Cheese has always been one of my favorite foods. There’s something about it that is familiar and comforting. If made right, it satisfies the taste buds with complex yet authentic flavors. If made right, there’s adventure and joy in it.

Yet dairy cheese has a dark side. I will talk about that in a moment.

I came to the vegan cheese business quite late in life. I was an intellectual property lawyer for many years, protecting ideas and innovation for corporations and entrepreneurs. My work took me to Europe a lot. I also had strong ties to Europe because of my family history.

I liked cheese so much that I planned a lot of my European work trips around visits to alpine villages and restaurants that specialized in fine artisanal cheeses. It never occurred to me that at some point I would stop eating it. The truth is, I never did. What I stopped eating was dairy cheese. Treeline is what helped me do that. Here’s how it happened:

For many years, my European friends and I used to meet once a year in a small village in Italy’s Aosta valley, near the Swiss border, ostensibly to go cross country skiing. The hotel we stayed at served amazing meals and specialized in local cheeses. So much so, they had a special cheese waiter - Roberto - who aged his precious cheeses in an ancient cheese cellar that he kept under lock and key. After we had visited the hotel several times over many winters, Roberto finally accepted that we had established our credibility as cheese aficionados, and he invited us into the cheese cellar. It felt like we were going into a vault of fine art. We had a sense of awe as we surveyed the dimly lit rows of fontina, gorgonzola and parmesan and many more obscure and rare cheeses, like gressoney toma, seras and reblec, and we took in the unique aromas, representing cheesemaking traditions dating back hundreds of years.

But around that time I started learning about how dairy products are produced. Up until then, I was under the impression that dairy cows lived happy lives in idyllic pastures and that they needed and liked to be milked every. I wanted to believe this because I didn’t want to stop eating cheese. But as I learned more, I came to an important realization about how human beings interact with animals - if there is money to be made from animals, the money comes first, even if it means the animals must suffer. This is why the use of animals for food will always be cruel and exploitive. This is why I am vegan.

With the help of friends, including Gene Baur, the founder of Farm Sanctuary, and Neal Barnard, the founder of Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, and the writings of philosophers like Peter Singer and Tom Regan, I began to realize that my image of the dairy industry had been sheer fantasy. I had been so taken with that fantasy that I never wanted to ask the important and obvious questions about the dairy industry, much less know their answers. Questions like:

How do cows keep producing milk year in and year out? Answer - they are forcibly inseminated and immediately after they give birth, their calves are forcibly taken away from them.

What happens to the male calves that are born on dairy farms? Answer - they are considered to be "waste" and killed shortly after they are born, or in some cases chained up and poorly nourished to the point of anemia so they can be used for tender veal chops and schnitzels.

Why do cows want to be milked every day? Answer - they don’t. They are forced to lactate by being repeatedly impregnated. Their calves are not allowed to drink their milk so their milk is available to humans.

What happens to the cows when they get old and can’t produce milk? Answer - they are shipped to slaughterhouses where they are turned into hamburger meat.

Once I had asked those questions, it became clear to me that the dairy industry is one of the most cruel and systematically violent ideas human beings have ever come up with. And that’s saying a lot. Once I realized that, I felt that there was violence in every bit of cheese I had been enjoying, including the cheese in Roberto’s cellar. Looking back, it seems less like a fine art vault and more like a morgue.

Knowing what I now knew, I decided there had to be a better way. So I started experimenting in my kitchen. I didn't know anything about cheesemaking, but I had an engineering degree and I had spent the past 25 years as an intellectual property lawyer nurturing innovation. After about a year, I had developed a few cheeses that I felt quite good about. I put them in the refrigerator to age, and went off to France for a well earned and cheese-free vacation. When I came back, I tasted the cheeses I had left behind to see how they had matured. I was astonished. They were amazingly good. That was the moment Treeline was born.

Some more about me that might explain why I felt so strongly about all this. I grew up in South Africa during the apartheid era. My father and his family had fled Germany in the 1930’s, to avoid being killed by the Nazis. My mother's family had fled Lithuania to avoid being killed too. They arrived in South Africa, destitute but alive and ready to work. As soon as he was old enough, my father enlisted in the South African Air Force and went into combat, flying missions against German forces in the Mediterranean, North Africa and southern Europe.

When he came back from the war, South Africa started implementing a system - the apartheid system - that had striking similarities to what had driven him out of Germany and what he had fought against in the war. Non-white people were denied basic human rights, and were barred from voting, from doing skilled jobs, and from living or working in parts of the country reserved exclusively for white people. The result was that families were condemned to poverty. Parents were separated from their children.

While I was growing up, we were told by the government that apartheid was the natural order of things. White people got used to it. It did not take long for apartheid to become the norm. Most white people went along with it because it benefitted them even if others suffered. But my parents had refused to buy into it. A few years after the end of World War II, they set about devoting their lives to trying to bring this racist system to an end. They paid a big price for their efforts. They were harassed and threatened. My father, who had become a prominent politician, was constantly attacked and taunted with antisemitic slurs in parliament and in the press for having the nerve to call for equality for all and an end to the racist regime. As a child I longed to be “normal.” But my parents never let me forget that racism was not normal, how lucky we were (all our grandparents had thankfully avoided being murdered for being Jewish) and that we should stick to our values, even if just about everyone around us was going along with the prevailing white supremacist ideas.

Eventually, after a long struggle and a lot of sacrifice by very brave men and women, the system was dismantled. After a lifetime of working to end apartheid, my father became the first post-apartheid South African ambassador to the United States. One of his last official duties was accompanying his old law school classmate - one Nelson Mandela - on a state visit to the White House, as the the country’s first democratically elected (and black) president. I was privileged to be at the White House for that amazing event.

As I watched the two old comrades, I felt a profound sense of pride that I came from people who had lived by their principles, when most white people had just gone along with the racist brutality of apartheid. They believed that doing the right thing was more important than having an easy life. I believe that too. That’s why I decided to fight against the oppression of animals, to fight for a cleaner environment, and to fight for better human health. Providing an alternative to dairy is one part of that fight.

My parents never shied away from telling the truth about what was going in in South Africa and criticizing it. But they taught me that mere criticism is empty if you don’t work for an alternative. That is why I built Treeline.

I also still work to help the poor and mistreated people and animals of South Africa. But my day job is Treeline.

Treeline brings together my love of cheese and my desire to make the world a better place. I do this by making cheeses that don’t compromise on taste or nutrition and are made with responsibly sourced ingredients. I believe that in my own small way, this opens people up to the possibility of leading compassionate and healthy lives, alleviates suffering and improves the environment.