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
I’m here for tofu recipes pls
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)
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.
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.
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…
I love this one a lot, i marinate the tofu in soy sauce, oil and a little 5 spice after freezing and pressing it
For something different, apply this technique to any of the suggested recipes here. ETA: firm and extra firm tofu works best.
Freeze it. Thaw it. Press it. Shred (or cube) it.
It takes on a different texture, and can remove even more liquid through pressing than fresh.
Check out Thai vegetarian recipes. Mostly soy protein and the most flavorful food in the world. You can substitute a lot of Asian ingredients if they are not available in your region very easily too.
Been vegetarian for over 20 years now and focusing on maximalist kitchens (thai, indian etc) is the way to go with vegetarian constraint!
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.
Grate a block of tofu on a cheese grater with large holes, fry with oil and some soy sauce in a pan while stirring. Add a diced onion as it gets firmer, then garlic, then strained tomato and italien herbs.
Voila, vegan Bolognese.Or just spread some hot sauce on tofu slices and fry both sides. Goes great with many things.
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… 🥴
Beans are a less complete protein than soy, so you need to either eat a lot more or supplement with grain or dairy.
The focus on complete protein is not useful in 99.9% of cases. You do not need to eat all amino acids in the same meal. As long as you get it at some point in the day, it’s fine. The main person who popularized the idea has actually said they regret doing so
"In 1971 I stressed protein complementarity because I assumed that the only way to get enough protein … was to create a protein as usable by the body as animal protein. In combating the myth that meat is the only way to get high-quality protein, I reinforced another myth. I gave the impression that in order to get enough protein without meat, considerable care was needed in choosing foods. Actually, it is much easier than I thought.
Damn, good link. I was also about to type up a lengthy explanation about why it’s not relevant, but then realized you need to explain a ton of stuff before you can argue that on a logical basis, which they wouldn’t trust me on either.
I have a serious question, if someone is a person that is bulking does her quote about : “With three important exceptions, there is little danger of protein deficiency in a plant food diet. The exceptions are diets very heavily dependent on [1] fruit or on [2] some tubers, such as sweet potatoes or cassava, or on [3] junk food (refined flours, sugars, and fat). Fortunately, relatively few people in the world try to survive on diets in which these foods are virtually the sole source of calories. In all other diets, if people are getting enough calories, they are virtually certain of getting enough protein.” also apply?
Like suppose a person need 4000 calories a day to bulk I can actually just eat a diet of tofu, rutabagas, confierous vegetables, oil for frying them and a multivitamin and Ill be eating enough protein and calories per a day to bulk?
If you are eating 4000 kcal/day, you are almost certainly getting a lot of protein. At 4000kcals, even the example of a 100% sweet potato diet is getting you to around ~80g of protein (well above average person recommendations of 50g/day). If any significant portion of that is tofu, the number is going to be even higher. Tofu has like 30-50g of protein per block (varying based on soft vs firm vs extra-firm)
~800 kcals of tofu (~2 blocks of firm tofu) is already putting you at like 90-100g protein assuming you ate zero other protein from anything else for the rest of your 3200 kcals (which will not be the case unless you ate like somehow ate 100% pure cornstarch)
I was going to rebuttal that you typed out a wrong comment since you didnt account for ESSENTIAL AMINO ACIDS anywhere in your comment . But then I plugged in a 4000 calorie serving of boiled sweet potatoes into a website and found out that you are correct and Im wrong. If a person is willing to eat 5.2 kilograms of boiled sweet potatoes EVERYDAY they are indeed getting in enough essential amino acids into their diet even if they are bulking cause theyll be getting WAY more than enough each of the essential amino acids for an average adult lol https://tools.myfooddata.com/nutrition-facts/168484/gm/5269
Thanks for that . I didnt even know that you could get essential amino from potatoes…
Adding to what the other person said about complete proteins, the whole thing is really overblown and frankly almost never something to even begin to worry about. Virtually every plant food contains every essential amino acid, it’s just that the ratio of those amino acids is slightly different than the ratios in human or other animal flesh. Notably legumes have marginally less methionine than a lot of other protein sources. But even in an outlandish scenario where you had to live on nothing but beans, this deficiency would still be easily overcome by just… eating a little bit more of the beans…
But people don’t do that. They eat lots of things, and many foods supply varying amounts of protein. Despite the hype, there is no need for the average person to worry about their protein intake. If you are eating real food and getting enough calories, you are getting enough protein.
