KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP) — Malaysia has announced an immediate and full ban on the importation of electronic waste, as the government vowed the country would not be a “dumping ground” for the world’s waste. The Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission said in a statement late Wednesday that all electronic waste, commonly known as e-waste, would be reclassified under the “absolute prohibition” category effective immediately. This removes the discretionary power previously given to the Department of Environment to grant exemptions for importation of certain e-waste. Environmental advocates have long urged stronger action. E-waste — discarded electronic products such as computers, phones and appliances — can contain toxic substances and heavy metals including lead, mercury and cadmium that pollute soil and water resources if improperly processed or dumped. “E-waste is no longer permitted,” MACC chief Azam Baki said in the statement, vowing “firm and integrated enforcement action” to prevent illegal imports. Malaysia has previously grappled with large volumes of imported e-waste, much of it suspected to be illegal and hazardous to human health and the environment. Authorities have seized hundreds of containers of suspected e-waste at ports in recent years and issued notices for return to exporters. The ban comes as authorities widen a corruption inquiry tied to e-waste management. Last week, the MACC detained and remanded the director-general of the environment department and his deputy over alleged abuse of power and corruption involving e-waste oversight. The probe has also seen authorities freeze bank accounts and seize cash linked to the case. The Home Ministry in…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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Every year at Grand Canyon National Park, millions of visitors from all over the world stop at one of a dozen water spigots. Most people are on a rim, seeing the canyon's majesty for the first time, when they step off the trail to refill a water bottle. Others are deep in the belly of the canyon, sweaty and tired, facing a hike up in punishing heat, filling their reservoirs and dumping water over their heads to avoid dehydration and heat stroke.

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An international study investigating the genomic diversity of the Sudanese population reveals that the Copts originating in Egypt—who settled in the country between the seventh and eleventh centuries—have acquired a genetic variant that protects them from contracting malaria.

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Global climate models capture many of the processes that shape Earth's weather and climate. Based on physics, chemistry, fluid motion and observed data, hundreds of these models agree that more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere leads to hotter global temperatures and more extreme weather. Still, uncertainty remains around how seasonal weather patterns and atmospheric systems like the jet stream will respond to global warming. Some of this uncertainty stems from the way models approximate the effects of relatively short-lived, small-scale phenomena known as gravity waves.

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Seamounts and the oxygen minimum zone (OMZ) are two typical deep-sea habitats that often coexist. However, determining whether the "seamount effect" alters OMZ structure through marine stratification, thereby influencing the deep-sea hypoxic environment and carbon sink processes, remains unconfirmed.

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A study conducted by researchers at the University of Liège on a large population of Japanese giant salamanders—one of the largest amphibians in the world—reveals that above a certain size, a spectacular transition occurs in the diet of this species, propelling it to the top of the river food chain. The Japanese giant salamander (Andrias japonicus)—an endemic and emblematic species of the country—fascinates scientists with its exceptional size, reaching up to 1.5 meters in length.

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A French research team led by CNRS scientists has discovered that cells are able to retain a memory of a previous perturbation within the 3D structure of their genome, independently of their DNA sequence. When they are exposed to a transient stimulus that induces changes in the proteins that compact DNA—thereby altering chromosome architecture—cells retain this modified architecture even after the initial cellular conditions have been restored. Moreover, this cellular memory is amplified if the cells are exposed to the same stress again. These findings were published in Nature Genetics on February 4.

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Studying the shape of tissues and organs is critical to understanding how they are formed. Embryonic development happens in three dimensions, but many studies are limited by the use of two-dimensional approaches and images to describe three-dimensional processes. To overcome this challenge, researchers at EMBL Barcelona have created LimbLab—an open-source pipeline made for three-dimensional visualization and analysis of growing limb buds.

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Spanish rescuers on Thursday desperately searched for a woman missing after a new storm hit the Iberian peninsula while Portugal warned of a heightened flood risk after several months' worth of rain fell in a few hours.

