All hail the mighty Soy Bean 🙌
So when a new peer-reviewed paper set out to compare common protein sources, looking at nutrition alongside affordability, accessibility and environmental impact, we paid attention.
Dr Chris MacDonald – a behavioural scientist at the University of Cambridge and director of the Better Protein Institute – ranked 20 high-protein foods to see which ones stacked up best overall.
And the mighty tofu came out on top!
Here’s how the top 10 stacked up:
- Tofu
- Chia seeds
- Beans
- Quinoa
- Sunflower seeds
- Lentils
- Chicken breast
- Tuna
- Peanuts
- Chickpeas
What pushed tofu to the top wasn't protein alone.
The index looked at the bigger picture: nutritional quality and affordability alongside environmental impact. Tofu’s strength was that it performed well across the board.
We’re trying very hard not to say ‘we told you so’. But… well, we did tell you so.
We've been banging on about tofu for years
Not because it’s trendy, and certainly not because we think everyone needs to become a tofu evangelist. We keep coming back to it for a pretty solid reason: in real life, it just works.
It’s a high-quality protein. It’s versatile. It’s cheap (as in inexpensive, not nasty).
Mexican? Chinese? Italian? Thai? It happily takes on whatever flavours you throw at it. And it can move from breakfast to dinner, and even dessert, without making a fuss.
That isn’t just something we say. It’s baked into the way we help people eat during No Meat May.
Across our 2026 meal plans, roughly one in three recipes includes tofu in some form, and it pops up again and again throughout the challenge as one of the reliable building blocks we use to help people put delicious, satisfying, protein-rich meals on the table.
But nobody changes what they eat because a research study tells them to
This is the part we think matters most.
Knowing a food is good for us doesn’t magically make us want to eat it. If we want people to change what they put on their plates for the long term, the better choice also has to taste good. It has to fit the budget. It has to fit into an actual life. And it has to work on a tired Wednesday night when nobody is interested in embarking on a 27-ingredient culinary odyssey.
That’s where tofu gets interesting.
It can be golden and craggy with a little potato starch in the air fryer. Sticky and glazed in a citrus-soy-maple marinade. Silky in a cheezy sauce. Crumbled into a five-minute breakfast scramble. Simmered in rich curries, tossed through fresh noodles, folded into gingery dumplings, blitzed into creamy fillings... or transformed into something that bears almost no resemblance to the pale little block that came out of the packet.
And it can be as easy (or as extra) as you want it to be. There’s the five-minute version: pre-packaged marinated tofu, with whatever vegetables are hanging around. Or the Level Five Vegan version, where mushrooms, ginger, za’atar, turmeric, nutritional yeast, spinach, chickpeas, quinoa and half the contents of the fridge somehow end up in the pan. Both count.
Come for the protein, stay for everything else
Protein may be the doorway right now, and we’re very happy to walk through it. But tofu’s appeal doesn’t end at protein. It also brings plenty of iron, calcium in calcium-set varieties, fibre and other essential nutrients to the party. And when tofu helps us shift our eating towards more plants, there are benefits that reach well beyond the protein count.
Choosing more plant proteins significantly reduces the environmental footprint of what we eat. It also gives us another practical way to eat that asks less of animals and of the resources needed to produce our food.
Those benefits matter to us. They always have. But we don’t think the best way to create lasting change is to wag a finger at people and tell them what they should eat.
We’d much rather make the alternative irresistible.
So yes, we are going to keep on banging on about tofu
This isn’t the beginning of a three-week tofu series. Tofu’s been part of No Meat May for years, and it’ll continue to be one of the foundational ingredients we return to again and again.
We’ll keep celebrating the people who cook it brilliantly and sending you to the original creators for their recipes, scroll through our socials for endless inspiration. We’ll continue to explore the quickest ways to cook it, the cheapest, the crispiest and the most delicious.
We’ll look at tofu for busy people, tofu for protein lovers, tofu for people who think they hate tofu, tofu through cuisines around the world, and probably a few things we haven’t thought of yet.
Because the goal isn’t to convince you to eat tofu because you should. We want you to eat it because you genuinely want to.
And if something delicious, affordable and useful on your plate also happens to stack up remarkably well for health, animals and the planet?
Well. All hail the mighty soybean.
