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
It isn’t one or the other, it’s both: soya oil and meal (what’s left after pressing the oil out) are so-called “co-products” - you get about 20% oil, and 80% meal. The meal goes almost exclusively into animal feed, the oil then goes into various other products, including animal feed and food industry, where it is used in mostly non-vegan products (because vegan products only constitute a small proportion of industrially produced food products).
Your 80% figure pressed for oil includes soya meal used for animal feed.
after it goes into an oil press and oil is extracted the waste product is fed to livestock. the oil is almost half the value but it’s only 20% of the weight.