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Malaysia’s coral reefs are shrinking at a pace that is hard to ignore. According to the latest national survey by Reef Check Malaysia, about one-fifth of the country’s coral cover has been lost since 2022, a decline compressed into just three years. What had been gradual erosion now looks more like a slide. The 2025 survey assessed 297 reef sites across Malaysia, from the tourist-heavy islands off the peninsula to the more remote waters of Sabah. Average live coral cover fell to just under 40%, down from nearly 45% a year earlier. In 2022, it stood close to 50%. Put another way, the loss since 2022 would be equivalent, on a percentage basis, to Malaysia losing around 4 million hectares of forest over the same period. The causes are familiar, but their overlap is proving especially damaging. The global coral bleaching event of 2024 exposed reefs already weakened by pollution, coastal development, and heavy tourism. Physical damage is widespread. More than four-fifths of surveyed sites showed signs of trash or abandoned fishing gear, while over half had been scarred by anchors. Bleaching was recorded at two-thirds of locations. In parts of Sabah, damage linked to dynamite fishing, long outlawed, was recorded at a third of sites. Map showing the reef health composition of each survey location in Sabah based on Live Coral Cover. Graphic courtesy of Reef Check Malaysia Map showing the reef health composition of each survey location in Peninsular Malaysia based on LiveCoral Cover. Reef Health in Malaysia…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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Amelia Schafer
ICT

Just as they’ve done for centuries on Turtle Island, Indigenous artists are using the tools and talents available to them to communicate about the historic immigration raids across the United States.

From her home in south Minneapolis, using an iPad and the Procreate app, graphic designer Jearica Fountain is creating bold, eye-catching designs to raise awareness about the large Immigration Customs Enforcement surge to her Midwestern community.

South Minneapolis, particularly on and near Franklin Avenue, is considered a cultural corridor for the city’s Indigenous population. But the area also has a high Latino and Somali population, meaning it’s been a targeted area for the surge of over 2,000 immigration agents in the city as the Department of Homeland Security works on what it’s calling the largest immigration crackdown in history.

Jearica Fountain, Karuk, is using her graphic art skills to raise awareness for what’s going on in Minneapolis. (Courtesy of Jearica Fountain)

“I feel like art has the ability to let anyone that views it reflect,” Fountain said. “It has the power to speak to everyone and it doesn’t matter how much knowledge you have about the subject. … Sometimes words can’t truly explain what is happening and what we’re seeing, but art can.”

A citizen of the Karuk Tribe, Fountain said she’s been drawing since she could first hold a pencil, having been surrounded by a family of artists.

Now an adult, Fountain’s designs are currently displayed across the Minneapolis metro area in an act of resistance.

Art has always been a method for Indigenous people to speak out. Historically, tribes across the northern plains, such as the Oceti Sakowin, or Lakota, Dakota, Nakota people, created winter counts, a visual calendar of the year’s events depicted through painted drawings on the leather side of a buffalo hide and later through paper.

Following European contact and broader colonization, winter counts began to depict children being taken to boarding schools, the smallpox epidemic and some of the first commodity deliveries to reservations.

A winter count on a buffalo hide stored in the Remembering the Children Exhibit depicts a year at the Rapid City Boarding School. Winter counts are a traditional way for plains tribes to depict and remember significant events from the year. This winter count depicts a year spent away. (Photo by Amelia Schafer, ICT

Decades later, several Indigenous artists, like Fountain, are continuing the legacy of using Indigenous art to document and shine a spotlight on issues affecting their communities.

Fountain’s most popular design – a nod to the iconic Morton Salt Girl – depicts a young Native girl wearing a ribbon skirt and basket design on her shirt holding an umbrella and sprinkling salt behind her as she walks. The design is framed by the phrase “Mni Sota Makoce knows how to handle ICE.”

Art by Jearica Fountain (Karuk) has been featued on posters at anti-ICE protests around Minneapolis. (Courtesy of Jearica Fountain)

Inspired by Minnesota’s frigid icy winters, Fountain got the idea to Indigenize the immense amount of salt the state uses in the winter to defreeze ice.

