiss, I was a bit more of an adventurer when it came to cheese. Now there were some people's refrigerators I poked around in where I saw Velveeta, but that didn't factor into my adventures. I have to admit that my fridge at home was a bit snobbier. Brie, Camembert, Rokeford, and even Limburger, that smelled wonderfully of stinky socks filled the cheese drawer. It was my dad, a white guy born in Charlotte, raised in Kansas City and then shipped off to high school to live with his aunt in Santa Cruz who taught me at a young age to be a cheese connoisseur. Together on weekends, we drive up to the Marin French Cheese Company in West Marin, the oldest cheese company in the country. Tucked away in the pastoral countryside, the place seemed so remote at the time, but it's literally five minutes from where I live now. We'd stock up on those lovely Bloomy rind cheeses packed traditionally in round wooden boxes with their rouge and noir logo. Once I got past that horrible first kiss with cheese, the cloyingly oily cheese on that cheap pizza, I had become obsessed with it. Some Swiss cheese knockoff from a random American manufacturer, uh, no. It had to be Emmentaler or better yet, Gruyere or Rubbery Low Moisture Mozzarella. You can forget about it. If it wasn't Mozzarella di Bufalo, don't bother putting it in my fridge. I went on to college where I started hosting wine and cheese parties in my dorm room on Friday nights, procuring as many exotic cheeses as I could from the one and only specialty food shop in town. Then a girlfriend and I decided to take a gap year and backpack around Europe for a few months. This is where the real awakening took place. I remember arriving in Paris and stumbling into my first cheese shop. My memory paints a picture of walls covered with shelves to the ceiling filled with cheeses of every variety. I realize now that it couldn't have been possible since they would have had to been refrigerated, but that is the indelible, in fact, if factually incorrect memory. In this paradise of fromage, I didn't even know where to start. We fill their baskets with cheese of various shapes and textures, some hard, some seemingly oozing out of their film and place them on the counter. We will never understand what happened next. The lady at the counter snapped at us. I didn't speak French and I had no idea what we had done wrong. She continued to bark at us, but stranger yet, she removed some of the cheeses we had set down and put them behind her. She wasn't going to allow us to buy all of them. We left with only half a basket of cheese. Still, we had plenty as we discovered when we sat down on a grassy pitch by the side of a road and broke into our treasures to eat with chunks of Parisian baguette and wash it all down with a bottle of red. Ah, I could ask for nothing more. To me, this moment embodied the good life. I mean, what else was there? Cathedrals, who cares? Over the next six months from England down to Greece, we sought out cheese in every corner of Europe. Our fortunes for procurement fared better outside of France, where shopkeepers and open market purveyors allowed us to actually buy everything we chose. What struck me profoundly then was something that amazes me to this day. It is at the core of my approach to making cheese with plant milks and drives my curiosity about how far we could take this evolution of cheese making. The simple fact is this. All of the thousands of varieties of cheese are all based on one ingredient, milk, from an animal, cows, goats, sheep. And there are those that have made cheese from camel's milk or even mother's milk, but the vast majority come from three mammals. To the milk are added enzymes and bacteria and sometimes yeasts and molds, and then nature does its thing, transforming through chemistry and biology, liquid milk into cheese. Depending on the type of bacteria, yeast or mold, as well as even the ambience, what's in the air around it? Is B linens floating around? Is there penicillin Roke 40 from moldy bread nearby? What is the humidity? What is the fat content of the milk? Were the cows milked in the winter or summer? All of these variables play a part in the outcome of the cheese. Cheese is an evolutionary science experiment that has gone on in the rustic kitchen labs of farmhouses and everyday people for thousands of years. It is also a craft that people have perfected after observing what nature can do to milk, an art form that requires constant attention. The head cheese maker at Cowgirl Creamery told me once how cheese was alive and therefore needed daily monitoring. It isn't just a recipe or formula you follow, the temperature, the humidity, the fat and protein content of the milk. All of this can alter the recipe. Master cheese makers know how to make adjustments so that the results are the same or close every time. But know that it doesn't happen automatically that way. This is a craft and art form that I have great respect for. Today, some of the biggest cheese companies have found ways to mass produce a craft product and bypass many of the traditional methods. Hard cheeses generally become hard through an aging process that can last many months, sometimes years where the soft curds give up moisture in a cave, either natural or man-made, eventually developing a rind and becomes firm and sliceable. I learned from a cheese maker from one of the largest cheddar companies that aging is no longer part of the production process. They found a way where the warm curds are packed off in packaging and sent to coolers where they firm up in one-tenth the time normally required. As people eat more and more cheese, the average American today consumes 40 pounds a year compared to four