After revolutionising vegan cheese, Miyoko Schinner is leveraging her decades-long experience to teach everything plant-based at all nine University of California campuses.
Longtime animal rights activist, vegan dairy entrepreneur and plant-based chef Miyoko Schinner wants to change the food system. The whole darned thing.
“We are on the precipice of redefining what the food system could look like, and in order to understand that, we have to really dive deep into the current food system and understand every aspect,” she says.
“Not just the problem with animal agriculture, but the consolidation, the distribution system, the inequities around the world. Not just food deserts, but what food companies here are doing to impact food choices in developing countries,” she continues.
“As we try to redefine what a better food system could look like based on plants, we can’t just swap out the products. We have to really examine it from every angle and not repeat the mistakes that we’ve made in the past. And students are going to be the stewards of the future.”
Schinner is speaking to Green Queen from Berkeley, where she serves as a co-instructor on a new plant-based course at the University of California. Together with Brittany Sartor, who founded the programme, she is helping students advance the transformation to a plant-forward food system.
And where better do it than Berkeley, the hub of nouvelle American cuisine, and home to Alice Waters’s pioneering farm-to-table eatery Chez Panisse, which spearheaded the locavore food movement in the US.
“If you want to call Berkeley the birthplace for that type of movement, you can call Brittany the mother of this class, because she dreamed up this entire course and wrote the syllabus, and I’ve just joined at the last minute to help put some padding into it,” says Schinner.
The makings of University of California’s plant-based course
The University of California, Berkeley has a programme called Decals, a set of courses created and taught by students, covering topics not traditionally found in the institute’s coursework. When Sartor was a student at the Haas School of Business, she had an a-ha moment when she realised that “we’re not talking about plant-based alternatives” enough.
As she put together a syllabus for the class, she was on the hunt for a faculty sponsor. “I eventually connected with Will Rosenzweig, who teaches edible education,” she recalls. Rosenzweig had just happened to connect with a master’s student, Samantha Derrick, who was developing a course covering the public health aspects of plant-based foods.
“And he said: ‘You guys should just join forces create this multidisciplinary course that covers all aspects of the food system: public health, climate, environment, animal welfare,’” says Sartor, who describes herself as a “long-term vegan”.
She and Derrick combined to introduce two courses under the Plant Futures programme, one of which was a single-unit crash course called Introduction to Plant-Centric Food Systems. The class hosted dozens of guest speakers – Schinner among them – and has now evolved into the new three-unit course available to all nine University of California campuses.
The online-only course, funded by the Office of the President, already has around 55 students enrolled. It covers several critical modules, spanning Climate & Environment, Health & Nutrition, Animal Welfare, Social Impacts, Innovation, Policy & Law, Behavioral Change, Media, and Plant-Forward Cooking.
Students from all diets, all over the world
The Plant Futures programme is part of a growing trend of apprenticeships and university courses focusing on plant-based food and alternative proteins. This summer, for example, the Austrian government will launch a vegan and vegetarian culinary apprenticeship, as part of its green economy plan. Schinner herself has been teaching an online vegan cheesemaking course too.
The plant-based course at the University of California was partly born out of growing student demand, with interest in these foods on the rise across generations. Sartor believes sustainability and the climate argument hold the most weight with the youth, while the older generations are in it for health or animal welfare reasons.
“Not everyone’s vegan or vegetarian either,” notes Schinner. “It is an incredibly international group of students. We have students from all over the world – people from Asia, Africa, just everywhere.”
The team has partnered with over 60 organisations and brands, including Grener by Default, Mercy for Animals, Califia Farms, Tofurky, and Beyond Meat.
“Thankfully, there’s a ton of amazing non-profits that have been working in this space for a while. And so there are great partnerships there. In terms of startups, we really want them to be mission-aligned,” says Schinner. This could involve a non-vegan company working to develop a plant-based product.
For example, one of the projects students have worked on was to help Bel Group reformulate its iconic Babybel cheese through a dairy-free formulation, making it less grainy and more colour-identical to the original.
The expansion of the course to all campuses also coincides with the introduction of the Plant-Forward Cooking module. It’s also an evolution of the mini-cooking sessions from the one-unit class. “We got course feedback from the students that that was one of the most valuable things. They never – in their high school or college classes – learned how to cook.
“And I think especially with like, plant-based cooking, people are just like hesitant. They think it’s going to be harder, and so I’m excited for that throughout the course.”
Sartor likened it to the “documentary effect”, referring to popular films like Cowspiracy and The Game Changers, which influence people to give up meat or dairy. “Some people look at documentaries maybe as being biased or not reputable, where I think being part of an accredited curriculum at a university has an added layer of reputation to it.”