“We’re basically in the Arctic, with how much salt we use to handle our ice situation,” Fountain said. “And right now we’re currently trying to deal with our ICE situation and get rid of it.”

Just blocks away from where Fountain lives, ICE officers shot and killed a 37-year-old woman, Renée Nicole Good.

“Right now what I’m creating affects everyone in Minnesota,” Fountain said. “It doesn’t matter your religion, political background, you are affected by ICE here in Minnesota.”

Fountain said she began supplying her designs to local action groups to use as posters and buttons at anti-ICE protests across the city. She’s also donating proceeds from sold prints to local relief organizations. Outside of the city, Fountain has heard from people across the country impacted by her art.

“Getting to hear back from people outside of Minnesota is kind of nice to hear because sometimes it feels like we’re living on an island here where only we know what is happening here and only we are the people talking about it,” she said.

Over 146 miles northeast of the Twin Cities, Lac Courte Oreilles tribal citizen Aerius Benton-Banai is using her talents as a seamstress to make a bold political statement.

Jingle dresses need to be created in a good way, she said, with a clear head and heart. News of what was going on in Minneapolis weighed on her too much and she needed to create something, she said.

Aerius Benton-Banai poses in a ribbon dress she created, needing an outlet for her anger and disbelief towards immigration activity in the Twin Cities. (Courtesy of Aerius Benton-Banai).

“I transmuted all of my anger and distress into this piece,” Benton-Banai said. “I wanted to make a statement of support to all of our people really, that are being taken from us and seen as immigrants. No one is illegal on stolen land means we can’t criminalize people for wanting to migrate to a safer, better place for their life.”

The dress, crafted on red satin and adorned with 20 rows of multicolor ribbons, features a large patch on the center of the ribbon stack. The white, satin patch, with bold black lettering, reads “No One is Illegal on Stolen Land.”

“No one is illegal on stolen land built by stolen hands,” she said. “And I wished that I had added that little last bit, you know, because that is the true history of America and we know that.”

Benton-Banai, the owner of popular jingle dress design company House of Jingle Dresses, donned the red ribbon dress on January 16 and recorded herself speaking directly to her over 27,000 followers about what’s going on in immigrant communities across the country.

“I realize that not everyone can be on the front lines right now,” she said. “I have a daughter at home and it’s important that we stay safe, but also think of acts of resistance.

Acts of resistance can come in many forms, Benson-Banai said. It can be done through singing, dancing or creating.

“I wasn’t expecting such a huge response with my message,” she said. “As Indigenous people, we don’t see land with borders. We love the land and we appreciate the land for what it gives us. We don’t see it as something that is to be owned or bought or sold.”

Benton-Banai ends the video, which has been viewed over 280,000 times, with a statement, “Which side of history will you stand on?”

As the granddaughter of American Indian Movement co-founder Eddie Benton-Banai, she is carrying on her grandfather’s legacy of resistance – one stitch at a time.

“I wanted to spread my truths that were passed on to me by my family and my elders and theirs,” she said. “So that is our truth as Indigenous people. I think it’s important to remember also, as artists, it’s important to create and shift the culture. The people that are oppressing us know that controlling the culture is controlling the people. And it’s really important to remember that.”

Aerius Benton-Banai posted this video on her Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/reel/1272205348054979

The post Using art to melt ICE appeared first on ICT.

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As federal policymakers weigh potential changes to how biomedical research is funded and regulated in the United States, a Virginia Tech scientist highlights the importance of preserving the nation's ability to turn discovery into life-saving therapies.

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President Donald Trump is considering allowing companies to lease more than 113 million acres of waters off Alaska for seabed mining. Alaska is the latest of several places Trump has sought to open to the fledging industry over the past year, including waters around American Samoa, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands. Like those Pacific islands, Alaska is home to Indigenous peoples with ancestral ties to the ocean, and the proposal is raising cultural and environmental concerns.

