One of 8 fields we read

Plant-Based & Vegan

67 discoveries published so far

October 6, 2026 New York City's soy milk pilot is expanding from five schools to twelve Since May, five New York City schools have offered organic soy milk on the lunch line.
October 5, 2026 A certification body makes 30% plant-based menus mandatory The World Sustainability Organization updated the standards for its Friend of the Earth and Friend of the Sea certifications.
October 3, 2026 A hog barn becomes a mushroom room The Faaborg family in central Iowa used to raise about 8,000 hogs a year, which left nearly a million gallons of liquid manure to store and haul.
September 26, 2026 Ireland is being asked to copy Denmark's plant-based playbook The Vegan Society of Ireland is asking the national government to fund a plant-based action plan in the upcoming Budget 2027, due October 6, modeled directly on Denmark's.
September 25, 2026 An Iowa hog farm converted its barn into a mushroom operation Tyler Faaborg and his family run 1100 Farm in central Iowa, named for the number of hogs each of their two barns held for decades.
September 23, 2026 Cultivated meat took a step toward growing its own muscle structure, instead of being assembled by hand The hardest part of a convincing cultivated steak was never really the cells, it was the architecture: real muscle weaves together several cell types, and current methods grow each one separately before bioprinting or stacking them by hand.
September 21, 2026 A yeast-made cocoa butter fooled four out of five tasters UK startup Sun Bear Biofuture engineers yeast to convert sugar into a fat that behaves like cocoa butter, using precision fermentation instead of tropical farmland.
September 19, 2026 Nearly eight billion chicks are culled a year, and the technology to stop it already exists Every year, roughly eight billion male chicks are killed shortly after hatching because they're useless to the egg industry: they don't lay eggs, and they don't grow the way meat breeds do.
September 18, 2026 The technology that could end killing 7 billion chicks a year Because male chicks can't lay eggs, the egg industry kills an estimated 7 billion of them worldwide every year, about 200 every second, shortly after hatching.
September 17, 2026 The body quietly adapts to a plant-based diet A new review published in the journal Biology pushes back on one of the most common objections to going plant-based: the worry that giving up meat means giving up nutrients your body actually absorbs.
September 16, 2026 Nearly 80,000 people, five years, and a clear signal from what's on the plate Researchers tracked 79,460 Seventh-Day Adventists across the US and Canada for five years through the Adventist Health Study-2, comparing those who ate a whole-food vegetarian diet against fellow Adventists who ate meat but shared the same health-conscious, non-smoking, low-alcohol lifestyle.
September 15, 2026 England is making beans mandatory in school lunches, and dropping the rule that forced meat onto the menu For the first time in more than a decade, England has rewritten its national school food standards, and starting next September, schools must serve legumes, beans, lentils, or chickpeas, alongside a main meal at least once a week (secondary schools get a year to phase it in).
September 13, 2026 A century-old kitchen trick turns lentils into something with real bite Scientists at ETH Zurich's Institute of Food, Nutrition, and Health took red lentils, black lentils, mung beans, soybeans, and black beans and turned them into fibrous, meat-like gels using nothing but water, heat, and a freezer.
September 11, 2026 British shoppers are buying less fake meat, and a lot more actual beans An analysis of UK retail data by the climate group Madre Brava found that sales of beans, pulses, tofu, and tempeh grew 7.3 percent by volume in the first half of 2026 compared to the same period last year, while products designed to imitate meat fell 4.3 percent.
September 9, 2026 The technology that could stop billions of male chicks from being killed Every year, an estimated 7 billion male chicks, about 200 every second, are killed shortly after hatching because they can't lay eggs and aren't raised for meat.
September 8, 2026 Going plant-based just got cheaper, not just kinder ProVeg Netherlands priced a full plant-based grocery basket, mince, burgers, butter, milk, yogurt, cheese, against animal versions at nine major Dutch supermarkets, and found the plant-based basket cheaper at every single one, by an average of 18 percent and up to 30 percent.
September 7, 2026 Whole beans are outselling processed vegan meat, and scientists just made them chewier ETH Zurich researchers borrowed a technique from kōri-tofu, a sponge-like Japanese tofu that's been made since the 16th century, to give whole lentils, beans, and peas a layered, muscle-like bite using nothing but the legume, water, and a freezer.