Trump administration will ‘create a landscape we haven’t witnessed’
We’re talking about food systems transformation at a time when it is perhaps more polarising than ever before. Scientists the world over have said we need to grow and eat less meat to lower emissions, land and water use, and food insecurity.
Animal protein has become part of a culture war in the US of late. Carnivore diets and raw milk have become major points of discussion, Elon Musk has sung the praises of beef on Joe Rogan’s podcast, and lobby groups and mostly Republican lawmakers have attacked alternative proteins as ultra-processed foods that should be banned.
The impact? Sales have continued to slow over the last two years, as has investment in startups. Venture capital flowing into the sector was down by 27% last year, with cultivated meat – the target of legislation in more than a dozen states – witnessing a 40% dip.
“The industry is in a period of self-examination right now, trying to figure out what’s going on,” says Schinner, who built one of the sector’s most successful companies in Miyoko’s Creamery, subsequently exiting in 2023. “What is the direction we should be going in? Are we making the right products? Are we addressing the right audience, and is this something that should be sold with huge money or not?”
On Donald Trump, she says: “It’s hard to know where the current administration is going to be with this. But, we can only guess that there are going to be limitations to certain initiatives. I think anything that’s technologically based that’s going to threaten potential industrial animal agriculture is going to be seen as a threat.”
She adds: “That’s going to create a whole new landscape that we hadn’t previously witnessed as much […] and we’re going to have to dive deep into how we can get the industry to grow in this landscape.”
Products aren’t the be-all and end-all
Schinner believes we “can’t conflate products with the future” of the plant-based sector. “We’re just focused on the sales of products that we’re making, and that doesn’t reflect the entire picture,” she explains.
“The whole world’s not going to go vegan because there’s Beyond Burger, right? But they might go vegan if we promote a plant-rich diet,” she says. “We put all our eggs in that basket and threw a lot of money at it and assumed that that was what was going to create conversion. I’m not convinced of that.
“We have to change food culture,” she adds. “You can’t just change what we put on the shelf […] So the evolution of the human being has to go along with it if we’re going to make that change.”
I ask Schinner what mistakes the food system has made historically. “I’m going to say white saviour mentality,” Schinner responds. “What we did in developing countries, with protein in Africa, with formula, patented GMO seeds that went into places like India and robbed communities of food sovereignty.”
“That’s when the food system is focused on profits rather than actually feeding people. And so I wonder, as the plant-based industry is focused just as much on growth, IP protection and consolidation, whether or not we could be making the same mistakes that could jeopardise the health and the wealth of people in other parts of the world, as well as here in the US.”
Sartor notes that our food system has changed rapidly, even just in the last century or two and suggests it can change again. “There’s definitely a chance that it will change rapidly over the next 200 [years],” she says.
“I don’t think it’s probably feasible to say everyone will go vegan, but I do think that people are going to realise that how we’re doing animal agriculture right now is not sustainable. It’s literally just not sustainable for even the farmers themselves.
“Inevitably, there’s going to be a shift away from as many animal products as our population grows, because it’s just… it has to.”
Upcoming cookbook takes ‘whole new approach’ to vegan cheese
Schinner is the original vegan dairy queen. She made her name as the chef-owner of Now and Zen, an all-vegan eatery in San Francisco in the late 1980s, and the founder of plant-based dairy startup Miyoko’s Creamery, whose products are available in over 20,000 retail doors.
But legal disputes over trade secrets and IP led to her departure from the company in 2022 – she no longer has any involvement in the business, which installed Stuart Kronauge as its new CEO in 2023.
Schinner has been focusing on Rancho Compasión, the animal sanctuary she opened a decade ago, which educates about 50 kids each week about humanity and the food system. A prolific author, she is about to release her seventh cookbook, The Vegan Creamery, this September.
“I’m really excited about it, because it’s a whole new approach to making everything from milk to cheese to ice cream using all kinds of ingredients that I know,” she says. It’s not just all cashews – there are cheeses made from watermelon seeds, or a vegan halloumi from mung beans.
“I have recipes in the book where I actually coagulate the plant milks, separate the whey, and then the curds are pressed and over time, they melt into one smooth cheese,” she reveals. “So there’s some techniques in there that are unique, haven’t been seen before, and I am not applying for patents.
“I am sharing the recipes with the world, hoping that it will encourage more people to embark on this path. Hopefully, it will be the book that launches 10,000 vegan cheese companies.”
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