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Vegan Food News of the Week: Steak & Eggs, and Just Salad’s Mushroom Meat
https://vegnews.com/2024/3/vegan-food-news-of-the-week-march-29
MARCH 29, 2024
This week, Atlanta-based hotspot Slutty Vegan continues its expansion with a 14th location now open in NYC’s West Village neighborhood.
Australian startup Fable Foods makes toothsome mushroom meats that just landed on the menu at Just Salad.
Plus, Mike Tyson has a new edible in a shape that’ll make you do a double take.
Read on for more.
Vegan food news
Steak and eggs but make it vegan? Coming right up. Swiss company Planted just launched a new vegan steak made from soy protein, rapeseed oil, beans, rice, and a proprietary blend of microbial cultures that give the whole cut a juicy and tender texture and rich umami flavor.
Planted
The new Planted.Steak is crafted at its cutting-edge facility in Kemptthal, Switzerland, where it produces “whole muscle” cuts of vegan meat through a sophisticated fermentation process.
“Our Planted.steak is designed to satisfy even the most discerning palate,” Planted’s co-founder Pascal Bieri said in a statement.
“It’s a true game changer, not only for us but also for the whole category,” Bieri said.
Making steak this way also produces 97-percent fewer CO2e emissions and uses significantly less water than its animal-derived counterparts.
For better eggs, we turn to Neggst, a German startup working to disrupt the egg category with its vegan products. This week, Neggst unveiled two innovative additions to its lineup, both crafted from legumes: Poached Neggst and Neggst Sunny Side Up.
These products, which are not yet available for purchase, offer a plant-based alternative to traditional eggs, featuring a running “yolk” for the poached option and a perfect fried egg alternative for the sunny-side-up version, suitable for avocado toast, English breakfasts, or burgers.
Neggst
“The mass production of chicken eggs uses an unnecessary amount of resources,” Co-founder and CTO Verónica García Arteaga said in a statement. “Neggst’s idea is to combine science and sustainability with the enjoyment of traditional egg dishes.”
Next, If you’re in the mood for a little savory snack, high-protein cookie makers Lenny & Larry’s just launched seasoned pretzels that might just hit the spot. Called “Fitzels,” the new line of protein-rich, plant-based pretzels, comes in three flavors: Pizza Palooza, Boujie Mustard, and Everything Bagel.
“Lenny and Larry are protein-powered and don’t believe you should ever compromise when it comes to fun or snacking,” Lenny & Larry’s CEO Jolie Weber said in a statement.
“They’ve inspired us to amp up our snacking game with the big flavors of convenient on-the-go Fitzels,” Weber said.
7th Heaven
For a little sweet treat, we’ve been reaching for Reese’s vegan peanut butter cups—which are not always easy to find. Luckily, vegan chocolate company 7th Heaven just launched an oat milk peanut butter cup that’s just as good and easier to find.
“Our Peanut Butter Cups are the culmination of our commitment to excellence, sustainability, and compassion,” 7th Heaven Co-founder Elya Adi said in a statement.
“It’s a proud moment for us to offer a product that not only competes with giants like Reese’s but also delivers a tastier experience,” Adi said.
And if you find yourself in the United Kingdom this Easter Sunday, you’ll be happy to know that local vegan chocolate brand H!P has upped the size of its Easter eggs by 50 percent this year.
Founded by James Cadbury, a descendant of the famous chocolate family, H!P’s Easter eggs are available in flavors such as Salted Caramel and the award-winning Cookies No Cream.
HIP
“Choosing H!P this Easter doesn’t mean compromising on great taste,” Cadbury said in a statement. “Building on the success of last year’s sell-out eggs, we’ve made our eggs bigger than before but kept the price the same, while also introducing a delicious pouch of smooth oat milk chocolate buttons.”
Despite doubling in size, the vegan chocolate eggs maintain their previous pricing.
