FOOD

ANAY MRIDUL: Chicago-based meat company Oscar Mayer, a subsidiary of Kraft Heinz, is launching a line of plant-based hot dogs, as part of an ongoing collaboration with NotCo. They will debut at Expo West next week. The two-year-old joint venture between Kraft Heinz and Chilean food tech company NotCo is launching its first plant-based meat product range: a vegan hot dog under the former’s Oscar Mayer brand. The NotHotDogs and NotSausages, which will be previewed at the Natural Products Expo West in Anaheim (March 12-16), mark Oscar Mayer’s first foray into plant-based meat, and the fourth…

WHITNEY BAUCK: Some farmers have turned from livestock to crops to avoid the financial pitfalls and thorny ethics of industrial agriculture... Farmer Tom Lim had been raising poultry for 20 years when the company he worked for as a contractor terminated him without warning, leaving him saddled with debt and unsure of where to turn. “My heart just dropped,” he said. “I didn’t know where to make money to pay off our loans"... Lim is one of a number of farmers transitioning away from industrial animal agriculture in favor growing vegetables and mushrooms. Though Lim’s contract ending forced…

CHARLOTTE POINTING: 'Feeding Tomorrow' is the people who grow food and the people who eat food working together to transform the entire ecology of the planet,” says farmer Mark Shepard in the new documentary Feeding Tomorrow, released on January 23. The film, which has already won multiple awards, including Best Feature Documentary at the Ceres Food Film Festival, guides viewers through the current reality of the food system, which prioritizes fast and cheap production, and as a result, is destroying ecosystems, fuelling climate change, and threatening our health. But, as the name suggests,…

PROVEG INTERNATIONAL: This report shows how packaging colour can influence consumers' purchasing decisions and steer their preferences toward plant-based-meat products. We'll delve into the application of choice-architecture design, particularly the use of harnessing attractive colours as a nudge, in order to promote the consumption of plant-based meat. Marketers in the food industry can use the insights to strategically design packaging and branding that appeals to consumers' preferences for certain colours, effectively encouraging the consumption of plant-based meat. In recent years,…

BEN DE GROEVE: Attitudes toward vegans can be markedly ambivalent. On the one hand, vegans may evoke admiration among omnivores for their moral commitment to their vegan diet and lifestyle. On the other hand, vegans may be subjected to stigmatization for appearing to display moralistic traits indicating arrogance and overcommitment. This ambivalence in stereotypical impressions has recently been termed the “vegan paradox”  and is theorized to stem from the cognitive dissonance people may feel from eating meat: Omnivores may view vegans as morally committed because they embody care for…

ANAY MRIDUL: It’s been an eventful few months for Italy and its adventures with alternative protein. In November, it became the first country to ban cultivated meat, citing health reasons, a risk to the country’s tradition, and a need to safeguard the livestock industry. However, this wasn’t the only ban introduced by Italy, with another legislation going slightly under the radar. As part of the cultivated meat legislation, the country also prohibited the use of meat-related terms like ‘steak’ and ‘salami’ on the product packaging of plant-based meat, which alternative protein think tank…

POLLY FOREMAN: Christspiracy will be screened in over 600 movie theaters around the world on March 20th and March 24th in all of the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and parts of Germany, Switzerland, and Austria... Tickets available now at Christspiracy.com ... Christspiracy caused a huge stir when it was first announced last year, and people around the world have been waiting in anticipation for news of its release date... The film comes from Kip Andersen, the maker of Cowspiracy, What the Health, and Seaspiracy. He teamed up with Kameron Waters, a US-based Christian who posed…

VEGETARISK FORENING: On February 8th 2024, a lower court in Denmark, the court in the city of Hjorring granted the vegan movement in Denmark a milestone win. A Danish court has now ruled that vegans are protected under Article 9 of the European Court of Human Rights. The ruling is the first of its kind in Denmark, and the Vegetarian Society of Denmark is proud to have taken this case to the courts and won. The case was about the right of vegan children in public daycare institutions to be able to eat vegan food. A Danish kindergarten (and the municipality running it) had refused to prepare…

BRIELLE BENYON: Patients with prostate cancer may experience fewer sexual and urinary side effects if they take on a plant-based diet, according to recent research published in the journal, Cancer... The study included 3,505 individuals with non-metastatic prostate cancer who filled out food-frequency questionnaires and had their quality of life calculated by the Expanded Prostate Cancer Index Composite, which, according to the National Institutes of Health, is a 15-item questionnaire that measures urinary incontinence, urinary irritation, as well as bowel, sexual and hormonal health-related…

SILVIA PANIZZA: In their daily practices, many ethical vegans choose what to eat, wear, and buy among a range that is limited to the exclusion of animal products. Rather than considering and then rejecting the idea of using such products, doing so often does not occur to them as a possibility at all. In other cases, when confronted with the possibility of consuming animal products, vegans have claimed to reject it by saying that it would be impossible for them to do so. I refer to this phenomenon as ‘moral impossibility’. An analysis of moral impossibility in animal ethics shows that it…