Caroline Buck

Hi, Guy and Jeffrey.

My name is Caroline Buck.

I'm here in Oakland, California.

My husband and I started Petaluma, a direct-to-consumer dog food company, making plant-based formulas using whole food ingredients like chickpeas, pumpkin, peanut butter, tasty stuff like that.

Of course, yeah.

It's the same question that most vegans, vegetarians get when they go home for Thanksgiving for the first time too, right?

Like, aren't you wasting away now?

Most people I think have been fed mostly like a marketing story about what dogs should be eating.

They co-evolved with us 20, 30,000 years ago, maybe even longer ago, and they ate our scraps.

And for most of human history and most parts of the world, we didn't throw out a lot of meat.

So they had to evolve to have digestive enzymes to break down carbohydrates and starches.

And they are true omnivores like humans.

Yes.

I had been kind of flirting with being vegetarian most of my life, but didn't really go full tilt until maybe 2016, 2017 on a New Year's resolution.

I just went cold turkey and never looked back.

I have a couple of dogs.

And living at the time in San Francisco, I had a very crystal conversion moment of walking my dog in Golden Gate Park and him playing with a pig on a leash, someone's pet pig.

And it was just like, all right, I'm officially – the lines have officially blurred.

I now need to knock this off.

So it was a personal dietary change before it became one for my dog.