pounds 100 years ago and even 11 pounds in the 1970s. Cheese manufacturers had to figure out how to make more faster. Real estate is costly and that parmesan taken up space in your aging for two years becomes very expensive. To cut costs, they even found ways to make cheese from the waste stream, the way that runs off when the proteins coagulate to form curds. Velvita. And then there's processed cheese, which doesn't even contain milk sometimes. Typical ingredients could lick something like this. Water, salt, artificial colorings, flavorings, lefthin, enzyme modified cheese, dehydrated cream, and hydrous milk fat, phosphoric acid, albumin from cheese whey, acetic acid, monosodium phosphate, potassium citrate, sodium tartrate, potassium sorbate, you get the idea. A scary fact is that the US government has 1.4 billion pounds of processed cheese stockpiled in its coffers to push through school lunch programs, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program called SNAP and various others as a measure to support the dairy industry and farmers. So as with many things, artistry has given way to commodification. But back to my story and how I ended up starting a plant milk creamery. After college, I moved back to Japan. I wanted to reconnect with a part of my life that I had felt been lost to myself. The little girl who loved to dip nori in soy sauce and wrap it around hot rice. The girl who couldn't wait for oshogatsu or New Year's to hear the taiko drumming and eat ozoni or mochi soup. The girl who ran out into the street with excitement when the sweet potato monger rolled his cold laden cart of smoky ishiaki mo. Tokyo was a bit bigger than the village where I had grown up in the two-story traditional Japanese house with a sliding fusuma doors that opened up to a rice paddy. Tokyo seemed busier, bigger, more bustling than even New York. At first I lived with my aunt and uncle next to a freeway in the Bergs, which were just a congested mangle of concrete buildings that stretched between Tokyo and Yokohama. I concentrated on trying to relearn Japanese much of which I had forgotten and learn how to read and write kanji. I wanted to be immersed in everything and taste everything that was Japanese. But as the months went on, I began to grow tired of the bowls of noodles and rice and pickles and everything tasting like soy sauce. I wanted, well, cheese. I mentioned this to my aunt who went to the supermarket and brought back a little packet of something that was like laughing cow. This was all there was, she told me. And that was the truth. Unbeknownst to many, Asians didn't consume dairy until recently. I hadn't had milk in my diet in my early youth in Japan. In fact, the other food story I remember of my childhood aside from the first experience with cheese was the time my mother took me to eat ice cream for the first time. She told me we were going someplace special. And so we got all dressed up and took a cab instead of a train. At a fancy restaurant in a department store, I was served a parfait bowl with one perfect scoop of vanilla ice cream. The introduction to ice cream was nothing short of mystical and magical. I concentrated so hard on that scoop, my mouth caressing each spoonful, eating as slowly as possible to make the experience last as long as possible before it all melted away. After a few months of living with my aunt and uncle, I left their little abode under a freeway and managed to find an apartment in the Roppongi district of Tokyo, an area known for its nightlife, smack dab in the middle of everything happening, restaurants, clubs, trendy boutiques, they were all there. One day I stumbled upon a store called Magia, a specialty store carrying tons of imported foods. Among there was an entire cooler of cheese, soft cheese, hard cheese, stinky cheese, moldy cheese. I could not believe it. I walked out of Magia with brie and some fancy crackers and celebrated life all over again. Yes, it was expensive, but I knew that I could once again satisfy my addiction. Oh, and speaking of addiction, I'm not just speaking metaphorically, cheese is literally an addictive substance. Cheese contains high amounts of something called queso morphine and actual opioid. Yep, that's why so many people say I could go vegan but I couldn't give up cheese. It almost sounds like queso, Q-U-E-S-O plus morphine, a liquid cheese you might just shoot up. And while it's spelled C-A-S-O, not Q-U-E-S-O, it might as well be spelled like the Spanish word for cheese because it's just as addicting. It's an opioid that's released as casein, a milk protein breaks down. So when you say that you can't give up cheese, it's not just because it tastes great. It's because it's truly biologically addicting. In the 1980s, the Japanese were enamored with everything French, including its cuisine, and there were numerous French restaurants within walking distance to my apartment. In fact, there were more Michelin star restaurants in Tokyo than all of France. The Japanese may not be true innovators, but they are great improvers. They borrow from other cultures and make everything better. As I discovered restaurants and pastry shops in Tokyo, my passion for the European approach to food was reignited. At an international bookstore, I bought a copy of the Mastering the Art of French Cooking and started to cook my way through it, trying to vegetarianize everything. And then in the mid-80s, something happened. I went vegan. I don't remember the exact date or even the circumstances, other than an article I read about the dairy industry in Vegetarian Times Magazine, a magazine that I received monthly from across the Pacific, which was like my lifeline to vegetarianism, a