Tag: plant-based

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Violife’s Vegan Cheese Makes Its ‘Top Chef’ Debut in Canada

Nicole Axworthy, VegNews, Sept. 15, 2022

 

Season 10 of Top Chef Canada will challenge competing chefs to push the boundaries on creativity with a vegan feast.

On September 26, the Food Network’s cooking competition show Top Chef Canada is returning for Season 10—and this time it will be challenging the chefs to push the boundaries of their creativity in a vegan cooking competition. …

Vegan cooking finally gets on mainstream shows

In recent years, veganism has begun permeating mainstream television, with a number of popular cooking competition shows helping to carve out space for this animal-friendly way of cooking and eating. …

[… Read more at VegNews]

 

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U of T chefs serve up new menu of plant-based dishes

By Morgan Sharp, National Observer, August 25th, 2022

Students living on two University of Toronto campuses will have more vegetarian and vegan options to choose from when school starts up again next month.

Tofu, tempeh and seitan took the place of animal protein in a two-day, in-person training program offered to chefs, sous chefs and cooks by the Humane Society International Canada this week. And in return, the university’s St. George and Mississauga campuses have promised to make 20 per cent more of their overall menu plant-based.

If the move leads the industrial kitchens scattered across residences and affiliated accommodation to use less meat and other animal products, it could help the university towards its goal of becoming carbon positive by 2050, meaning it will absorb more carbon than it emits….

The menu they ran through and shared notes on this week, for example, included a sweet and smoky tempeh kale salad, chickpea omelette with hollandaise sauce, bechamel with spelt pasta and fresh herbs, Kung Pao chickpeas with sesame fried millet and mushroom lentil stroganoff with roasted potatoes and cabbage.

[… Read more at ]

 

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Why Gen Z Is Going Plant-Based Faster Than Older Generations

Karen Asp, Sentient Media, June 28, 2022

When 22-year-old Cienna Romahn turned 16, she went vegan. She’d already been vegetarian for 10 years, but what started as a moral obligation to the animals became an obligation to the planet. “While animal welfare is still important to me, the environmental impact of my food and lifestyle choices is the number one focus for how I choose to live,” says Romahn who lives in San Francisco and works as an events manager at Hooray Foods.

Although her name may not be as well known as fellow zoomer and climate and environmental activist Greta Thunberg, Romahn is one of the many young individuals hoping to fight climate change one bite at a time. In fact, she and her peers are proving that the adage “with age comes wisdom” holds little merit. In the wake of dire warnings from the EAT-Lancet Commission and the Chatham House that the world needs to shift to a plant-based diet to avoid climate destruction, young people are latching onto the message and changing their diets faster than other generations.

For proof, look no further than a 2020 YouGov survey which found that Millennials are more likely than other generations to say they’ve changed their diet, one reason being to reduce their impact on the planet. According to the survey, they’re also more likely than Gen Xers and Baby Boomers to have tried a vegetarian diet, and more Millennials have gone vegan than older generations. What’s more, a report from the NPD Group shows that the Gen Z and Millennial generations will be almost entirely responsible for the growth of dairy and meat alternatives through 2024…

[… Read more at Sentient Media ]

 

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Level Up Your Baking With These Vegan Egg Substitutes

by Grace Hussain, Sentient Media, June 29, 2022

With so many different vegan egg substitutes available, choosing which one to use and how to use it in each baking project can be daunting. Regardless of the recipe, egg substitutes are available that doesn’t cause suffering to chickens or other birds. In fact, it’s likely that you already have a few of these substitutes in your fridge or pantry.

Is There a Vegan Egg Substitute?

There is not just one vegan egg substitute but a whole range of different options. Many are kitchen staples, others are specialty items available at health food stores, and some are replacements specifically crafted to replace eggs—particularly in recipes that use them as a central ingredient, like quiche. In baking, applesauce and pumpkin puree are useful substitutes, while the eggs in egg casseroles can be swapped for JUST egg, Red Mill Egg Replacer, or another specially formulated egg alternative.

