Link: https://phys.org/news/2026-10-tofu-winner-scientist-holistic-scoring.html

In a paper published in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, Dr. Chris Macdonald explored the best sources of protein currently available.

To answer the question, Macdonald had to build a new holistic scoring system that combines measures of environmental impact, health, affordability and availability into a single framework.

Applying the scoring system to 20 commonly consumed protein-rich foods, the analysis found a striking pattern: every product in the highest-scoring quintile was plant-based, while every product in the lowest-scoring quintile was animal-based. Tofu ranked first overall, while cheddar cheese ranked last.

The paper argues that many existing food rating systems focus on only one aspect of a product. While useful, these single-dimension labels can obscure important trade-offs and make it difficult to compare foods comprehensively.

TOFU DOMINATION

Link to open access article https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sustainable-food-systems/articles/10.3389/fsufs.2026.1677796/full

It seems that the biggest impact you can have with a diet change is to just stop eating beef.

Beef is only part of the problem, it's rather bad but all animal products are super high emitters

If we are concerned about the ethical side of things, swapping to other meats increases the number of animals slaughtered due to lower slaughter weights

What is even the point of preserving liveable Earth if the food on it will taste like polystyrene?

I was commenting strictly based on the charts in the article. Beef seems to be the worse, by far.

Tofu is extremely versatile in taste, it'll taste like whatever you season it with. It's more a vehicle for other flavor

Yeah, but talking about beef is more about it being a good first step for people to take. Removing one thing from your diet that can easily be replaced, makes it easier for people to start their journey.

Also, ethics is weird to bring and discuss in this issue, because... "What's worse"?

50 male chicks fed to the grinder alive at three days old, plus their 50 female cousins living in hell for 4 months until being asphyxiated alive, for meat,

or

four cows being chain-machine-raped, made pregnant, and having their children immediately taken away from them repeatedly, in order to keep the cows producing milk, unmoving and sick, throughout their 5 year life until slaughter?

It's all a criminal tragedy. I don't think it makes sense to compare them, comparison will never make sense, it's all arbitrary.

What is not arbitrary, are the methods to wean people off of the habits that feed those industries, and the methods to reduce those industries' political power.

I am doubtful advocating for switching one type of meat for another types of meat will lead towards people reducing their meat consumption in the end. I see it brought up way more often as an excuse to not reduce meat consumption

I’m here for tofu recipes pls

You're a bad cook.

There's a couple communities on Lemmy with a decent number of tofu recipes (plus plenty of other plant-based recipes which are not tofu)

!veganrecipes@sh.itjust.works

!veganhomecooks@lemmy.world

This is anecdotal of course, but that was absolutely my journey.

I went from a meat heavy diet to not eating meat the majority of the days, and still trying to gradually lower it further.

For some people (like me) the barrier to lowering their meat consumption has more to do with having to learn a whole new paradigm of cooking, than being super invested in meat itself.

In case like mine it really helps to do the changes little steps at a time, where you make just one relatively small change at a time, learn how to cook with that change in mind, and then move onto the next relatively small change.
It allows me some time to learn to cook with the new ingredients/new allocation of ingredients, and make food I actually want to eat in the long run, so it becomes way easier to keep it up.

My personal favourite right now is:

• A pack of firm tofu (~200g drained) cut into comfortable bite sizes
• 2 tablespoons of soy
• 0,5 - 1 inch of grated ginger
• half a green onion chopped

Add together in a bowl, mix and serve.

It's a super quick side that goes well with nearly any of my regular dishes, and I eat it several times a week.

Not sure how they score, but chickpeas are pretty great too. Soak'em, mash'em, stick 'em in a falafel.

Scrambled tofu!

Gotta translate this from french https://l-herboriste.com/tofu-brouille/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUI8Xu6Xpec (also contains chickpeas and dates)

I tried this recently, and while it doesn't quite match the texture and sweetness of "real" cakes, it's ... not bad. If you pair it with something very sweet like whipped cream, it's actually very good.

Ultimately, beyond the spreadsheets and scores lies a fundamental reckoning: our protein choice is a referendum on the compassion we are willing to show to animals, to the planet and to future generations.

Clearly no bias at all!

Where's the lie?

Personally I'm wondering why their beef item was steak and not ground beef. Because there's so much more of the animal that can be included, the impact would be smaller.

Stop eating steak, you mean. Part of that high number is that there's only so many steaks on a steer. I mean, beef is still bad but it's exaggerated in the chart.