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Sinking Shores and Rising Seas Will Inundate 24 US Coastal Cities
Flooding could plague 1 in 50 residents, a new study estimates.
Flooding in Hampton, New Hampshire – on the Atlantic Coast – in January 2024 stormsCharles Krupa/AP
This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Flooding could affect one out of every 50 residents in 24 coastal cities in the United States by 2050, a study led by Virginia Tech researchers suggests.
The study, published this month in Nature, shows how the combination of land subsidence—in this case, the sinking of shoreline terrain—and rising sea levels can lead to the flooding of coastal areas sooner than previously anticipated by research that had focused primarily on sea level rise scenarios.
“One of the things we wanted to do with this study is really emphasize the impact of land subsidence, which is often not reflected in most of the discussion around sea level rise,” said Leonard Ohenhen, the lead author of the study and a graduate student at Virginia Tech’s Earth Observation and Innovation Lab.
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The study combines measurements of land subsidence obtained from satellites with sea level rise projections and tide charts, offering a more holistic projection of potential flooding risks in 32 cities located along the Atlantic, Pacific and Gulf coasts. “We tend to think of the consequences of climate change as a long term effect…and that often leads to underpreparation.”
The satellites bounce signals off the Earth and measure the time it takes for them to return, allowing the researchers to determine whether the distance between the ground and the satellites is increasing or decreasing. Less distance between the ground and the satellites would mean that the land is rising, while increases in that distance would show that the land is sinking.
The study found that out of the 32 coastal cities examined, 24 are sinking more than 2 millimeters per year. Half of these cities have specific areas that are sinking faster than the global sea levels are rising.
Up to 500,000 individuals living in these regions may be impacted in the next 30 years, with potentially one in every 35 private properties facing flooding damages.
Most conversations around climate change impacts involve projections for the end of the century, Ohenhen said. The team’s goal with this study was to look at the short term and show the existing hazards. “We tend to think of the consequences of climate change as a long term effect,” he said. “Which makes people feel like you cannot really account for all of the changes or the things that will happen before that time. And that often leads to underpreparation.”
The year 2050, often cited in climate discussions, is not an end point but rather a marker of the immediacy of the issue, said Robert Nicholls, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and professor at the University of East Anglia in the UK, who was a contributing author to the study.
The research anticipates that the 32 cities under consideration will collectively house approximately 25 million people and 10 million properties by 2050. It found ethnic minorities, especially in the Gulf Coast region, could face disproportionate impacts.“It’s important that these communities that are at risk really are using the tools available to try to plan for sea level rise.”
Minorities constitute roughly 43 percent of the population in the 11 Gulf Coast cities the study includes. However, they are expected to represent between 64 to 72 percent of the population at risk of flooding by 2050, the research shows. African Americans, in particular, are projected to make up over half of this vulnerable population.
The first step in tackling the challenge of flooding isn’t necessarily adaptation, but rather recognizing that it’s a problem, said Nicholls.
“It’s really a wake up call to think about how we’re going to live with this changing interface between the land and the sea,” Nicholls said of the study.
Structural adaptation strategies vary widely, from building protective walls to raising buildings on stilts or elevated mounds of earth, a more common practice in many areas of the US, Nicholls said. These strategies can help protect properties from flooding.
Natural habitats and coastal ecosystems have some degree of protection against sea level rise hazards, but they won’t protect communities from all of the challenges that sea level rise could pose, Siddharth Narayan, an assistant professor at East Carolina University, said.
“So it’s going to be a combination of long-term structural adaptations and solutions wherever possible and conserving and maintaining our natural spaces to add a little bit of a buffer,” Narayan said.
Marsh restoration, coral reefs and dunes can provide a natural barrier, said Andra Garner, an assistant professor at Rowan University.
It’s still uncertain what sea level rise impacts might look like in the future, Garner said. That uncertainty, she said, comes from a lot of places—including human behavior.
