This year, Lund University ranked first in sustainability in the QS World University Rankings. Plant-based Campus, a student-led organization, has been advocating for plant-based catering and is now building on this opportunity to implement their vision on a university-wide scale. LUNA, the Science Student Union, has recently become the first student union to support this transition, setting a precedent for others to follow suit.
While policy-makers and large institutions have been grappling with ways to properly address the climate crisis, research has long pointed to one significant contributor to global emissions: the meat and dairy industry. The global food system causes around a third of the world’s annual emissions, and animal-based products like meat and dairy make up a disproportionate share of its total sum.
Here in Lund, the grassroots organisation Plant-Based Campus (PBC) has campaigned for plant-based university catering over the last several years. The student-led movement just achieved its first major milestone since its re-launch in March 2025 as LUNA, the Science Student Union, recently voted in favor of a motion submitted by Plant-Based Campus to back a transition to wholly plant-based catering at Lund University.
Campus. Photo: Marin Cima.
Part of a larger international network, PBC advocates for educational institutions to make all their catering services entirely plant-based. While universities work to integrate sustainability into their research and organisational policies, PBC points out that one of the universities’ most sizable emission areas, food, has remained largely unquestioned.
Beyond its advocacy for fully plant-based catering on campus locations, the organisation also emphasizes the university’s norm-shaping role, and the way university-wide measures can produce effects that ripple way beyond the university cafeterias. Rather than taking a top-down approach, Plant-Based Campus views collaboration as the best way to bring about meaningful change. Valter Olsson, a representative of the Initiative, emphasizes that a transition to fully plant-based catering must happen fairly.
– We have this community approach to change, so we want to work with all sides constantly to make sure that this transition happens in the most fair and equitable way possible, and that’s really important to us as an organisation.
Rather than enforcing a top-down transition, Valter Olsson raises the importance of cooperation with all canteens, which are privately owned rather than being property of the university itself.
– [We] would like to work closely with the canteens to make sure that this happens in the most fair and equitable way possible. I think that’s really important. And we can figure it out together, we as Plant-Based Campus and the canteens, and of course the student unions and the university as well, how to do this in the best way possible for them..
LUNA student union. Photo: Marin Cima.
PBC’s motion to LUNA’s student union council contained the endorsement and encouragement of ”university-wide, 100% plant-based and affordable catering at Lund University”, according to a press statement by Plant-Based Campus. Max Larsson Rydström, president of the LUNA student union, states the endorsement of the motion was mostly a no-brainer:
– We already work to push for vegetarian food, and this is not that big of a change. We will simply be making that change from vegetarian to vegan.
– The university has recently been awarded the number one QS ranking for sustainability, I think no one’s missed that. And being in that position, you have a responsibility to conduct yourself in a manner that represents that. A good way to do that is to carry the torch in making the change to plant-based alternatives.
The organisation’s work is starting to pay off. Other universities in Europe, like the University of Graz, have voted to adopt 100% plant-based catering on a university-wide scale, setting a precedent for other universities and showcasing that the food transition can be mobilized on an institutional level.
– We are tired of feeling […] helpless in the face of the climate crisis. A crisis that cannot be solved unless we account for the emissions from our current food system. Animal agriculture is responsible for more emissions than all forms of transportation combined, according to the UN, so the evidence is clear.
– We need to actually change the way we consume if we want to prevent a climate catastrophe. And we think that huge institutions like our university have the responsibility to follow the evidence. Especially when they themselves are the ones producing that very same evidence. Because if the university doesn’t even follow their own research, then who will? says Valter Olsson.
