The refurbished Tulip Tree Café at the Nuffield Department of Population Health (NDPH) has re-opened as the University of Oxford’s first meat-free café.
The focus of the café, located in the Richard Doll Building at the Old Road Campus in Headington, is sustainability, and making it meat-free ties in perfectly with research from NDPH about the benefits of a vegetarian and vegan diets for the planet and public health. Food production is responsible for around a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions.
NDPH senior researcher Dr Marco Springmann has led a number of studies looking at the impact of food production on the environment, for example methane emissions from livestock, deforestation to make farmland, water pollution from fertilisers and freshwater depletion. Much of the greenhouse gas emissions comes from livestock production, and Springmann has found that adopting plant-based diets could reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of the food system by half, in a study in Nature. Springmann also contributed to The Lancet Planetary Health report, which found that energy-balanced and plant-based diets could result in greenhouse gas emissions reductions of up to 87%, and reductions in chronic disease mortality by up to 22%.
Read the full story on the Nuffield Department of Population Health website