concept that was strangely strange in Japan, a country that had been vegan by royal decree for 800 years. This article revealed the injustices of modern dairy farming and its impact on the planet, and it shook me to my core. I decided then and there I would try to eliminate all animal products from my diet. Of course, there was the cheese problem. I simply couldn't imagine how I could cook and create luscious dishes without it, let alone indulge in cheese as a standalone course before or after the meal. What was I gonna have instead of cheese as an appetizer? I wanted to create alternatives to classic European, French and Italian mostly, cuisines that were rich and luscious because of the butter, cream and cheese in them. But how? Initially I turned to tofu, pureeing it and using it as a cream substitute, which unfortunately added a beanie flavor to everything. Then I discovered cashews, which when pureed with water turned into a lovely cream. I hosted dinner parties every Friday night where I would create a 10 to 12 course tasting menu inviting everyone and anyone I knew who as the weeks went by would invite others, which led to magazine features and cooking demos at department stores. And eventually I'd accumulated enough recipes to write a book, which I did in Japanese. But cheese eluded me. Then one day I saw a Japanese TV show about some Buddhist nuns treating tofu in unique ways. For one dish, they covered the tofu in ash and left it to ferment for a month. In another, they buried it in miso for a day or two, which changed the texture from crumbly to smooth and buttery. I tried it at home. Alas, it was almost cheese-like, although it was far too salty. I played around with it and modified the recipe to include white wine for a little acidity and mirin or sweet sake to give it umami and round out the flavors. This was a huge hit at the next Friday night party where I served it with crostini and roasted vegetables. Tofu is sometimes called soy cheese because it is made in a very similar process to cheese. Soy milk is heated and then an enzyme is added, traditionally magnesium chloride from seawater, but also calcium sulfate or even lemon juice. The minerals or acid coagulates the proteins to form curds and then the whey is drained. The curds are poured into forms and pressed just as cheese is made. What's missing is the lactated acid bacteria that lowers the pH and turns the sweetness of milk to something more acidic and savory, the hallmarks of cheese. In other words, cheese is fermented. Tofu is not. Although the Chinese do have something called fermented tofu, which is very similar in texture to the miso covered cheese described here, buttery, smooth and definitely funky in flavor. In my mind, it seemed to make so much sense and yet the reality was different. If soy milk coagulates, then why couldn't it be used to make cheese? And why were the resulting curds so different than that of cow's milk? The question plagued me. I didn't understand that it had to do with the different types of proteins and plants versus cow's milk. Memalium milk, but particularly cow's milk, contains the almost magical casing which forms a stretchiness in some cheeses. Goat's milk, by the way, has almost 90% less casing than cow's milk, which is why it doesn't stretch. It would be many years before I could spend the time to really delve deeply into plant protein fermentation and begin to understand how they behave under different circumstances. Okay, back to the story. We're gonna skip a decade or so. Fast-track into the 1990s and I'm back in the US of A where I'd opened a vegan bakery which turned into a vegan restaurant, which turned into a natural food store, into a natural foods company making alternative meats before it was all cool and investors knew it was a thing to invest in. I made fancy vegan pastries and cakes. I made vegan steak, marinated in red wine and I even made the world's first truly non-dairy frozen whipped topping called Hip Whip. The tagline was, it's cooler than cool. But I still hadn't made cheese. Sure, at the restaurant, I had a melty cheese made of oats that sat atop a seitan parmigiana and I'd served the miso tofu cheese I created over a decade ago, but real cheese? The unctuous, luscious, creamy, funky stuff? Not yet. Over the decades, my taste buds had changed and I just didn't crave cheese as I once had. I guess I got over my addiction to queso morphine but it still bothered me. Why had I not invented something? At grocery stores, vegan cheese slices had begun to hit the shelves. Stuff made of oil and starch much like the processed cheese of the animal world and while the initial discovery was exciting, the products themselves left me feeling like I'd be settling for Velvita. This is where we have to ask the question, what is cheese? What defines it? The question brings me back to my freshman year in college studying Play-Doh, spending hours discussing the ancient Greek word, ados. Ados loosely translates as form but reveals a meaning much deeper. We'd use household objects such as ashtrays, yes, people smoke back then in the 1990s, in 1970s or a table to try to understand it. Tables all over the world differ in shape, sizes, design but are all recognizable as such. Something at which you sit and eat or do something. The ados thus is the essence or idea of a thing by which we recognize that thing. My question therefore is, what is the ados of cheese? And I would argue that it is a food made from milk whether from an animal or a plant that has been fermented and coagulated with or without the addition of various yeasts and molds that can, like a table, take many shapes, sizes, textures and flavors. There is an intention behind