In December 1980, a 20-something nomadic 
naturalist Boomer found himself at a crossroads. Conservative Ronald Regan had just defeated environmentalist Jimmy Carter, which meant U.S. government funding of outdoor eco-programs was about to end. Plus, ten years living in tents and crashing on friends’ sofas was getting old. There was a tree house to build.

With the $2,500 our naturalist had saved working that summer at a Youth Conservation Corps camp on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula, Seth Tibbott, sans any real business experience, founded the Turtle Island Soy Dairy. His can’t-miss plan was to make tempeh—
i.e., moldy soybeans—the next granola.

In late 1995, after “failing forward” for the next 15 years, and with a few friends, Seth created a “delicious holiday feast” for vegans and vegetarians. His friends and employees wanted to name it the “Meatless Stuffed Tofu Roast.” But our hero insisted on a more “fun” name. Today you know that centerpiece as “Tofurky.”

Seth recently published his autobiography, In Search of the Wild Tofurky, detailing it with wit and 
positivity about how he pioneered plant-based proteins. This year marks both the 40th anniversary of the founding of his company, now known as Turtle Island Foods, and the 25th anniversary of Tofurky.

The Animals Voice is pleased and honored to present our exclusive interview with Mr. Tofurky, Seth Tibbott.

Let’s start at the beginning. You were born in Washington, D.C.
I was born five blocks from the White House on April 20, 1951. My Dad was 56 when I was born and worked for the Federal government. My Mom was 39 and had a full-time job raising me and my older brother, Bob. We lived in a small house my Dad’s mother had built five blocks from the D.C. line in Maryland.

You just mentioned your paternal grandmother. Not many 69-year-olds have a grandmother who was born during the Civil War. Can you share an interesting tidbit about Grandma Tibbott?
My grandmother was born in Philadelphia, two months after the battle of Gettysburg in 1863. Her mom was home alone before the battle and was worried that the marauding Confederate troops of Robert E. Lee would make it to Philadelphia and lay the city to waste. Her father was in the Navy and fighting the slave trade in Africa at the time of her birth. My grandmother grew to be both a woman’s suffragist and an artist.

She once applied for a job as an illustrator at the Dept. of Interior in Washington, D.C. She was told a woman couldn’t draw as well as a man. She applied anyways and drew a pocket gopher, I am told, perfectly. It was rejected. She said she would redraw it. Again it was rejected. She ended up drawing this pocket gopher 64 times before they relented and offered her the job. She refused, telling them that she just wanted to prove to them that a woman could draw as good as any man.

She died when I was four years old, so my hand has touched the hand of a woman born during the Civil War!

Beautiful story. Amazing, actually. Now let’s turn to your maternal side. In your book you mention your grandfather Seth, whom you were named after. How did he influence the tree house you built and lived in for seven years…that we’ll talk about in a few minutes?
My grandpa, Seth Lundquist, was an avid reader; read Emerson’s essays five times, each time writing copious notes on every single page. He also read and marked up Lao Tzu’s The Way of Life. In one of his books, he wrote about vegetarianism being something good that we should consider. So that he could focus on his readings, he built several tiny houses out in the woods near Minneapolis where he lived. One he called “Pirate’s Cove,” but his most famous was a 10’x12’ addition he built next to his garage that he called his “wigwam.” It had a fireplace, a bunk, an old Victrola record player, and shelves and shelves of books. I loved visiting him growing up and would often sleep out in his wigwam with my cousins. When his estate sold, my mom sent out the rug from the wigwam, which I placed in my tree house for all the seven years that I lived there.

After high school, you began your westward journey. Tell me about your college days and the initial path toward vegetarianism.
My mom was from the Midwest and had many good things to say about the people there, so when I graduated, I decided to find out for myself what the Midwest was all about. I was accepted at a small liberal arts school called Wittenberg University in southern Ohio. I was impressed by the rural vibe of Ohio; it looked so much better than the harsh city ambiance 
of the D.C. area.

After two years at Wittenberg, I decided to become an Elementary Education major. One semester, an English professor I admired asked me if I would help him start an after school drop-in center for the kids who lived in his run-down neighborhood. I said sure and, with eight of my friends, we started the Tony 
Russell Free School in his basement.

And the vegetarianism?
In 1971, after reading Diet for a Small Planet and eating a yummy meal of lentils, rice, and onions, I became a vegetarian while at Wittenberg. I then discovered books by Stephen Gaskin, who would later start The Farm commune in Summertown, Tennessee. Among his psychedelic spiritual teachings was the idea of eating a “pure vegetarian” diet without the eggs, cheese, or dairy products I had been eating. This interested me, so I bought The Farm Vegetarian Cookbook and started living off soy grit burgers that tasted bad and digested worse. It was in that book that I first read about tempeh, the good tasting, easy-to-digest soy food, and I was intrigued.

