Josh Balk on using shareholder activism to win change from the world’s largest food companies

How I Learned to Love Shrimp

In this episode, we speak with Josh Balk who is the co-founder and CEO of The Accountability Board. Previously, he was vice president of farm animal protection for The Humane Society of the United States. In addition, he is a co-founder of EAT JUST, a food technology company.
We spoke to him about a promising new strategy that he’s trying out, which is shareholder activism. In a nutshell, that involves doing something that seems counterintuitive, buying shares in the largest food companies that use animals as products, and trying to get them to change. On top of that, we also speak about the successes he’s had through ballot initiatives in the US. such as prop 12 in California, the EATS act, and US politics more generally.

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Chapters

1. Episode preview (00:00:00)

2. Intro (00:01:07)

3. A view that most animal advocates would disagree with (00:02:12)

4. Josh's journey into animal advocacy (00:09:18)

5. Prop 12 (00:11:26)

6. What inspired The Accountability Board (00:18:59)

7. How does shareholder activism actually work (00:22:58)

8. The challenge of enforcing companies welfare commitments (00:27:12)

9. The Accounability Board going forward (00:30:54)

10. Prop 12, in slightly more depth (00:35:36)

11. Banning production to banning sales (00:40:55)

12. How bad is it to lose a ballot initiative? (00:47:59)

13. EATS Act (00:55:44)

14. Future challenges and struggling to maintain those big wins (01:00:11)

15. How to get involved in politics for animal advocacy (01:02:52)