the making of cheese and when a round or log of cheese graces a cheeseboard we all recognize it as such, no matter the type of milk used. To me, this is a prime example of the natural evolution of any food. Over the decades or centuries, a food starts out as one form and evolves into another. Cakes might have been flat blobs made of flour, oil and honey during Roman times. But now they are fancy multi-layer concoctions with fillings and frostings. Cake bibles don't dictate whether or not they contain eggs or are made with margarine or butter. There are literally thousands of types of cakes and we all know them to be such. Food evolves and so should the language around them. I had turned 50, I had had a good life, three great kids, a beautiful home, friends. But where was the good life? The one I had envisioned sitting on that grassy knoll in Paris savoring that lunch of delicious cheese and bread. Where was my lover, cheese? Around this time a friend of mine passed away and I recalled her words to me from years before. If anyone can make a great vegan cheese, Miyoko, it's you. So I got back in the kitchen. If there was to be a great vegan cheese, I knew it had to be made with craft and artistry using fermentation and methods of coagulation. I started thinking about the process for making tofu again and knew there had to be a way to coagulate and ferment plant milks. I started out by making cheese from soy yogurt. I learned to make dairy yogurt decades ago from an Egyptian cook in Cairo. I simply applied the technique to soy milk and found it worked beautifully. To make yogurt cheese, all you have to do is put natural yogurt, the kind without a bunch of gums in the junk they put in yogurt today in a muslin or cheesecloth bag and hang it from your faucet to drain for 12 to 24 hours. The resulting product is thick like a goat cheese and can be flavored or rolled in herbs or peppercorns or whatever delights you. One Christmas at a party we threw, I served one of those yogurt-based cheeses and was asked by a guest from which excellent creamery I had procured it. At the same time, raw food was all the rage and one day at a raw restaurant, I got my first taste of a nut-based cheese. It was, more or less, a rough puree of cashews, more the texture of hummus than cheese, not smooth, a bit gritty, but with a bit of lactic bite, it wasn't cheese. It was hippie-dippy food, but I could sense a bit of potential in that direction. So I ventured beyond soy milk. I made milks and creams from anything and everything I could think of, including nuts of every sort, grains such as oats and sticky rice, and even legumes with mixed degrees of success. I made cheese logs from cashews and melty cheeses from yogurt. The local junior college had cheese-making courses, so I took some so I could learn some of the science some of the science behind it that I could perhaps apply to plant milks. My teenage kids were embarrassed to bring their friends home because there were cheeses at different stages of fermentation and aging all over the counters. My kitchen just looked weird. I found a broken refrigerator that kept but one temperature, 55 degrees, perfect for an aging room, and I practiced the art of athinage or curing and aging cheese. I waxed some of them and I lay others to rest for months or years. I wanted to apply all that the legions of cheese makers before had created to a new and more sustainable approach for the future. I wrote a book, Artists and Vegan Cheese, published in 2012. It was the world's first on the subject of making fermented plant milk cheeses. My goal was to empower people and vegans the world over with a know-how of how to make plant milk cheeses at home. What I didn't realize was that very few people wanted to bother. And as I traveled around the country to promote the book, I was hounded by people begging me just to make the cheese and sell it. A couple of years later at the age of 57, I gave in to their requests. I launched Miyoko's Kitchen. We built what I thought at the time would be the world's largest facility for plant milk cheese. It was all of 2,000 square feet with an additional 1,500 or so of what was supposed to be a retail space and an office. Our warehouse consisted of four shipping containers outside. In our conference table, our conference room was an old picnic table by the containers. It was a big gamble to open this because there was no proven track record for Artists and Vegan Cheeses at the time. When I told non-vegans of what I was doing, their eyes glazed over as they feigned interest. I don't understand the rules of the universe, but for some reason it was a hit from the first day. Our online orders were so great that the retail shop never opened as we needed the space for fulfillment. We launched at Whole Foods in NorCal after three months and managed to get on shelves nationwide in a year. We built a new facility in Petaluma and we expanded into Canada, South Africa, and parts of Asia. But it's not the business success story that makes me proud. And by the way, it hasn't always been a dream song. There have been challenges every inch along the way. If Helen of Troy launched 1,000 ships, then my book, Artists and Vegan Cheese, launched 1,000 vegan cheese shops, mine included. I've walked into tucked away little cheese shops the world over in Budapest and Rome and Portland, Oregon, and each time the cheese maker has thanked me for the inspiration. Many of these plant milk cheese makers have taken the exploration further, creating lovely blue me rinds and blues that make me proud. Other vegan cheese books have been born. This is the beginning of a new era of making cheese that honors tradition and the dedication