Globally tofu production is somewhere raround 36 m metric tonnes/year. To eat 150g of protein per day using DIAAS scores (so that's amino acid complete as measured in animals) about 1.2kg of tofu is needed to be consumed, about 1,700kcal. production/consumption - a current global sustainable protein source for 40 million humans. (napkin math)

Here is a map of current global tofu growing regions (2024) - https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-024-04248-2

they also rate quinoa a high score - which to get 150g of DIAAS adjusted protein requires about 4kg of quinoa....

Swap not just beef, but any meat for pulses and you've achieved a lot for yourself and the rest of the world.
And it doesn't have to be a "100%of the time" situation; each time you do the swap is good.

Well, if I had to guess, I’d say they started with the result they wanted, and worked backward from there.

Infredients: block of tofu
Prep: none
Cooking: none

Enjoy one bite at a time

• 1-2 packs of plain tofu, drained, cubed (about 200-400g)
• add to a pan and fry it a little until it shrinks in size and gets a little golden from all sides
• add soy sauce until it's all coated and let it simmer and absorb the soy sauce a little
• add a sweetener of your choice (agave syrup is the one I use), a good squeeze from the bottle is good
• paprika powder
• maybe MSG if you like the taste
• salt a little if you don't like MSG
• serve :)

Tofu can taste like anything you want. It's the way you prepare and season it that makes the taste

I want to point out a few major issues with these calculations, and how to arrive at a more reasonable result.

First, 150 g of protein per day is a big amount, something that you could recommend to a 100 kg person who does a lot of sports (if you assume 1.5 * bodymass in kg rule, which would be a mid-range estimate). 70-100 g would be more fitting to the average person. Second, you make the calculation as if tofu was the only source of protein. Eg. Menno Henselman, a muscle growth researcher, has stated that our bodies are actually remarkably good at combining amino acids from different protein sources digested throughout the day. His recommendation is to increase protein intake by 10-20% if you swap animal proteins to plant proteins (note that the amounts in his presentation are for bodybuilders). A balanced diet would include a fair amount of grains, even vegetables and mushrooms that have protein. So all of this would bring the amount of protein required from the main protein sources way down.

Let's say that your main protein-rich foods would cover 70 percent of the total protein intake of a 100 g + 15% = 115 g (still quite a lot), that means 81 g of protein from tofu. With 14 g / 100g this would mean eating ~580 grams of tofu, or 145 g per meal over four meals, a very reasonable portion.

Now, in reality, I would not recommend eating just tofu as your main protein four times a day, but of course use some of the other great plant-based protein sources mentioned, like seeds, beans, lentils etc. Personally, I even throw in some sustainably fished local fish.

Too bad there isn't a good source of tofu in most grocer markets. Soy is one of the most suspect crops,with pesticides and such to start, and there just aren't many buying options, and they are all expensive-er than they should be.

A pound is like a couple of bucks, but a pound isn't that much really. Making your own isn't really practicable, I saw a video on how they make it traditionally in East Asia and it's a big thing with many steps.

Crispy Tofu and Veg Stacks with Pea Puree and Lemon Herb Sauce

I hate almost everything in this recipe but somehow it's insanely deliciious.

Crispy salt and pepper tofu

I love this one a lot, i marinate the tofu in soy sauce, oil and a little 5 spice after freezing and pressing it

90%+ of soya grown is used for animal feed. Funny how those of us that eat a lot of tofu manage to find it cheap very easily, and I'm still finding new types of Tofu 35 years later... I'm in the UK, but surely wherever you are can't be that far behind the rest of the world?

We get tofu blocks in various forms from all supermarkets (Aldi, Lidl, Asda, Tesco... etc.) for about £1 per block. Equivalent meat costs probably £3-£5. We sometimes get fresh (unpackaged) and deep fried tofu from our local Asian cash-and-carry, plus various tinned, vac-packed and jarred varieties. Occasionally we get "expensive" tinned braised tofu from local wholefood shops as a treat. Occasionally we get a Chinese take-away - several of our local ones do Tofu and Seitan. Our favourite one does their vegan dishes £1-£3 cheaper than the non-vegan options.

We don't buy frozen ready meals, but vegan ones do exist. We like cooking, and cook a lot from scratch, but there are lots of jarred sauces and sachets you can get that are vegan - it's completely possible to make a quick meal with a jar of pasta sauce, a tub of marinated tofu chunks and frozen veg, and it would still be cheaper than using frozen chicken chunks instead.