Deep-sea mining, the practice of scraping minerals off the ocean floor for commercial products like electric vehicle batteries and military technology, is not yet a commercial industry. It’s been slowed by the lack of regulations governing permits in international waters and by concerns about the environmental impact of extracting minerals that formed over millions of years. Scientists have warned the practice could damage fisheries and fragile ecosystems that could take millennia to recover. Indigenous peoples have also pushed back, citing violations of their rights to consent to projects in their territories.

Trump, however, has voiced strong support for the industry as part of his effort to make the United States a leader in critical mineral production. He has also pushed for U.S. companies to mine in international waters, bypassing ongoing global negotiations over international mining regulations.

Kate Finn, a citizen of the Osage Nation and executive director of the Tallgrass Institute Center for Indigenous Economic Stewardship in Colorado, said she worries the seabed mining industry will repeat the mistakes of land-based mining.

“The terrestrial mining industry has not gotten it right with regards to Indigenous peoples,” Finn said. “Indigenous peoples have the right to give and to withdraw consent. Mining companies themselves need to design their operations around that right.”

It’s not yet clear which companies, if any, are interested in mining off Alaska. A spokesperson for The Metals Company, one of the leading publicly traded firms in the industry, said it has no plans to expand to Alaska. Oliver Gunasekara, chief executive officer of the startup Impossible Metals — which has asked Trump to allow mining around American Samoa despite Samoan opposition — said his company has no plans either.

“We do not have current plans in Alaska, as we do not know what resources are in the ocean,” he said. “If there are good nodule resources, we would be very interested.”

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The potential lease area under consideration is larger than the state of California. Cooper Freeman, director of Alaska operations for the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity, said the scope is so broad that it includes ecologically important waters already closed to bottom trawling, a fishing method that drags heavy nets across the seafloor.

“A lot of these areas, particularly in the Aleutians, have been put off limits for bottom trawling because there are nurseries for commercially important fish and ecologically important species and habitat, ” Freeman said.

In its announcement, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, or BOEM, the agency responsible for regulating deep-sea mining, said the proposed area included depths more than 4 miles deep near the Aleutian Trench and the abyssal plains of the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska, at depths as low as 3.5 miles. “BOEM is particularly interested in areas that have been identified by [the U.S. Geological Survey] as prospective for critical minerals as well as heavy minerals sands along the Seward Peninsula and Bering Sea coast.”

The waters are off the coast of a state that is home to more than 200 Alaska Native nations. Jasmine Monroe, who is Inupiaq, Yupik, and Cherokee, grew up in the village of Elim in Alaska’s Bering Strait region. She said she became concerned about what the proposal could mean for the seafood her community relies on after learning the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management opened up a 30-day public comment period last week on potential leases.

“We eat beluga meat, we eat walrus, we eat seal, we eat whale,” she said. “Whatever happens in the ocean, it really does affect our way of life.”

“It just feels like we don’t have any say on whether it happens or not,” she said. “It just feels like the system is set up for failure for us.”

The Alaska Federation of Natives, an organization representing Indigenous peoples of Alaska, did not respond to requests for comment.

Monroe, who works on water quality issues at the nonprofit Alaska Community Action on Toxics, said she feels disempowered by what she described as a top-down approach and short timelines for public input.

Kate Finn from the Tallgrass Institute said Indigenous peoples have the right under international law to consent to activities in their territories and warned that U.S. federal regulations alone may not be sufficient for companies to meet international legal standards, particularly amid deregulation.

“Companies will miss that if they’re only relying on the U.S. federal government for consultation,” she said.

Finn added that Indigenous nations have their own economic and cultural priorities and that some have chosen to work with mining companies under specific conditions.

“There are Indigenous peoples who work well with companies and invite mining into their territories, and there is a track record there as well,” she said.