of past artisans in crafting this beautiful food. But reinterpreting it for the present and the future in a way that is sustainable for the planet and allows animals to live their lives as they please, as sentient beings with lives and purpose of their own without being commodified by us. I know this to be real because of the individual cows I have known. Angel, Erica, Louie, cows that reside at Rancho Compasión, the farmed animal sanctuary I founded, who have clearly shown me the depths of their thoughts and feelings. As humanity, we have an amazing opportunity. As creatures of habit, we love what we love and we feel we must have it. But we are also becoming aware of the cost of our desires. No, not the money, but the cost to the planet, the cost to the animals. The amazing opportunity is that we can do something about it. We just have to shift our thinking and realize that there is another way. Those unctuous cheeses that bring such delight are possible. We just have to embrace a new way to make them. And we, you, me, and the animals can all have the good life, the compassionate Dolce Vita. Thank you. So thank you for sitting with my very first reading of a short story. I just wrote it, so not thoroughly edited and I thank you for this. Are there any questions or comments? Yes, gentlemen, raising his hand. I have a microphone. Oh, yeah. Mioko, thank you. What a lovely love story. That was great. Thank you. I learned a lot. I've never heard of the queso morphine, probably not saying it right. Queso morphine, C-A-S-O-M-O-R-P-H-I-N. Are there, so two questions. One about that, are there particular cheeses where that is more potent? Cow's milk. Yeah, so queso morphine's in just is a, it's a byproduct of a protein breaking down in mammalian milk. It's in all mammalian milk to some degree, much less in goats milk than in cows milk. It's in mother's milk too. And is one of the reasons babies fall asleep at the breast. It's not just because their bellies are full, it's also because they're a little high. That's great. And the other, could you talk for a minute about the animal farm sanctuary? Yes. Where the animals come from. Absolutely. So Rancho Compasión is a farmed animal sanctuary, a 501C3 nonprofit I founded in 2015. It's in West Marin in the little town of Nicosio. And we have about 100 animals. Cows, goats, pigs, sheep, ducks, geese, chickens, donkeys, pigs, and they come from different places. Sometimes they're, an animal will, somehow, well, for example, just this past week, we rescued a chicken by the side of a freeway or a highway, a country highway that must have gotten off a farm and was eating a dead vulture. And so we brought her, we took her, she was covered with mice and with mites and lice and very, very skinny and very dehydrated. So there are animals that will stray from a farm and get picked up by animal control. There are kids that sometimes are part of 4-H or FFA, Future Farmers of America, and they raise animals to be paraded around the county fair, et cetera. And what a lot of these kids don't realize is that they can't leave the county fair with their animal. The animal has to be slaughtered. They sell them to a farmer. And there are kids that realize that and after going through the program don't drop out of 4-H or FFA and they have no way to keep their animals. So we have several animals from those programs. We have animals that were just rescued from, I have one of our cows, Angel, was a three-month-old baby living in isolation in one of those, all calves are separated from their mothers upon birth and are not allowed to drink mother's milk and they're given formula so that we can actually drink the mother's milk. So Angel was one of those babies that had been separated and raised in a little crate and the farmer went under and she was left by herself. She'd never seen another cow except for the day she was born. So they come from all different places. Sometimes they're just abandoned. We've had animals just dropped off. We rescued a pig this week from an 83-year-old man whose son dumped a pig on him. He couldn't keep her and so we went and rescued her this week. So they're all animals that would be commodified in some way or be used for food, et cetera. And you can come visit. We have visitor days, we have visitor days today. So check us out ranchocompassion.org. It's spelled like ranchocompassion but only with one S. Amazing. More questions? There were two hands down here. Thank you. Was the bakery that you were talking about your bakery? Was that on Buchanan Street? Well, you must remember it was called Now and Zen. Yes. Back in the 1990s, I opened a little bakery and then it turned into a restaurant and then I started making a product called The Unturkey and it turned into a natural food company. Did you go there? Yes, I did go there because I used to attend vegetarian society events a lot and I used to sometimes cater some of their events and I was a friend of Dixie May. Oh my gosh, okay. So she introduced me to your bakery. Okay. This is so amazing, your story. Thank you, I love it. Thank you. Hi, thank you so much for your story. It was awesome just listening to your inspiration and kind of diving into your life. You had mentioned there was like one of the main differences between plant protein and cow protein and how the coagulation is a little bit different in the casein and how it's able to form cheese differently. And what was the main component that you found with the plant-based version? So it actually depends on the plant. Every plant has different amounts of protein, starches, fats and they have different protein compositions. So there's, for example, albumin which is also found in egg protein