Josh Balk (vegan): A Gamechanger for Animal-People, Part 1 of 2

Josh Balk is the vice president of Farm Animal Protection for the Shining World Benevolence Award recipient, the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), and co-founder of Eat Just, Inc., one of the first companies in the world to produce a plant-based alternative for eggs. He is also the co-executive producer for the widely acclaimed documentary “The Game Changers.”

After graduating from college, Josh joined Animal Outlook (formerly Compassion Over Killing). One of his first assignments was undercover filming in a chicken-person slaughterhouse. “Being inside a slaughterhouse, seeing what happens to the animals just tears your soul apart. And eventually, one chicken got to me. And I'll never forget her. And what she taught me was that each and every day, this is real-life consequence stuff that we're doing. We have to, for her and for the billions of others like her, help as many people as possible eat less meat because it leads to less of that suffering.”

Currently, as the vice president of Farm Animal Protection at HSUS, he works tirelessly to encourage veganism. One of his primary focuses is the US foodservice industry that serves millions of meals each day. “We’ve got companies to commit to shifting their menus from roughly 0% plant-based to 20% plant-based. We've even got a food service company to set a goal that, for every animal-based item on the menu, they're going to [have] a plant-based right next to it. And so, we're working together to shift the food system to plant-based foods.”

Josh Balk and his team constantly strive to reduce the suffering of animal-people, by criminalizing some of the most inhumane practices in animal-people factories. One such inhumane practice is imprisoning chicken-people and pig-people in tiny cages. In 2018, the HSUS scored a remarkable win in California, with the passage of Proposition 12. This legislation will improve living conditions for nearly a million pig-people and 40 million egg-laying hen-people each year. “Just in the past couple of years, we've passed laws in California, Oregon, Washington, Michigan, Colorado, Utah and Nevada. That's the fastest stretch of law passing for farm animals in the history of the United States.”