It's there if you go looking for it. A vegan diet is pretty cheap in reality - about 30% cheaper the way we do it, and we're not particularly frugal about it, nor do we put in much effort to achieve it. We buy the things we like where we know we can get them, probably just like you do.

this is just warmed over poore-nemecek 2018. it's not new, and it's not good science.

this is just poore-nemecek in a trench coat

I haven't read the article and I'm not saying you're wrong, but in general plant foods are known to have less environmental impact than animal products because animals are higher on the food chain, and it takes more energy to raise an animal for consumption (including the resources to grow food for the animal) than to just grow plants and consume them directly.

A lot of dietary choices are just inertia and fear of change. 🤷‍♀️

Tell me you don't know how to cook vegetables without telling me you don't know how to cook vegetables

My wife has made tofu as few times as well as a tofu analog using different types of beans and it was surprisingly good and it was less intensive to make than I expected. Tofu is fairly cheap, but I imagine you could make large batches without much additional work. I can't say that her was following some traditional method which might be more work, but it matched what I expected from tofu in the taste/texture dept.

I don't have a recipe as my wife is the tofu cook, but she uses silken tofu and cashews to make a shockingly good vegan mac and cheese. One of my kids became a vegetarian last year and now most of our meals are vegetarian or vegan just because it is too expensive and time consuming to make different meals.

I've made my own tofu and it is not a big thing with many steps. Soak beans overnight, blend beans in blender, cook resulting slurry, strain, add coagulant, place in container and apply weight.

It's about the same amount of work as baking bread. However it is not cheaper than buying tofu from the store unless you can find very cheap soybeans.

Misread the title and read the article hoping to learn more about this "hostile" scoring system, only to be highly disappointed. lol

I'm a bit surprised that tofu is ahead of beans, especially in the Planet Score, since it's kind of just further processed beans.

My best guess is that the non-determinate "beans" are an average or something like kidney beans, whereas tofu is specifically soy beans.
And well, Wikipedia tells me that soy beans kick ass:

Cultivation of soybeans has one of the lowest needs for land use (1.3 m² / 1000 kcal) and emits some of the lowest amounts of greenhouse gas emissions per gram of edible protein of any food (1.6 kg CO2 / 100 g protein).

Would probably need to e-mail them to ask for the actual data... 🥴

What's with the protein obsession? Eat more fiber, that is what almost everyone is lacking.

Sounds a little similar to making cheese. Which you can do at home easily too. It just takes a lot of milk for not much cheese. Usually only do it if I obtain several litres of milk for free that would otherwise be wasted.

Magic Tofu

Per pound or 454g of extra-firm tofu:

• Break the tofu block apart by hands in a bowl, make pieces of 2cm/1'' large
• Add 1 table spoon of preferred oil (nut, vegetable oils)
• Add 1 table spoon of cider vinegar
• Add 1 table spoon of soy sauce
• Add 1 table spoon of sugar (best source are honey, agave or maple syrup)
• (Optional) Add 1-2 table spoons of preferred spicy sauce (I use sambal oelek or thai red curry paste)
• Mix
• Add 30 g of nutritional yeast
• Mix
• (Optional) Add more nutritional yeast for flavor (another 15 g should do), mix again
• Put on a baking tray, preferably with a parchment baking sheet to cover it, and spread the tofu apart
• Bake for 25 minutes at 375°F or 190°C in the oven

Enjoy on everything! I add it on top of pizzas, in wraps, in a plate with vegetables and rice...

We have ways of making you talk calculating performance

For some reason, this reminds me of a story my dad told of being in college in the early 70s. Apparently there was a "game" going around - a sort of viral joke - that involved going up to someone and in a terrible German accent saying "Do you vant to play Geshtapo?" and no matter what they said, slapping them (probably gently) on the face and saying "You lie! You lie!" - probably funnier 30 years after WWII rather than 80 years we are now. heh.

So he did this and it was fun until the one time he started to do it to one of the football players. Massive guy, not so quick on the uptake.... He said he went up to him, asked "Do you vant to play Geshtapo?" and started to put his hand up to slap him, and the guy grabbed his arm, looked confused and said, "What dis?" and my dad was like "Just a joke....... nevermind.........." lol. And that was the end of that!

(I suppose it's too late to mention that my dad is on the shorter and scrawnier side)

Beans are a less complete protein than soy, so you need to either eat a lot more or supplement with grain or dairy.

Are there any health issues linked to a lack of fibre?

It's a large ongoing Facebook campaign. My mom is also obsessed with protein suddenly, so dumb.

Marketing. Also, people think you can only get protein from meat.

Colon cancer.