which is the coagulant there is often found in plant proteins as well. So there's all kinds of different proteins in plants. And so the coagulation is going to differ based on the heat that you apply to it as well as perhaps an enzyme. Some might curdle because of an acid you add, some might require an enzyme, some might require just heat. It all depends, they're all very, very different. And that is the exploration that I started years ago and it takes a very long time. I'm a chef, I make my discoveries on bench in the kitchen, not researching online. But when something happens, it's like, well, why did that happen? And then I'm curious and I want to research it and find out what's the makeup of the proteins? What's happening here? Another interesting thing is somehow, like when you make, it's not just the proteins, it's the fats you have to think about because the fats in animal milk are also different from in plant milk. And somehow in plant milk, the fats seem to be locked up in the plant. And even if, for example, so right now we're making cheese, we've got two different cheeses, we're making out of watermelon seed milk and very high in protein, really interesting coagulation. We're launching the world's first caught as cheese with that with 10 grams of protein per serving. But it's interesting because the fat in there, even though it's actually high in fat, rich in fat, because it's not saturated, it doesn't coat your tongue in the same way. As animal fats. And this is why sometimes with plant cheeses, you end up adding a little bit of a saturated fat to give it some of that unctuous texture or component. So they're not identical to animal milk, they're different. And the way I like to think about it is, goat's milk cheese isn't cow's milk cheese. And goat's milk cheese doesn't try to be cow's milk cheese. People don't try to make cheddar out of goat's milk cheese, it's its own thing. And why can't we have plant milk cheese and let it be its own thing? We don't have to try to replicate cheddar or mozzarella. I mean, the way, exactly anyway. The way that most of the cheeses that are like cheddar in the marketplace are made are literally, they have no milk in them. They're made out of oil and starch and they add natural flavors. And then they're cooked and it's a process cheese technology. It's not what I would call real cheese. So if we want it to be exactly like the animal milk counterpart, then we may have to add that sort of artifice where we're not really making it out of milk anymore and we're adding natural flavors, et cetera too. But why can't we just evolve cheese? So plant milk cheeses are its own thing. You can achieve similar textures. You can make hard cheeses. You can make cheeses that melt. You can, they're just not gonna be exactly like Gruyere or cheddar, but they're gonna be their own thing and just as lovely. So when you were talking about, sorry, just one last question, I'm so fascinated by this. So when you said that you were basically experimenting in your kitchen, which I was a hidden passion of mine as well, I'm always struggling to find, okay, I wanna know why this is happening, but I don't know the source of information as to where to grab it, maybe a scientific journal or something along those lines is to figure out why. Well, I mean, you can just Google, I just Google it. And then sometimes it pulls up scientific articles. Sometimes it pulls out something else. One thing that, so I had an interesting thing happen. We first opened up our place in Fairfax and we built this little aging room and I didn't have a lot of money and we built this crappy little aging room with galvanized steel instead of stainless steel because didn't have a lot of money. So we used kind of like plastic sheeting on the walls and then the seals and then it was sealed off with galvanized and after about three months, we noticed that there was this white powder covering the walls and the galvanized steel started to corrode and rust. And we thought, I was like, nobody could figure out what it was. And I had these, I asked the engineers, I asked the cheese, I asked, I had a couple of cheese consultants, Jerry, cheese consultants and they're like, never seen anything like this before, have no idea what it is. And I literally just had to start Googling and after just like days and days of trying to connect the dots like white powder, I realized it was acetic acid or vinegar. And for some reason, these large amounts of, when the aging room was full of cashew based cheese, it was that were fermented, it was releasing acetic acid into the atmosphere and causing this white powder that was corroding the galvanized. So, there was no article that I could find about called, study on cashew cheeses and it said, emid acetic acid. I was like, it just didn't exist, because no one had done it before. And so when you're doing, when you're going down this type of road and it's completely new, you just have to kind of like connect the dots and figure out what's going on here. Thank you. Hi, thank you for your talk. You mentioned you wrote many books. Could you go down and talk about your books that you've written? Sure, can you give me one second? Yeah, I have your latest recipe book and it's amazing. It's really amazing. The first book I wrote was in 1990 called, The Nowan's and Epicure. And it was probably the first vegan cookbook that was not like, you know, lentil loaf and whatever. I mean, so, and then I wrote a book on Japanese cooking and then a new edition of the new Nowan's and Epicure of the new Nowan's and Epicure, which was about 50% different. And then I took a 10-year gap until I published this book, Artisan Vegan Cheese. And then that was