I interviewed Patty Shenker, a California activist who attended a “small liberal arts college” at the same time you were in school. Patty also went veg while in college, one year before you. Maybe everyone should attend a small liberal arts college? Just a thought… After college you headed west once again. How did you end up in Oregon?
After getting my degree in Elementary Education with a minor in Outdoor Education, I was itching to 
go west to Oregon, which I had yet to explore. Playing my mandolin in the front seat of my roommate’s VW bug, I arrived in Oregon in August 1974 on the day President Nixon resigned.

We drove up to the Columbia River at dawn and saw Mt. Hood shining above the early morning clouds as we passed through Hood River. Little did I know Hood River would play such an important part in my future. Again, I was duly impressed by the majesty of Oregon, which I judged to be far superior to Ohio.

The first night in Oregon, I met a recent high school graduate at a campground who told me about the great outdoor school programs in Portland. With my long hair and ragged jeans, I applied for a job and was soon hired. Whether or not I was wearing underwear for my job interview is still in dispute. After an eight-year career teaching outdoor school in Oregon, I took a job as a naturalist in Alaska in the summer of 1980. Again, I was impressed by the sheer, raw beauty of Alaska, which I judged was even prettier than Oregon. At that point I saw my life pattern as traveling from east to west, improving with each step. I would probably still live in Alaska if I had not started to make tempeh commercially in Forest Grove, Oregon, at the end of 1980.

How, and why, did you get started making tempeh?
In the summer of 1977, in the midst of the eight-year education career I just mentioned, I got a job as 
a naturalist teaching high school kids in a park outside Greenville, Tennessee. On weekends, the kids would leave our primitive tent camp and go home. On one 
of the first weekends, along with three co-workers, 
I decided to drive over to The Farm, five hours away. We talked our way into staying overnight and in the morning, we sat cross-legged on a hill with the 1,000 hippies who lived on The Farm and chanted “OM” as the sun came up. After that, Stephen gave his weekly sermon and before we left, I ordered a small vial of tempeh starter that The Farm had just begun to sell. This was the first commercial tempeh starter sold in the United States.

The next week, the starter arrived along with directions. I soaked some soybeans overnight, split them by hand, cooked them for an hour in boiling water, and added the vial of black tempeh spores. I then put the beans into a stainless-steel pan in a one-inch layer, covered the pan with perforated tin foil and set everything on a chair in the field in the middle of our tent camp. Since Tennessee has summer temperatures very similar to Indonesia, tempeh’s native land, the fermentation worked perfectly. After 24 hours, I peeled back the tin foil and there was this beautiful white cake with fluffy, fragrant mold on the top. I knew it was perfect from The Farm’s detailed directions. Excitedly, I ran down to the cook tent carrying my pan of moldy soybeans. The staff had been at the tent drinking beer all afternoon, so caution was weak and good sense was weaker. 
We cut the cakes into 4” squares, fried them up, and served them with okra and silver queen sweet corn and big fleshy slices of tomatoes. It was nirvana and love at first bite. The staff wasn’t so sure, it being mold and all. But they ate it only later to confide in me that there were some pretty large concerns that they might die that night. But nobody did die and I was hooked on this tasty, digestible protein.

In the fall, I drove back to Oregon where I spent three years making tempeh for family and friends until 1980 when I started making it commercially at the neighborhood food co-op and selling it to eight natural foods stores and restaurants in nearby Portland.

After the infamous “bathtub brainstorming session,” your girlfriend at the time, Kim, suggested you name your new company “Turtle Island Tempeh.” Instead you went with “Turtle Island Soy Dairy,” even though you weren’t making soy milk. Why did you go with this name?
My girlfriend, Kim, did indeed suggest the name of Turtle Island Tempeh in the fall of 1980 for my new tempeh business while we were taking a bath in the increasingly cooling bathwater at our house. At that time, “Soy Dairies” and “Soy Delis” were gaining popularity. I had visited Sunbow Soy Dairy near Corvallis, Oregon, several times and was impressed by their ethics and dedication to providing high quality tofu to that community. I reasoned that, though I was only making tempeh then, by calling my company a “Soy Dairy” it left the option open to manufacture other products.

My artist friend, Jan Muir, who drew the original logo of Turtle Island Soy Dairy, as well as the map in the front of my book, drew this cool drawing of a soybean milking a soy cow that I have never been able to find a use for. Is this too creepy or brilliant? Have yet to decide. Oh, and Kim and I are still good friends. She’s actually the one who lives in Alaska now.

And now we get to the tree house. Tell us a little about it, why you chose to do it, how long you lived in it, where it was, and any other lurid details that you remember and care to share!
When you have a take-home pay of $300 per month, a guy has to be creative. In the summer of 1984, while the tempeh dream was just getting off the ground, I rented four trees from a neighbor, about two miles from my tempeh kitchen in Husum, Washington, which is about 70 miles east of Portland.