Monroe said she recognizes that seabed mining could supply minerals used in technologies like electric vehicle batteries, similar to other mining proposals she’s opposed in Alaska including a graphite mine that could pollute waters. But she doesn’t see electric vehicles in her community, and said the environmental and cultural cost is too high.

“It really feels like another false solution,” she said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Indigenous concerns surface as Trump calls for seabed mining in Alaskan waters on Feb 5, 2026.

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YouTube is a great place to find all sorts of wildlife content. It is not, however, a good place to find viewers encouraging each other to preserve that wildlife, according to new research led by the University of Michigan. Out of nearly 25,000 comments posted to more than 1,750 wildlife YouTube videos, just 2% featured a call to action that would help conservation efforts, according to a new study published in the journal Communications Sustainability.

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British scientists said Thursday that a world-first AI tool to catalog and track icebergs as they break apart into smaller chunks could fill a "major blind spot" in predicting climate change.

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Gene therapy holds the promise of preventing and curing disease by manipulating gene expression within a patient's cells. However, to be effective, the new gene must make it into a cell's nucleus. The inability to consistently, efficiently do so has hampered progress in advancing treatment.

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When then 31-year-old Brazilian culinary student Letícia Dias walked into Eleven Madison Park on a Sunday evening last August, she had no idea a meal was about to change her life. A longtime vegan, it was her first time dining at the world-class New York City luxury restaurant, which in 2021 made the bold move to ditch meat and dairy and offer a fully plant-based menu. When her lips met the deceptively simple-looking corn velouté, something new clicked between her taste buds and brain.

“I drank that, and I was like, ‘Oh my God. This is insane,’” Dias recalled. “Like, I understand why this is different than other places that I’ve been to.”

It wasn’t just the food that made the dinner unlike any she’d ever had. It was also the ambience and level of personal attention — the mid-meal tour of the famously quiet kitchen, the waitstaff appearing seemingly from nowhere to refill her water glass between sips, and the stories that accompanied each dish down to the ingredient.

Eleven Madison Park, also known by its initials, EMP, has long been considered a bucket list destination for serious foodies. In 2017, it appeared at the top of a list of the world’s 50 best restaurants. After it dropped meat and dairy, it became the first restaurant in the world to be awarded three Michelin stars for a fully plant-based menu. For vegan cooks in training like Dias, who does not want to work with animal products, EMP’s shift away from meat opened up an elite career opportunity. The restaurant has long had a robust training program that helps aspiring chefs cut their teeth and gain valuable skills for the luxury food world and beyond.

“It’s a teaching institution,” said Matt Ricotta, owner of the plant-based cottage bakery Manifold in Venice, California, who was a pastry intern at the restaurant in 2022. “It’s one of those famous, famous places where everyone wants to go and learn.”

Matthew Pene, Maitre d’ at Eleven Madison Park, checks the dining room before dinner on April 6, 2017 in New York City.
Spencer Platt / Getty Images

By the time her meal was over, Dias had decided she wanted to apply to EMP for her externship — a temporary, entry-level kitchen job required by many culinary schools to help graduating students gain experience and valuable industry connections. After the staff found out she was a vegan culinary student, one of the chefs even gave her their business card.

So it was a shock when, just three days after Dias’ visit, Eleven Madison Park chef and owner Daniel Humm announced that the restaurant would be adding a limited amount of meat and dairy back to the menu — say, an optional cameo of lavender-glazed duck here, an if-you-want-it lobster course there — starting in October 2025. Humm told The New York Times that the change was meant to attract a wider base of guests, both for financial reasons and to reflect a hospitality philosophy of wanting to welcome everyone.

As the news spread, concern grew among the members of Dias’s cohort at the Institute of Culinary Education, where she was enrolled in a program geared toward vegetarian and vegan chefs. Just the day before, one of her classmates, Autumn Henson, had sent their completed externship application to the institute’s career adviser to forward to the restaurant. An experienced vegan baker, Henson had wanted exposure to plant-based haute cooking at a place with name recognition: “It’s important that there’s [vegan] representation at all levels,” they explained.