followed by The Vegan Pantry, The Homemade Vegan Pantry. And then last year I wrote The Vegan Meat Cookbook. So, anyway, I know we're serving cheese. So I will leave, these are clean copies. This was the only copy I could find at my house this morning I grabbed these last moment. It's absolutely maybe disgusting, but I'll let you guys peruse it anyway. And they're all available here. That's correct. Yeah. Thank you for your time. And I encourage you to keep writing those stories because that was beautiful. Thank you. I just have one quick question and then I'll go into it. You had said that when you were in college there was one specialty shop. I assume that was in Annapolis that you're referring to. How'd you know? I know you went to St. John's, from Annapolis Board and Raced. What was the specialty shop? I can't remember. It was down by the Wharf right in the middle. Sam's? Maybe it was Sam's. I don't remember the name. They had wine, they had wine and cheese. And I could get Robert Mondavi there as well. Exactly. I know my parents are from Annapolis and went and got a tour from Mondavi here when they were like the only, he was the only person running the vineyard. Right, right, right. I mean, this was back in the 1970s. So it was a long time ago. And my other question was about just in schools you had mentioned the dairy that's being served. Is there anything that we as a collective can do to help serve whole foods in schools or help with evolution and process and laws and support of the food that's being served in schools? I mean, in terms of public schools there are organizations that are fighting that. I know in New York they've got meatless Mondays now and in schools, in public schools. LA also, I don't know about San Francisco. When my kids were in school, were school age I volunteered at a nonprofit that was working towards that. I don't know what the state is right now but there is a school lunch program. It's part of the food bill and it's very complicated. As I talked about the 1.4 billion pounds of processed cheese that's stocked by all in the country. It is forced through the school lunch program. This is what kids get. And I think it's gonna have to be a grassroots movement where we become more vocal at all times. Just like the food industry is changing I think this is eventually going to topple. It is going to change but we can't be silent about it and say there's nothing we can do. We have to just be vocal. We have to keep choosing with our pocket books. We have to keep barking at our representatives. Hi, Mioko. Hi. I'm an omnivore but have a particular admiration and respect for your work. Thank you. In keeping with your idea of letting vegan cheese or whatever be its own thing. I'm wondering if you've stumbled upon a vegan food that is not analogous to an existing category like cheese or meat. Is there something sort of in the works or that you're working on or sort of exploring that is really is literally its own thing that is unprecedented as a kind of food. Well, that's, just historically, most food was vegan. Like if you go to most of the blue zones, you go to the south of Italy, most of Asia, most people ate pretty much plants for most of history. And they weren't like saying, people weren't like joining the vegan club 500 years ago but most people by nature couldn't afford to eat animal foods. And so a lot of the great traditions, I mean, it's really only recently, especially in the last 100 years that we feel of humankind has evolved to a point where we feel like we have to base our diet on animal foods. It's simply not true. And there are so many foods that are just naturally vegan because they were made out of legumes or grains or plants. And so there's, and today so many of the great chefs of the world, a lot of Michelin star chefs. I did some work with Dominique Cren recently. She's getting rid of dairy by the end of this year at, I'll tell you, Cren. She won't be serving dairy anymore. She doesn't serve red meat anymore. I'm gonna work on her about fish. But anyway, and they're all exploring the things that you can do with vegetables. Like vegetable cuisine is really big amongst Michelin star chefs today. So really just learning to, looking at vegetables in a unique way and seeing what else can I do this besides just boil it. So that is definitely happening. But I also don't see why we can't evolve meat and dairy to meaning to be made from plants because the dairy industry and the meat industry don't own that terminology. Coconut meat is called coconut meat. We even say the meat of the argument. When we talk about meat, we're talking about something that's substantive that you can chew on. So if you can make a mushroom steak, that just means you're making the mushroom and somehow maybe, I don't know, roasting it so it becomes really dense and chewy. Like if you've ever had lion's mane steak, it's incredible. I made some recently, lion's mane, I marinated and I smoked it until it was like one fifth its size. And it was so dense and chewy and delicious. If someone were to eat that and I would say, how would you describe it? They would say, well, it's steak-like. Should they not use that terminology? And so I don't think there's anything wrong with evolving language. I don't feel we need an exact replica of meat. I personally don't understand why a burger has to bleed. In fact, I don't want it to bleed because I want to change our perception towards animals and see them not as food. I don't want to be reminded that I'm trying to replicate that as a food of an animal. And I want to change human perception. I want to change our consciousness. So when we look at a cow, we're not thinking about steak. And I don't