Moby

What have you got there—is that some nice herbal tea?

It's white tea. I used to own a tea shop with my ex-girlfriend called Teany. It's still open, and it's doing well, and it's a wonderful place.

Are you still a vegan?

 I've been a vegan now for about twenty years. I had a lapse; in 1992 I had some yogurt. I know, I'm an apostate. There's a part of me that wishes I could be a 99% vegan, but a lot of times when I'm traveling, it can be really difficult. You'll be stuck in an airport for six hours, and you're really hungry, and the only thing to eat is Sbarro Pizza, and unfortunately I can't, because I'm a vegan. So I wish that I could maybe relax my principles when it was expeditious to do so.

Do you miss cheese? How do you get over that?

You know what's funny? Most of my female friends, the two biggest reasons that the women I know can't be vegan are they love cheese and sushi. For me, I never really liked cheese that much, and I never really liked sushi. It was just interesting: I can't tell you the number of friends I have who said they tried being vegan but they just couldn't give up cheese.

And how is being a vegan good for the environment?

 Animal production is responsible for 22% of all greenhouse gases. It is responsible for more greenhouse gases than every car, truck, bus, and plane on the planet, yet no one in the environmental movement mentions this. It's sort of like it's the inconvenient truth that's actually too inconvenient even for environmentalists.

Animal production is the number-one cause of deforestation in the Third World, it's the number-one cause of water pollution in the developing and the rest of the world. You can just keep going and going. Apart from coal, fire and power plants, I can't think of any other industry that's responsible for more environmental degradation than animal production. The New York Times actually wrote an article about why no one in the environmental movement talks about animal production.

Is it because people just don't want to give up their burgers and their cheese?

I think it's because people in the environmental movement like eating meat, which is the equivalent of someone in an AA meeting drinking a six-pack. Also, I think that in the environmental movement, they feel like it's too unpalatable for their supporters.