Leonardo DiCaprio is “Proud” to Invest in Vegan Meat

Actor Leonardo DiCaprio took to social media this week to praise vegan brand Beyond Meat, in which the actor was an early investor. “Proud to be an investor in the #futureofprotein,” DiCaprio posted to Twitter and Instagram, where collectively the actor has 45 million followers. DiCaprio—an avid environmentalist—shared new sustainability statistics compiled by the University of Michigan’s Center for Sustainable Resources that compared Beyond Meat’s plant-based Beyond Burger to its beef counterpart to reveal that producing the vegan patty uses 99 percent less water, 93 percent less land and 46 percent less energy, and emits 90 percent fewer greenhouse gases. Beyond Meat CEO Ethan Brown (along with Impossible Foods CEO Patrick O. Brown) was recently honored by the United Nations with a “Champion of the Earth” award for innovating a product that has the potential to displace animal agriculture—an environmentally damaging industry that the UN said “has brought us to the verge of catastrophe.”