The Founder and CEO of Green Monday talks about going plant-based, advocacy and the future of food
Last month, I went to the Grand Hyatt Erawan to interview David Yeung, the Hong Kong-based entrepreneur and eco-warrior who founded the wildly successful Green Monday, to talk about the social venture’s launch in Thailand. Instead, it started with him asking me about my choice to go vegan.
“I went vegan in 2013,” I said. I was living alone in Tokyo at the time, and the solitude created a mental space for me to unravel some of the cognitive dissonance I was carrying about my lifestyle and my concern for the environment. The truth is, I didn’t remain faithfully vegan from then until now.
Admittedly, when I moved back to Bangkok, where I wasn’t alone but surrounded by family and friends who want the best for my well being, it was hard for me to take the hardline. So, I compromised and sided with vegetarianism for a couple of years before finally gaining the self-esteem to return to my original stance two years ago.
David nods and smiles at my story. “That Asian family concern,” he chimes empathetically. David himself has been vegetarian for 18 years and eats vegan most of the time. “I don’t do dairy,” he says. “The only thing that is preventing me from being completely vegan is the occasional egg.”
A man on a mission
His long-time commitment comes from a universal value of compassion. “No life wants to be harmed. That was just very clear to me at a young age.” What was the tipping point, though, from going from personal lifestyle choice to full-blown global activism, I wondered.
“One of the triggers after I went vegetarian in 2001 was in 2006, when I watched the Al Gore documentary An Inconvenient Truth. The second one was reading the United Nations reports from the IPCC—the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It said two things: One, that climate change was a big problem, and two, that meat and livestock were major culprits for carbon emission.
Here are just some of the facts: Livestock farming generates about 18 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. This is more than all emissions from ships, planes, trucks, cars and all other transport combined. Greenhouse gas emissions aren’t the only issue either.
Meat and dairy, which provide only 18 per cent of our calories and 37 per cent of our protein, uses up over 80 per cent of the world’s farmland, the allocation of which is the leading cause of mass wildlife extinction.
Alternatively, if we were to replace meat agriculture with plant agriculture of equivalent nourishment, we would be able to reduce about 75 per cent of global farmland while still feeding the world. Hence, the headline you’ve all probably seen: Avoiding meat and dairy is the single biggest way to reduce your impact on Earth.