Faith-Driven, Plant-Based Eaters are Opening Doors for Climate-Friendly Diets
With a subtle Southern twang in her speech and cowboy boots on her feet, Renee King-Sonnen looks every bit the part of a Texas rancher’s wife. For years, that’s what she was: born and raised in Houston, King-Sonnen moved to a cattle ranch with her husband, Tommy, in 2009. But over time, the work of raising animals for slaughter began to wear her down.
She got attached to one calf in particular, whom she named Rowdy Girl.
As the cow grew up, King-Sonnen realized she couldn’t bear the thought of letting the calf she’d bottle-fed end up on someone’s dinner plate.
“I realized that I love a cow like I love a dog,” she said. That revelation was the seed for what became Rowdy Girl Sanctuary, an animal nonprofit that rescues domestic farm animals, including goats, chickens, ducks, pigs, and, of course, cows, standing on the same site that once served as a commercial farming operation.
“We’re the first documented beef cattle ranch in the world to go vegan and live to tell about it,” King-Sonnen laughed.
She and Tommy have made an unusual choice in the context of their Angleton, Texas, community, which consists largely of other farmers and ranchers. For the most part, King-Sonnen said, it’s a “live and let live” kind of community. But when she does find folks who have questions or disagreements about the work of the sanctuary and the reasons behind it, King-Sonnen has found it helpful to fall back on something she and so many of her neighbors have in common: faith.
Having grown up Christian, King-Sonnen had heard all the usual justifications for why some Christians believe the Bible explicitly condones meat-eating. But as she studied for herself, she came away convinced that there is a strong case for not harming animals in the Scripture, too, pointing to references that put forth the idea of “the lion laying down with the lamb” and “abolishing the sword.” In recent years, she’s put together fact sheets with Biblical references that “speak to not eating animals,” and presented on the subject of a Christian approach to veganism at conferences.
While she’s not able to convince every Christian she meets, being able to speak a common language of faith has opened many of her neighbors to hearing her perspective on veganism, who might otherwise be suspicious of it.
Some neighbors have begun bringing beloved calves of their own to King-Sonnen to rescue and even donate money to Rowdy Girl Sanctuary — all while continuing to run their own ranching operations. While that could be framed as hypocritical, it could also be seen as evidence that some part of King-Sonnen’s message is getting through to people who are navigating the cognitive tensions of raising animals for slaughter, and yet simultaneously falling in love with some of those animals.
While King-Sonnen’s primary reason for going vegan herself was the desire to avoid animal cruelty, she names environmental issues as her next biggest concern.
“There’s something like more than 10 farm animals to every one human on our planet right now,” she said. “Farm animals are using up the resources, urinating, defecating, and being slaughtered. All that waste that goes into our oceans creates dead zones and contributes to deforestation. It’s ridiculous.”
Environmentalists would say she’s got a point. Between a third and a fourth of global climate emissions come from food systems; animal agriculture is responsible for a large portion of that. (Cattle raising, which was the catalyst for King-Sonnen’s own journey, is a particularly important factor: beef far outpaces every other kind of food in terms of its negative climate impact.)
And while progress is happening to reduce emissions in many major sectors, including energy and transportation, food emissions have continued to rise, which means that addressing humanity’s oversized appetite for eating meat and dairy needs to be addressed if we want to fight climate change.
As environmentalists look for ways to help the world reduce consumption of the foods that are worst for the planet, King-Sonnen’s experience of being both fueled by her faith and using it to connect with people who might otherwise disagree points to an under-explored path forward.
She’s not the only one. Tarush Agarwal is one of the co-founders of Sach Foods, a startup that makes an award-winning, organic paneer. An immigrant from India to the U.S., Agrawal has been a lifelong vegetarian, a commitment shaped by his adherence to Hindu principles and teachings, including that of ahimsa, or nonviolence toward living beings.
Being vegetarian in India was easy, in part because so many other people were. High-quality, healthy, and delicious vegetarian options were plentiful and easy to find. One of the “hero proteins” he grew up with was paneer, a non-aged soft cheese that Agarwal said has a higher protein content than tofu and is on par with the protein content of many meat options. Back home, paneer was available everywhere from the local Indian spot down the road to the international chains like Pizza Hut and McDonald’s, which offered paneer pizzas and burgers.