Garner was the lead author of a 2023 study published in Earth’s Future, which surveyed 54 coastal locations in the US and found that more than half underestimated the future sea level rise projections by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
“It’s important that these communities that are at risk really are using the tools available to try to plan for sea level rise and to be working towards solutions that can benefit those that are exposed,” Garner said.
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Polar vortex is ‘spinning backwards’ above Arctic after major reversal event
By Harry Baker
published yesterday
Earlier this month, a sudden atmospheric warming event caused the Arctic’s polar vortex to reverse its trajectory. The swirling ring of cold air is now spinning in the wrong direction, which has triggered a record-breaking “ozone spike” and could impact global weather patterns.
- https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/weather/polar-vortex-is-spinning-backwards-above-arctic-after-major-reversal-event
The polar vortex is a key driver of the polar jet stream (seen here). (Image credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center)
The polar vortex circling the Arctic is swirling in the wrong direction after surprise warming in the upper atmosphere triggered a major reversal event earlier this month. It is one of the most extreme atmospheric U-turns seen in recent memory.
In the past, disruptions to the polar vortex — a rotating mass of cold air that circles the Arctic — have triggered extremely cold weather and storms across large parts of the U.S..
The current change in the vortex’s direction probably won’t lead to a similar “big freeze.” But the sudden switch-up has caused a record-breaking “ozone spike” above the North Pole.
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The polar vortex is most prominent during winter months and extends into the stratosphere — the second layer of the atmosphere up to around 30 miles (50 kilometers) above the surface. The vortex spins counterclockwise with wind speeds of around 155 mph (250 km/h), which is around the same speed as a Category 5 hurricane, according to the U.K. Met Office. A similar vortex also encircles Antarctica during the southern winter.
Polar vortices occasionally reverse temporarily. These events can last for days, weeks or months and are caused by sudden stratospheric warming (SSW), when the temperatures in the stratosphere climb by as much as 90 degrees Fahrenheit (50 degrees Celsius) in the space of a couple of days, according to the Met Office.
Related: ‘One of the biggest on record’: Ozone hole bigger than North America opens above Antarctica
The sudden warming is caused by “planetary waves” in the atmosphere — compression waves formed when air rises into a region of different density and is pushed back downward by the force of Earth’s spin. This process disrupts or reverses the vortex flow.
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The current reversal event in the Arctic began on March 4. However, the winds are starting to slow down, hinting that the vortex will return to its normal trajectory soon, Spaceweather.com reported.
“It was a substantial reversal,” Amy Butler, a climate scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and author of NOAA’s new polar vortex blog, told Spaceweather.com. The speed of the reversed winds puts the event in the top six on record, she added.
Disruptions to the polar vortex can impact weather in the U.S., such as in 2019 when a massive cold front descended across the Midwest. These extreme weather events occur when the polar vortex deforms the jet stream — an air current that surrounds the polar vortex — exposing lower latitudes to large blobs of icy Arctic air.
This month’s disruption did not change the shape of the jet stream, so weather patterns are expected to remain largely unaffected, according to Spaceweather.com.
However, the change in air temperature around the Arctic has sucked up large amounts of ozone from lower latitudes, creating a temporary ozone spike — the opposite of an ozone hole. Currently, there is more ozone surrounding the Arctic than at this time during any other year on record, according to Spaceweather.com. However, this ozone spike will disappear after the polar vortex returns to normal
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The current reversal is the second of its kind this year, following a smaller event in January that did cause a brief cold snap in some states, Butler wrote in NOAA’s polar vortex blog.
Historical records show that SSW events are more likely to occur during El Niño or La Niña, the two contrasting phases of a natural cycle of planet-wide warming and cooling. During these phases, global weather systems become more unstable, which sets the stage for more frequent reversal events, Butler wrote in the NOAA blog.
We are currently in the midst of a major El Niño, which could make further reversals or disruptions more likely over the next year or so.
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