What’s with the protein obsession? Eat more fiber, that is what almost everyone is lacking.
Marketing. Also, people think you can only get protein from meat.
Laughable new USAian nutrition guidelines plus accompanying social media nutrition grifters
I prefer both
This is the take.
Which is funny, because tofu is low fiber. Eat more beans.
+1 to more beans!
It’s a large ongoing Facebook campaign. My mom is also obsessed with protein suddenly, so dumb.
it seems to be the food industry marketing ‘flavor of the month’. everybody and everything that can, is stressing protein content or producing high-protein varieties.
Are there any health issues linked to a lack of fibre?
Colon cancer.
That is probably the most serious. Other things that are more likely when you don’t get enough fibre with your food:
Feel hungry sooner
Increased blood sugar fluctuations
Piles due to increased straining to poop
Constipation
Abdominal cramps and bloating
Weight gain
The last meta study I saw saw that over all health comes were better for people with a majority fiber diet over both majority protein and majority carbohydrate diets.
Personally it’s the fact that I can be full faster but with less total calories.
Link please!
Also if thst is true, is there such thing as a majority fiber diet that a person could bulk with? Id be thjnking its impossible since the majority of fibre is indigestible by the human body. Though I could he wrong of course as Im not an expert on the matter.
Diverticulitis
Nobody commenting on the fact that this good scientist nearly shares a name with the largest fast food chain on the planet on the planet. I like to think this Dr. Chris Macdonald is rebelling against their father, Ronald.
I agree Macdonald is clearly a plant working against big meat.
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
I was commenting strictly based on the charts in the article. Beef seems to be the worse, by far.
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
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.
I agree, I’m Autistic and had an eating disorder as a teenager. It takes a lot for me to leave my safe foods behind. Not because I don’t sincerely care about ethics and the environment but I also need to be alive and healthy.
And then I met my awesome partner who hates meat and we started cooking and experimenting together. It hasn’t been over night but just one meal at a time I’ve totally changed my eating habits!
[EDITED: my partner hates meat, he doesn’t hate me— as far as I know.]
By the way, same. Just getting familiar with the fact I had options, went a long way.
A lot of dietary choices are just inertia and fear of change. 🤷♀️
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.Just stop eating meat in general - it’s absurdly ridiculous middle man between us and our energy source. It’s purely a cultural relic yet people still pretend it’s not.
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.
this is just warmed over poore-nemecek 2018. it’s not new, and it’s not good science.
Misread the title and read the article hoping to learn more about this “hostile” scoring system, only to be highly disappointed. lol
We have ways of
making you talkcalculating performanceFor 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)
I’m sure it’d still score highly if not, but I wonder if the study accounts for the burning of plastic to cook it? https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2025/may/10/tofu-plastic-indonesia
That is not a general practice. From the article:
The tofu is not sold outside Indonesia.
OTOH, I doubt they trace whether it is sold to another company that makes canned meals ready to eat, for export.
Yes, and also from the article is that their average tofu consumed per capita per annum is 8kg. With a population of nearly 290 million, that’s a lot of tofu. Obviously it’s not all produced that way, but it’s not insignificant. Did you read the bit about dioxin levels?
and the worst thing is thdt in all forms of meat too there are microplastica found in them too
This is a “western” waste disposal problem, not a tofu-production related problem. Do you think they would use it to fuel their factories if we wouldn’t dump our trash there?
What made you think I was vilifying them for it? I was only curious about whether that sort of thing counts in this scoring system.
It’s a shame because plastic could be converted into biodiesel, which would then be clean burning. It could even be burnt in a diesel engine which would provide both heat energy and also kinetic energy that could spin a generator. The article made no mention of this. Would be interesting to know if that was considered, and what the cost would be for the chemicals needed for the conversion.
What is even the point of preserving liveable Earth if the food on it will taste like polystyrene?
Tofu is extremely versatile in taste, it’ll taste like whatever you season it with. It’s more a vehicle for other flavor
You’re a bad cook.
Tell me you don’t know how to cook vegetables without telling me you don’t know how to cook vegetables
Vegetables are awesome. And the majority of legumes are awesome. Delicious and nutritious. But tofu… tofu is basically biodegradable polystyrene, yes.
Gotta disagree, but heyho :)
I notice that the replies are all “it’s not tasteless, it tastes like whatever you season it with” so yeah. Boring and without much taste, but carries flavouring well