But in the U.S., paneer was harder to find, and vegetarian options of any kind were rarer. It was in that gap that Agarwal and his partner, Jasleen, decided to launch Sach. They named their brand after the Hindi word for “honest,” because “we wanted to be something that was doing something good for the world,” Agarwal said. To that end, Sach sources its milk exclusively from organic, family-owned farms in Northern California, in an attempt to create the most “honest,” healthy food possible.
The result has been a brand that helps customers eat less meat, both those who share Agarwal’s faith background and those who don’t. For people who grew up eating paneer as a primary source of protein because they were also raised Hindu and vegetarian, Sach provides a way to keep eating in line with their values and the taste of home. And for those who might come from a different background but want to eat less meat anyway, Sach provides a healthy, high-protein option that allows them to do so. “We’ve gotten notes from people saying that our paneer has been super meaningful for them, because it’s made it easier for them to live that lifestyle,” he said.
The Agarwals aren’t alone in being driven by faith to create options that help people of all backgrounds reduce their meat consumption. Ari Nessel is an investor and philanthropist whose drive to create a positive change in the world is deeply intertwined with his practice of Vajrayana Buddhism. As one of the driving forces behind groups like Mobius, The Pollination Project, and Food Solutions Action, Nessel has taken his Buddhist-informed sense that his actions “can cause great harm or enhanced wellbeing” and turned that into a career focused on distributing as much capital as he can to organizations he thinks are doing the right thing.
Often, that means funding groups like Fundación Veg, which works in Latin America to promote plant-based diets, and Food Frontier, a New Zealand and Australia-based think tank focused on researching alternative proteins. It also means investing directly in startups that are helping create options for people trying to eat less meat, like plant-based burger chain Veggie Grill and veggie-based pet food brand Wild Earth.
And while Nessel, like King-Sonnen and Agarwal, is driven to avoid eating animals to avoid causing them suffering, he’s also deeply committed to environmental causes, founding and investing in green energy companies.
But for Nessel, his spiritual practice doesn’t just inform the kinds of investments he makes. It also shapes how he interacts with other people, including those who may not immediately see eye-to-eye with him.
Though Nessel is committed to not eating animals that can feel pain, for example, he recalled having a conversation with a U.S. Senator who is a hunter and eats only the meat that he personally kills. Nessel was able to connect with the senator over the idea of having a strong personal ethic that shapes eating habits, and from there, start a conversation about what it might look like to push that ethic one step further.
“My goal is not to create an identity [around being plant-based],” Nessel explained. “It’s to move away from an identity and to more of a process of expanding your compassion for others.” For him, that includes having compassion for other humans and the complicated set of personal health needs, history, and cultural factors that play into the decisions people make about what they eat. “The more we meet people where they are, the more likely that there’s a benign or favorable change that they make,” he reasoned.
Neither Nessel nor King-Sonnen nor Agarwal would pretend that their spiritual background or practices have given them a silver bullet for addressing the ways that animal agriculture creates suffering, both in terms of the industrial farming system and its effect on climate change.
But being rooted in faith has given each of them the drive to be part of positive change, whether by creating more options for plant-based eaters, connecting with those who share their spiritual heritage, or empowering them to show up with compassion and empathy when people don’t immediately share their point of view.
Large-scale industrial farming has made meat products readily accessible — but at a cost.
It has created a distance between people and the production of their food, undermining the relationship between humans and animals. This disconnect has drawn invisible lines between creatures that deserve empathy and creatures that deserve exploitation. The result? A global food system that feeds humans but harms the planet and erodes our species’ reverence for life.
Plant-based diets rooted in faith build new bridges that can help contextualize plant-forward diets for a wide range of communities. Spiritually led solutions to animal product overconsumption can offer common ground through the understanding that all beings are worthy of love and consideration. In that way, faith and personal ethics can be used as a springboard to minimize the suffering of both animals and the planet.
In the case of these plant-based changemakers and innovators, guided by their faith, the reasons are multifactorial and the outcomes equally diverse, but at the root is a spiritual calling to respect the entirety of life and the sacred environment we call home.
What might shift in our world — both around and within us — if we approached every living being with the same reverence and desire to minimize suffering for all?
By Whitney Bauck