Young Activists Are Getting Plant-Based on the Menu, for Climate and Animals

In Cambridge, Massachusetts — a town best known for its elite universities — young grassroots climate activists are planting roots in the community. Ruti Pfeffer has persuaded Bhola Pandey, owner of the restaurant Base Crave, to add two new plant-based dishes to the menu as a way to help curb climate emissions. The effort is part of Eat for Impact — an initiative that has persuaded restaurants in 10 cities around the world to expand their menus with plant-forward offerings. Pfeffer has been working on this campaign as part of her fellowship with New Roots, a group that helps young activists work on food system change.

The way we eat and farm is responsible for around a third of the world’s climate emissions, with most of that fraction fueled by meat, especially beef. Rising global temperatures are already testing the boundaries of human livability in many parts of the Global South, including India and Pakistan. Climate scientists have outlined the solutions, however, including cutting back on the meat and dairy we consume. One way to do that is to encourage people to eat more plants, with dishes like shiitake mushroom curry that are on the menu at Base Crave.

Base Crave is one of more than dozens of restaurants around the world to participate in the Eat for Impact campaign organized by food system advocacy group Planted Society. Through her New Roots Institute fellowship, Pfeffer became connected with Planted Society, the advocacy group that led the campaign that enrolled restaurants in cities like Austin and Los Angeles in the United States, and Abuja, Nigeria. Planted Society helped prepare the campaigners to contact the restaurants and city officials, providing them with a set of points to raise about the campaign.

Pfeffer is a junior in high school. Her advocacy work is focused on the food system because increasing plant-based foods benefits the environment while also reducing animal suffering — a cause that she’s very passionate about, she tells Sentient. At least 3.4 billion animals are killed for food daily, with 99 percent of them raised on factory farms in the U.S.

Each of the three restaurants she recruited to participate added two plant-based dishes to their menus for the entirety of March. Over 15 restaurants took part in total, with some keeping the new dishes on the menu even after the campaign ended. The two dishes that Base Crave added to the menu — plantain curry and basil tofu — were so popular with customers, says Pandey, that he added them to the permanent menu.

Young Activists Take the Lead

Across a range of demographics, people care about climate change and they want to see a stronger response from lawmakers. Surveys have found between 80 and 89 percent of the planet’s population and 74 percent of the U.S. say they want to see their governments doing more to reduce climate pollution.

For many, and especially young people, the climate crisis can be a significant source of anxiety. In a survey of people ages 16-25, 84 percent of respondents said they are worried about climate change.

Climate action is a way to do more than temporarily avoid those feelings. “I think that a lot of times we’re distracting ourselves from living in this world,” Lauren Ferrucci, who works to develop leadership among youth activists for New Roots, tells Sentient. “Another antidote to being overwhelmed by pain and suffering is purpose.”

Young people are at the forefront of climate action. Perhaps the most well-known young climate activist is Greta Thunberg, but many other young activists, like Ruti Pfeffer, are doing the work too.

Do the New Menu Additions Have Staying Power?

The new plant-based dishes are still on the menu at Base Crave, though they aren’t as popular as they once were, according to its owner. Pandey attributes this to an increase in to-go orders, as customers tend to order their old favorites if they don’t get that interaction with waitstaff to encourage a bit of exploration.

The other participating restaurants will be bringing their dishes back as specials, or reforming their menu to make plant-based options more obvious, according to the campaign’s report.

Planted Society estimates that their commitments reduce greenhouse gas emissions by about 250,000 pounds annually in Cambridge. While that may sound like a drop in the bucket compared to the 10 to 20 billion tons of emissions attributable to the food system annually across the world, small actions like these do add up to emissions reductions.

New research from the World Resources Institute backs this up, and adds a further point: that combining effective individual action with a broader coalition, like voting or consumer pressure campaigns, can “unlock” the full capability of individual solutions. Deploying individual action and systemic change together is far more effective, the researchers found, as a way to leverage collective power.

This story is part of The 89 Percent Project, an initiative of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.