One of 8 fields we read

Plant-Based & Vegan

33 discoveries published so far

August 10, 2026 Pig genes, fired into lettuce, made real meat protein An international team led by plant biotechnology researcher Alexia Groff at Imperial College London used a "gene gun," a device that fires microscopic metal particles coated in DNA, to deliver pig genes directly into the chloroplasts of lettuce and tobacco seedlings.
August 9, 2026 A UK slaughterhouse's CO2 gas chamber has been demolished, three years after activists filmed inside it Pilgrim's Ashton-under-Lyne facility near Manchester killed roughly 750,000 pigs a year using high-concentration CO2 gas chambers, a method activists say leaves animals panicking and vocalizing as they're lowered into the gas.
August 7, 2026 Brazil just banned foie gras production and imports, in the first such ban in Latin America Brazil's Congress voted unanimously to ban both the production and the import of foie gras, the French delicacy made by force-feeding geese and ducks, making it just the second country in the world, after India, to ban both sides of that trade.
August 6, 2026 A month of eating vegan changed how genes switch on In a randomized trial from the University of California San Diego and the University of Freiburg, 48 healthy adults ate the same plant-based diet for a week, then split into a vegan group or a meat-rich group for four more weeks, with calories matched so the researchers were isolating the food itself rather than weight loss.
August 5, 2026 The world's first octopus farm just got called off Spanish seafood company Nueva Pescanova had planned to keep octopuses, animals that build shelters, disguise themselves from predators and can solve puzzles and unscrew jars, in giant communal tanks in Gran Canaria, feeding them 28,000 tonnes of wild-caught fish before slaughtering them by the millions in ice-cold water.
August 4, 2026 Singapore clears lab-grown steak for restaurant plates Nearly four years after filing its application in September 2022, Israeli startup Aleph Farms has Singapore Food Agency approval to sell its Thin-Cut Steak, a hybrid product built from non-modified, non-immortalized cells of a Black Angus cow layered into a soy-and-wheat plant protein matrix.
August 1, 2026 A pig farm in Iowa became a mushroom farm, and it's thriving For three decades the Faaborg family raised pigs in Radcliffe, Iowa, the state with the most factory farms in the country, housing about 8,000 animals a year in barns built for 1,100 pigs each.
July 31, 2026 An Iowa hog farm became a mushroom farm, and it's a model for the whole industry The Faaborg family spent three decades raising pigs in Iowa, the country's leading pork-producing state, before transforming their operation into a specialty mushroom farm with help from The Transfarmation Project.
July 28, 2026 Swapping synthetic materials for animal skins is already saving real leopards, and real emissions In western Zambia, 200 paddlers wear leopard-skin skirts every year to ferry the king of the Lozi people down the river at the start of flood season, a ceremony that has driven leopard poaching for generations.
July 27, 2026 A worldwide shift to a plant-rich diet could prevent 15 million deaths a year A new analysis in Nature ran 10 different food system models comparing business-as-usual through 2050 against a global shift toward the EAT-Lancet Commission's Planetary Health Diet, one where fruits and vegetables make up over half of what people eat and animal proteins like meat, dairy and seafood drop to just 3.6% each.
July 26, 2026 Eating mostly plants cut heart disease risk by 28 percent over 20 years Researchers tracked 66,892 postmenopausal women in the Women's Health Initiative for 20 years, scoring how closely each woman's diet matched the plant-forward Planetary Health Diet.
July 24, 2026 A third of every hotel meal on Earth is about to go plant-based The Global Sustainable Tourism Council, the UN-backed body that accredits sustainability certification across the hospitality industry, has published its first-ever food and beverage standard, and it requires certified hotels, restaurants, and tour operators to make at least 30% of their menu plant-based or predominantly plant-based.
July 23, 2026 Growing real dairy protein inside oat plants, no cow required Israeli startup Plantopia has raised $9 million, led by dairy giant Schreiber Foods itself, to build a facility growing casein, the protein that makes cheese melt, stretch, and brown, directly inside sprouted oats on vertical farms.
July 22, 2026 Most Americans say they'd trade meat for beans, and mean it A new Harris Poll of more than 2,000 Americans, commissioned by Humane World for Animals, found 62 percent are willing to eat less meat, and 57 percent would swap it for beans at least once a week.