September 4, 2026 Wild beaver kits are back in Norfolk after 500 years Beavers were hunted to extinction in England in the early 1500s.
September 2, 2026 A yeast-made protein could finally close plant-based meat's flavor gap Myoglobin is the iron-rich protein that gives meat its color, its metallic edge, and much of its umami flavor, and until now getting it meant an animal.
September 1, 2026 Europe's alternative protein startups just had their best funding half in two years European alt-protein companies raised €236 million ($274 million) in the first half of 2026, up 56 percent from the same period last year and the strongest half-year total since early 2024, according to the Good Food Institute Europe.
August 29, 2026 An Iowa hog farm becomes a mushroom farm The Faaborg family's 1100 Farm in Radcliffe, Iowa, once housed 8,000 pigs a year in a factory-farm barn system that left them buried in debt.
August 28, 2026 Pakistan links up 249 miles of protected river for one of the world's rarest dolphins The Indus River Dolphin is functionally blind, evolved to hunt by sound in murky water, and it's down to roughly 2,000 individuals worldwide, split into isolated pockets by decades of dams and irrigation canals.
August 27, 2026 The best protein in the world is a block of tofu Cambridge behavioral scientist Chris Macdonald built a new rating system, the Better Protein Institute Score, that combines a Planet Score (emissions, water pollution, land use) with a People Score (sodium, saturated fat, protein completeness, affordability) across 20 common proteins.
August 26, 2026 America's toughest animal welfare law survives another year of attacks California's Proposition 12, passed by voters in 2018, bans the extreme confinement of breeding pigs, egg-laying hens, and veal calves, and blocks the in-state sale of meat and eggs produced that way even from other states.
August 25, 2026 Brazil just made force-feeding animals for foie gras illegal President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva signed Bill 90/2020 into law on July 23, making Brazil the newest country to ban both the production and sale of foie gras, along with any food made by forcing an animal to eat beyond its natural limits.
August 23, 2026 The grocery cart where vegan is the cheap choice An analysis of nine major Dutch supermarkets found that a basket of plant-based staples, vegan mince, burgers, butter, milk, yoghurt, and cheese, now costs Dutch shoppers 18 percent less on average than the same basket with meat and dairy, and up to 30 percent less at one chain.
August 22, 2026 A former pig farm is now a mushroom farm The Faaborg family's pig operation near Radcliffe, Iowa sent its last pigs off the property in October 2022.
August 19, 2026 Tofu just topped a scientific ranking of 20 proteins Cambridge behavioural scientist Dr Chris Macdonald built a new scoring system, published in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, that judges protein foods on nutrition, affordability, and environmental cost together rather than one at a time.
August 19, 2026 Hungary just ended wild animals in the circus Starting January 1, 2027, Hungary will stop allowing 25 categories of wild animals, elephants, primates, big cats, bears, giraffes, seals, reptiles, and birds of prey among them, to be acquired, bred, trained, or forced to perform under a government decree published this month.
August 18, 2026 The red wolf, once reduced to 14 animals, had four litters this year In 1980 the red wolf became the first species ever deliberately removed entirely from the wild to save it from extinction; of roughly 400 wild canids captured in Texas and Louisiana, only 14 qualified as genetically pure red wolves.
August 17, 2026 A price tag on your dinner's carbon, and shoppers who actually changed course Researchers at the University of Trento and University of Exeter built a simulated online supermarket, recruited roughly 5,000 British shoppers, and tested what actually moves behavior: seeing a product's carbon footprint on the label, a tax on the most polluting foods, or both.
August 15, 2026 An Iowa hog farm that once held 8,000 pigs a year now grows mushrooms The Faaborg family's Iowa farm used to house 8,000 pigs a year in the kind of concentrated feeding operation that now dominates the state, one of more than 15,000 in Iowa alone.
August 14, 2026 A pig farm became a mushroom farm, and the family did it themselves The Faaborg family's pig operation near Radcliffe, Iowa sent its last pigs out in October 2022.
August 13, 2026 The world's first commercial octopus farm just got cancelled On July 22, Spanish seafood giant Nueva Pescanova withdrew its application to build the world's first commercial octopus farm in Spain's Canary Islands, a $63 million facility that would have held roughly one million octopuses a year in tanks.
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.