But as soon as Henson heard the news, they rushed to a computer and quickly shot off a follow-up message. “The subject line was, ‘Don’t send in my application to EMP.”

Likewise, Dias decided to put aside her partially finished EMP externship application and look for employers with a fully vegan menu. “The options for if you want to do plant-based fine dining are few and far between, and getting fewer,” she said.

Even before Eleven Madison Park’s menu change, opportunities to train in exclusively plant-based, high-end kitchens were scarce. The short list of such restaurants in New York City — a city with more vegan and vegan-friendly restaurants than anywhere else in the country — already meant cooks like Dias and Henson have a harder time finding their place within the ultra competitive food industry. As more elite kitchens step back from fully plant-based cooking, the ripple effects go beyond individual careers: Fewer chefs trained in plant-based techniques means fewer restaurants able to execute them at a high level, and fewer chances for plant-forward dishes to shape what ends up on menus more broadly.

At a moment when experts say cutting back on meat and dairy is essential to a sustainable diet, the loss of these training grounds could slow the cultural shift needed to make that future feel both desirable and delicious.

Kimberly Elliott / Grist

Even for more established vegan cooks, part of what made Eleven Madison Park’s return to meat so upsetting was that it had once represented the ultimate achievement for sustainable cuisine, the ascent to the top of the American cultural food chain.

Within the world of fine dining, vegan kitchens share many of the same hallmarks as traditional haute dining establishments  — prix fixe menus, meticulous presentation, premium ingredients, and a price tag that’s typically north of $100 per person (before drinks!). And yet the concept of a luxurious, formal, plant-based meal is still a culinary outlier in many parts of the United States, with many top-tier restaurants only emerging within the last few decades.

Like the Michelin star system itself — a rating guide that has become the go-to barometer for ranking the world’s best restaurants — special occasion food has historically been dominated by French culinary tradition, which is heavily reliant on meat and dairy. The 1960s through 1980s saw the rise of nouvelle cuisine, a lighter style of French cooking that emphasized simplicity and freshness and ditched heavy sauces, yet remained firmly tied to animal products.

That’s not to say delicious vegan fare didn’t exist, of course. Yet in popular culture, it was largely associated with healthful self-denial. In many restaurants, diners who eschewed meat often found themselves poking at plates of steamed vegetables over brown rice — hardly cause for gastronomic celebration.

But in the early 1990s, that started to change. Millennium Restaurant in the San Francisco Bay Area was an early pioneer of upscale vegan cooking when it opened in 1994, offering world cuisine-influenced dishes like tempeh glazed with Filipino-style banana barbecue sauce and a cornmeal-crusted maitake mushroom over grits drizzled with Calabrian chile sofrito oil. In the late aughts, vegetarian fine dining restaurant Dirt Candy in New York City gained national acclaim for its trailblazing playfulness with vegetables, like sweet cauliflower chilaquiles for dessert. Next came Vedge in Philadelphia, Crossroads Kitchen in Los Angeles, Avant Garden in New York, and other elevated vegan restaurants that helped nudge plants from the appetizer menu to the main course in the 2010s.

Then came the COVID pandemic. While American restaurants in general struggled, interest in plant-based diets peaked. During the pandemic, the plant-based food industry expanded by 27 percent, according to a survey conducted by the consumer group Strategic Market Research. Whether they were motivated by concerns over health, the climate impacts of meat and dairy, or the ethics of consuming animal products, increased consumer demand for plant-based products could be seen in grocery aisles and white tablecloth restaurants alike.

But it wasn’t until Eleven Madison Park’s 2021 divestment from meat and dairy that vegan fare became associated with the ultimate level of culinary luxury, which has since come to also include other plant-based dining destinations such as Fabrik in Austin, Texas; Astera in Portland, Oregon; and Michelin-starred MITA in Washington, D.C.

