Category: Elysabeth Alfano Interview Series

Some may falsely claim we lack protein, but nobody would ever dare accuse vegans of lacking in personality. We have the dubious honor of being labeled with a plethora of questionable personality traits. We’ve been called The Angry Vegan, The Radical Vegan, even the Vegan Police.

Profiles in Veganism seeks to show people what vegans are really like, namely like everyone else, except we don’t kill animals or drink their breast milk. As a great meme says, before you call me a radical, look inside a slaughterhouse.

Increasingly, vegans are business leaders, Like Ethan Brown, the wildly successful CEO of Beyond Meat, which went public and was immediately touted as the most successful IPO in more than a decade. 

We also have our romantics, like the inimitable Earthling Ed, who preaches around the globe -with a ponytail and a Shakespearean flourish - about the hazards of factory farming and the need for justice and kindness to all animals. 

And, we have our humorists, like the brilliant Tabitha Brown, whose delightful video on carrot bacon went viral and got her a major deal in Hollywood. 

We have our musical geniuses, like Moby, who devotes his life to convincing people that animal agriculture is killing our planet. And, of course, we have our Oscar-winning actors, like Joaquin Phoenix, who spoke truth to power about our abuse of factory farm animals on the very nights that he was winning awards for his gripping performance as The Joker. 

And, we have our visionaries, like Dr. Sailesh Rao of Climate Healers, whom we profiled in our documentary Countdown to Year Zero and who is working to create a vegan world by 2026.

And, then, there’s the classic and original activist, the one and only Ingrid Newkirk, founder and president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. They’ve flung everything under the sun at her, unsuccessfully trying to take her down. But, she maintains her revolve and her optimism, noting, “being sad never helped the animals. Be effective.”

We could go on. But, why not meet these amazing people, and thousands like them, by diving into the JaneUnChained’s Profiles in Veganism.