July 20, 2026 Singapore is turning beer, coffee, and vegetable scraps into food, materials, and fertilizer Singapore's National Environment Agency handed S$5.3 million ($4.1 million) to three projects that turn food industry leftovers into something worth having.
July 19, 2026 British lawmakers push to end animal testing approved "in the dark" Twenty-seven UK MPs from Labour, the Greens, the Liberal Democrats, the SNP, and independents have backed a motion demanding an end to "blind approval" animal testing licenses, which let labs run categories of experiments without regulators reviewing the actual details.
July 17, 2026 Most young Indians are already cutting back on meat, and half the rest are open to going vegan Faunalytics surveyed 801 Indian adults born between 1997 and 2012 who still live with their parents, and found 58 percent already identify as some kind of meat-reducer, vegan, vegetarian, pescetarian, or reducetarian.
July 16, 2026 Switzerland will now make it illegal to hide a painful farming practice behind a clean label Starting with a transition period through full enforcement in 2027, Switzerland will require labels on meat, eggs, milk, and foie gras, whether produced domestically or imported, disclosing whether the animals involved underwent painful procedures like debeaking, tail docking, or force-feeding without anesthesia.
July 12, 2026 A vegan deli in LA just beat traditional delis at their own game Maciel's Plant-Based Butcher Shop in Highland Park was just named the best sandwich shop in California and the fifth best in the entire country by Only In Your State, a ranking that makes no exceptions for the fact that everything on the menu is made without animal products.
July 10, 2026 Nearly everyone opposes factory farming, and food policy is finally starting to notice A survey of British adults found that fewer than 13 percent rated any common factory-farming practice, caging animals, killing newborn chicks, amputating body parts, as "acceptable," and US surveys found the same pattern holding steady across age, income, and political party.
July 2, 2026 Pigs and Their Unlikely Defenders An unusual coalition has emerged in Washington against a bill called the Save Our Bacon Act, which would override state laws banning extreme confinement of pigs.
June 29, 2026 Feeding the world without wrecking what feeds it Three separate stories arrived this weekend at the intersection of food, land, and survival.
June 27, 2026 Beavers Fixed London's Flooding for Free In 2023, five beavers were released into Paradise Fields, a 10-hectare former golf course in Ealing, west London.
June 24, 2026 The ocean has more to work with than we thought Two separate ocean findings this week, from different teams studying different coastal systems, both landing in the same direction.
June 23, 2026 Colombia Made Every Piece of Beef Traceable to Its Birthplace Colombia passed a first-of-its-kind national law requiring every piece of beef sold in the country to be traceable all the way back to the individual animal's birthplace.
June 22, 2026 The fat in olive oil and the fat that drives diabetes are telling the same story Researchers at the University of Barcelona identified the specific cellular mechanism through which palmitic acid, a saturated fat common in processed foods, animal fats, and palm oil, promotes type 2 diabetes: it triggers inflammation, causes toxic fat accumulation inside cells, and generates cellular stress at the point where insulin signaling fails.
June 20, 2026 Mushrooms are cleaning rivers in England, filtering out 80 percent of the E. coli Turkey tail mushrooms, placed in bags of woodchips inoculated with their spores at the bottom of rivers in Devon and Lincolnshire, England, filtered out 80 percent of E.
June 18, 2026 Alternative Protein Just Had a Very Good Week Three separate milestones for animal-free protein landed in the same week, from three different directions.
June 17, 2026 Pet Snakes and the Factory Farms Nobody Sees Between 2018 and 2024, American households with pet snakes grew from about 810,000 to 1.3 million.
June 17, 2026 Microplastics: What We Know, and What Actually Helps Penn State researchers tracking microplastics through Pennsylvania's rivers and reservoirs found that concentrations in sediment have been doubling every 20 years.
June 16, 2026 Science and Food Both Start Moving Away From Animals The NIH announced a new office, ORIVA, to coordinate the development and adoption of 3D human tissue models, computational tools, and other animal-free research methods across its 27 institutes.
June 14, 2026 New York City Hit Its 2030 Food Climate Goals Four Years Early In 2019, New York City set a target to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from government food purchasing by 33 percent by 2030.
June 13, 2026 Your brain is not done yet Three separate studies arrived this week at the same basic finding: there is no age at which the body simply stops responding to effort.