think most of you do. Like when you see a cow in the field, do you like start salivating and going, yum? You just don't. So it's only when we've consciously, through great effort, turned it into something that looks like food that you actually crave it. But in its natural state, if you're walking through the woods without a tool to kill, you probably wouldn't look at any animal and go yum. Whereas you might see berries and go, wow, that looks really refreshing. One final question? Amazing storytelling, by the way. Thank you. My question for you is we're in Silicon Valley and I'm curious about where you feel, for instance, like venture capitalists and other investors, like where should they be investing next when it comes to food? And then my second question is what's next for you? You've had amazing success with the creamery. Obviously, you're an accomplished writer. What's next? Money. Well, it makes the world go around and it can also take things off track. So I think we need to work on venture capitalists, meaning it's not just where should they be investing because they're investing because they want to make money. And the answer isn't how can we help them make money? The answer is how can we help them understand that they have a responsibility to use their money to change the world? And because we don't have a lot of time left. We're literally running out of time on this planet. So we have to work on how venture capitalists think about money. That being said, in this world, because we're running out of time, you can't grow a company the old fashioned way. We don't have 30 years to grow a company and grow 3% a year. So, but luckily there are more and more VCs out there that are mission aligned and that want to change the world. So, and I would say that sometimes founders with a really strong mission and a really strong voice can scare a venture capitalist because they want to play it safe. They're looking at the data and trying to figure out, what's popular now? What's working now? A founder, a mission-based founder, isn't looking at what the consumer acceptance or understanding is today or was in the past. A mission-based founder is looking at what is the future I can create? How can I change, how can I drive the future rather than be pulled along by the future? And it's my responsibility. It's our response, I believe, a collective responsibility of mission-based founders to decide what is the message that I have to get out to the world and how do I push that? Even if it's not the message that people have heard yet, we have to make it heard. That's our responsibility because we are literally running out of time on this planet. So we have to bring those venture capitalists along and we have to figure out who is looking for a quick turnaround and who is looking to build the future. I don't know if that answered your question, but. Second part was what's next for me, Yoko? Oh, what's next for me? You know, I am, I wanna do a lot more speaking. I mean, I've been doing more industry, mostly industry speaking, but I wanna get out into the public more. I really feel consumers are looking for inspiration leadership. They're not looking, they're out of a crossroads trying to figure out, how do I eat? What do I buy? And for me, it's not about, I wanna sell more vegan cheese, but it's, I wanna get consumers to start thinking about what they're doing and the amazing power they have in their hands. So I wanna do a lot more of that. I wanna write more. And I wanna start more movements. So I started Rancho Compasión five years ago last weekend. We hosted the Mindful Eating Film and Food Festival at the Marin Civic Center. It was probably the world's first film festival focused on both food and films about vegan food, if that makes sense. And we had a lot of vendors there. I don't know if it was the first or not. I didn't Google it, but I don't know of any others. And I also just recently co-founded another nonprofit called Leaders for Ethics, Animals and Planet, which is an organization that hopes to supplant 4-H and FFA by providing an alternative to those programs for school kids where they can work with sanctuaries, at sanctuaries with animals and learn about a compassionate food system, sustainability, develop leadership skills, and humane education. So that's a program that we kicked off as a pilot program this past spring. What happens in FFA and 4-H is that kids sell their animal, they make money off of it. So this program would actually provide a scholarship or a grant to the kids at the end of the school year. So every kid gets paid $1,000 to participate at the end of the school year. And they have to put in about nine hours a week at a sanctuary. I'm sorry, nine hours a month. A combination of humane education, hands-on workshops, volunteering, learning about leadership, all that sort of things, even cooking. And so we launched it at three sanctuaries. We're starting again in September at six sanctuaries just regionally. And then we're gonna launch it. We're hoping to raise adequate funds to expand this program nationwide so that kids all over will have an alternative for 2-4-H or FFA. So I'm interested in movements. I'm interested in hopefully inspiring people and whatever takes me there is where I wanna focus. Awesome. Thank you so much, Miyoko Shiner, everyone. And there are samples outside. Here's an example of your tote bag. If you do your 20 hours, don't forget to do that. The trackers are on the back, as well as flyers and info. And thank you all for being here today. And we love you and appreciate you, Miyoko Shiner. Thank you so much for being here today. Thank you. So is the cheese out there? Okay, well, I'll be out there.