I had never really built anything before, but the coming winter was all the motivation that I needed. The basic house was 11’ x 16’ with a sleeping loft above the main floor. Later I added an 8’x4’ cupola on the roof. The house featured cold water, basic electricity, Jotul wood stove, a party line telephone—Millennial, you may want to Google that—a deck around three sides, and a tree house pee house on the back side which came in quite handy.

I lived there for seven years quite comfortably with my cat, Shakespeare, who came and went as he pleased through a small kitty door I added for him. I had some great parties and loved to fall asleep to the gentle rocking and creaking of the house, which resembled a sailboat. My neighbors were mostly birds and flying squirrels who didn’t seem to mind me staying in their neighborhood after dark. It’s a bit run down now, but still up in the tree. I was just up there cleaning it up this weekend.

Why do I get the feeling that you have many more stories like these two? In your book you use the phrase “Existential Nausea.” From where did 
this beautiful term arise, and can you give it a 
one-sentence definition?
Phew, boy. That’s a tough one. Originally it comes from the famous existential Jean Paul Sartre book Nausea, but R. Crumb had a famous comedic rendition of that work in the 1960s. The concept was first framed 
to me by my good friend, Bill McKinney, who keeps popping up in my life at key moments to inspire me. Basically, it is succumbing to a feeling of a life filled with absurdity, but lacking in meaning. To the afflicted, life is about holding existential nausea at bay through projects, relationships, businesses, and other endeavors and distractions that bring great purpose and meaning to this precious, mystical experience of living in this sweet old world. I encourage the reader to do their own research and extract their own meaning.

“Existential Nausea” sounds like the perfect motto for 2020. You and I have known each other for the better part of this Millennium. I have always admired your positivity, good (and bad) humor, happy-go-lucky approach to life, and the way people are drawn to you. Many of these traits were handed down from your parents, as you explain in In Search of the Wild Tofurky. How did these characteristics help you in business, especially during the lean bootstrapping years?
Thanks for the kind words, Joe. Opening a business is always an act of optimism and faith. It’s about a 
vision of creating a better life for yourself, your employees, and the planet. 
It takes a constant optimism to stay in 
business for sure, but a deep feeling 
of mission helps, too. Businesses are a marathon, not a sprint. And the longer you can psyche yourself up and stay in the game, the more you shed your stupidity, allowing you a better chance for success. People often think that the “lean bootstrapping” years of my life, making tempeh, failing in business, and living in a tree must have been austere and filled with existential nausea. And there were definitely some tough moments. But overall, these were exciting, very magical years of great learning and great meaning for me. They were some of the best years of my life, for sure.

At the other end of the spectrum, is it difficult to resist the temptation(s) of success now that you and Turtle Island have “made it”?
Well, having lived through so many years of failure leaves you with a certain amount of financial PTSD, but also humility. It’s very good to be humbled in life and experience hardship. Stephen Gaskin, the leader of The Farm, used 
to say, “no one ever got to a high place without working through a place that was hard on you.” And the Buddha and other religious leaders all speak about suffering being a path to enlightenment.

I am a far cry from enlightened and my “suffering” was very minimal in the grand scheme of things, but I am grateful for how it all turned out and the empathy learned from those many years of working in relative obscurity, making a mess out of things.

Another insightful answer. Thanks. We’re down to our last question, my “Baker’s Dozen” 13th question, where I always try to ask something no one has asked before. This is actually 
inspired by a true story, by the way, from when the wildfires interrupted Turtle Island’s supply chain and your product was impossible to find. Here goes…
You’re going camping for the weekend. On the way out of town you stop at your favorite health food store for supplies, but there are no T.I. tempeh or deli slices to be found. Completely sold out. Which competitor’s brand do you purchase?

Wow, where to start? Currently there are so many delicious vegan options to choose from which is great because we want all good tasting vegan companies to succeed. Even though the last sales data I saw for the Refrigerated Meat Alternative Category in U.S. Supermarkets showed, as of March 22, 2020, that dollar sales were up an astounding 128 percent over 12 months ago, we still have a long way to go. And to veganize the world is a huge task. Way better than any one brand.

So, having a healthy category like this aligns with our mission for plant-based foods to replace animal-based foods, but it also makes things easier from a business standpoint too. “It’s the tide that floats all boats,” definitely applied. As for my Tofurky-less knapsack 
I would buy:

• Follow Your Heart Smoked Gouda vegan cheese and Vegenaise. Love all their tasty products and their ethics!
• Field Roast Apple Sage Sausage to grill over the fire.
• Higher Taste “Big Kahuna” Hoagie or Snackrilege’s “Wichfinder” (made with Hickory Smoked Tofurky; is this cheating?).
• Lightlife’s Smoky Tempeh Strips for a yummy breakfast.

To learn more about Seth Tibbott and Tofurky, visit Tofurky.

Joseph Connelly is a Contributing Writer for The Animals Voice. He is also the founder of ‘VegNews Magazine’ and the founding columnist of SF Gate’s “Green” feature.