How to Substitute Eggs in Vegan Baking

Baking without the eggs from chickens or other birds may seem challenging, but the reality is that swapping out eggs for other food items gives just as delicious results without contributing to the suffering of laying hens on factory farms. Below is a list of some of the options bakers have for making the switch from eggs to vegan substitutes in everything from cakes and muffins to shakshouka.

[… Read the 15 Substitutions, from flax and chia to aquafaba, at Sentient Media]

 

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Gen Zs and Millennials Will Drive Growth of Plant-based Foods in the U.S. Over Next Few Years

Making Healthier Choices, Sustainability, and Animal Welfare Are Top Motivators for These Plant-based Consumers

Kim McLynn, NPD, Oct. 21, 2021

The consumer demand for plant-based beverages and foods for in-home meal prep has continued throughout the pandemic. Both dairy and meat plant-based alternatives are forecast to grow through 2024, driven almost entirely by Millennials and Gen Zs, who choose these products for better health and because of their interest in sustainability and animal welfare, reports The NPD Group.

The deep-rooted values of Gen Zs and Millennials behind their choice of plant-based foods enabled the category to continue to grow throughout the pandemic when many consumers turned to comfort or more familiar foods. The demand for plant-based foods didn’t waver during the pandemic. About one in five adults say they want more plant-based foods in their diets, and that number remained steady throughout 2020, according to NPD’s recently released The Future of Plant-based Snapshot: The Evolution of Plant-based Continues.

Interest in plant-based dairy and meat alternatives by Gen Zs and Millennials extends beyond burgers and almond milk. These plant-based consumers look for various meat, poultry, or seafood analogues, flavor profiles, formats. For this reason, plant-based opportunities exist across frozen, shelf-stable, indulgent, and snack categories.

“As consumers continue to prepare more meals in the home and younger generations cook more, plant-based foods and ingredients will be a part of their repertoire,” says Darren Seifer, NPD food industry analyst and co-author of the study. “In addition to providing a variety of plant-based foods and ingredients, food manufacturers should also focus efforts on Millennials and Gen Zs since they will be driving the category’s growth. Their concerns for sustainability and animal welfare should also be taken into account when messaging to them.”

[… Read at NPD ]

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Plant-based meat by far the best climate investment, report finds

Exclusive: Non-animal proteins can play critical role tackling climate crisis, says Boston Consulting Group

Damian Carrington, The Guardian, July 7, 2022

Investments in plant-based alternatives to meat lead to far greater cuts in climate-heating emissions than other green investments, according to one of the world’s biggest consultancy firms.

The report from the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) found that, for each dollar, investment in improving and scaling up the production of meat and dairy alternatives resulted in three times more greenhouse gas reductions compared with investment in green cement technology, seven times more than green buildings and 11 times more than zero-emission cars.

Investments in the plant-based alternatives to meat delivered this high impact on emissions because of the big difference between the greenhouse gases emitted when producing conventional meat and dairy products, and when growing plants. Beef, for example, results in six-to-30 times more emissions than tofu…

 

Meat and dairy production uses 83% of farmland and causes 60% of agriculture’s greenhouse gas emissions, but provides only 18% of calories and 37% of protein. Moving human diets from meat to plants means less forest is destroyed for pasture and fodder growing and less emissions of the potent greenhouse gas methane produced by cattle and sheep…

Scientists have concluded that avoiding meat and dairy products is the single biggest way to reduce your environmental impact on the planet and that large cuts in meat consumption in rich nations are essential to ending the climate crisis. The Project Drawdown group, which assesses climate solutions, places plant-based diets in the top three of almost 100 options….

[… Read more at  The Guardian ]

 

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Burger King ends all-vegan London branch trial amid prediction trend will become norm

Critics say trial in Leicester Square is ‘manipulative’ but expert says fast food ideally suited for plant-based dishes

Helena Horton, The Guardian, April 14, 2022

All fast food will eventually become vegan, a leading plant-based restaurateur has said, after Burger King trialled making one of its flagship restaurants completely meat-free.

The Burger King outlet in Leicester Square, London, has been offering only vegan food for a month to test its popularity. This includes a plant-based version of its Whopper burger, as well as a “chicken” katsu burger and vegan nuggets.

Burger King said it would reintroduce meat options at Leicester Square but was exploring rolling out some of the most popular dishes from the trial in branches nationwide. In the meantime, the Vegan Royale, Vegan Nuggets and Plant-based Whopper will remain on the menu across all restaurants as standard, it said.

James Lewis, who works in marketing and product development for the vegan restaurant 123V on Bond Street, London, said this was part of a growing trend….

“Fast food is 100% the best area to switch to vegan,” Lewis said, adding: “The chains are often sneered at by people but they are setting the trends here. There’s no point starting a vegan chain because once McDonald’s figure out how to make a good vegan burger, they will think: ‘What’s the point in the cost of keeping all these animals when we can make it just as good and grow it in the ground?’

“Not too long from now, people will be getting their burger and it’ll be a vegan one and that’ll be the norm and they won’t think any different.”

Burger King has set a target of a 50% meat-free menu by 2030….

[ … Read more at  The Guardian ]

 

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UK Students Call for Plant-Based Meals at Universities to Fight Climate Change

Z. Zane McNeill, Sentient Media, February 10, 2022
A student-led outreach campaign supported by the climate and animal justice group Animal Rebellion has mobilized hundreds of students at over 20 UK universities. The students are calling for their universities to drop animal products from their catering menus before the 2023-24 academic year. 

Student activist Vaania Kapoor Achuthan, 19, from University College London says that in order to ensure a sustainable future, major institutions like colleges and universities have a responsibility to move “towards 100% just and sustainable plant-based catering.” Achuthan and other students argue that universities choosing to include animal products in their cafeterias not only illustrates complicity in the climate crisis, but also makes it more difficult for them to reach their sustainability goals.

Despite a 2006 United Nations report that found that animal agriculture emitted more greenhouse emissions than all of the transportation sector combined, progress mitigating the impact of animal agriculture on climate change has been slow, and the situation has grown more dire. Animal agriculture currently contributes at least 37 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions, although estimates vary, is responsible for 65 percent of anthropogenic nitrous oxide emissions, and is the leading cause of deforestation around the world. Livestock emissions also account for 32 percent of human-caused methane emissions, which account for 30 percent of global warming to date. The environmental justice group CimateNexus reports that greenhouse gasses could be cut in half by the adoption of a plant-based diet, which is why these students are lobbying their universities to drop meat from their menus.

[… Read more at Sentient Media ]

 

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Tilting menus towards plants cuts meat eating, study shows

Damian Carrington, The Guardian, Jan. 31, 2022

Making more sustainable choices easier could be a more acceptable approach than meat taxes, say researchers

Tilting menus towards plant-based meals significantly cuts the amount of meat eaten, according to new research.

The experiments in work and university cafeterias showed making it easier to choose meat-free food can be effective and could be a more acceptable approach than other proposals, such as taxing meat or banning it on certain days.

Meat production is an important driver of the climate crisis and red meat in particular is linked to heart disease and other illnesses. Substantial falls in meat consumption are needed in rich nations to curb global heating and ill health.

The new research, published in the International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity, involved three separate experiments, including the first scientific online study of plant-based menu choices. This used a representative sample of 2,200 UK adults and found that when three of four meal options were meat-based, 12% chose the plant-based option. But when three of four meal options were vegetarian, 48% chose the vegetarian meal. The effect was the same whether the participants were female or male, rich or poor….

[… Read more at The Guardian ]

 

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