Server Houssam Abbari, left, and Chef Miguel Guerra with guests in the dining room at Mita Restaurant photographed March 30, 2024 in Washington, DC. Scott Suchman for The Washington Post via Getty Images

For the last few years, upscale vegan restaurants have provided new training grounds for the next generation of vegan chefs and bakers, many of whom have taken those plant-based lessons beyond the haute dining scene.

Internships and externships in vegan fine dining kitchens teach budding plant-based cooks things that omnivorous kitchens teach, too — like how to chop vegetables on a very, very, very even dice — which you can either call fundamentals or grunt work. (Both descriptions are true.) But these experiences also usually teach some of the skills that are especially important for vegan haute cookery.

More so than meat dishes, cooking fine plant-based fare requires an advanced understanding of what ingredients are at the peak of their season and ripeness, and how to prepare them in ways that accentuate their flavor, said Dan Marek, director of plant-based culinary and content development at Rouxbe Online Culinary School. Cooks training in haute vegan restaurants might gain specialized skills that are highly tailored to the chef’s approach or to the cuisine the restaurant serves. If they’re at a fancy vegan sushi place, they might learn how to roll vegan sushi. Elsewhere, maybe they’d learn spherification, a molecular gastronomy technique that forms tiny, liquid-filled pearlettes that look like caviar but can taste like anything — Key lime, passionfruit, a peak September tomato.

Whole roasted carrots with black lentils and green harissa prepared by Rich Landau from Vedge in Philadelphia, and his wife, co-owner Kate Jacoby. Astrid Riecken for The Washington Post via Getty Images

At the pastry station of many high-end vegan kitchens, pastry cooks need to be versed in using plant-based baking substitutes, especially butter. Ricotta of Manifold Bakery said his internship at Eleven Madison Park helped him grasp the importance of using acidic ingredients and generous amounts of salt to heighten flavor, plus exposed him to vegan substitutes and thickeners — part of what he believes sets apart his plant-based baking style today.

“All that came from my time there,” he said. Ricotta said that if he were seeking an internship today, the presence of meat on the restaurant’s menu wouldn’t dissuade him, so long as the pastry program remained fully vegan. Eleven Madison Park says it will “at this time.”

Vegan fine-dining chefs who stay in that part of the field and open their own restaurants also need to eventually learn, or at least consider, the extra element of performance that some restaurants leverage to help vegetable-only dishes feel worthy of a lofty price tag. Eleven Madison Park brought that to the plant-based culinary scene with dishes like its famous carrot tartare, ground at the table and mixed up by the diners themselves, like a big, playful wink at steakhouse expectations.

But for all its innovation in the kitchen, plant-based eating recently began showing signs of trend fatigue. Meat is making a cultural and political comeback in America. Carni-bros, farm-to-table acolytes, and people looking for easy, protein-filled weeknight recipes alike are on the bandwagon. In January, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. released updated federal dietary guidelines that championed red meat and dairy in a major reversal of previous recommendations.

It wasn’t the ideal professional landscape for Dias and Henson, as they looked for other plant-based externship options in New York last August. Going down the list of high-end plant-based restaurants in New York, they discovered their options were rapidly dwindling. In 2025, at least 20 well-known vegan restaurants in the city closed permanently, two others closed temporarily, and another two, including Eleven Madison Park, de-veganized.

While restaurant turnover is part of the food industry, it’s notable that most of the recently shuttered vegan businesses in New York are not being replaced by new vegan eateries. Marek attributes a broader nationwide contraction to an overly saturated market: The U.S. restaurant scene got to a point where there were more plant-based eateries than the market of vegan and vegan-curious eaters could actually support. “We’re seeing a lot of closures in the past year,” he said — more than can be attributed to the inherent challenge of targeting a niche clientele.

“The bigger the swell, the bigger the fall.”

Kimberly Elliott / Grist

Though the vegan restaurant scene has shrunk compared to its post-pandemic high, it’s by no means gone. There are still about a dozen high-end meatless restaurants in the Big Apple alone. A few — like Dirt Candy, Bodai, and Omakaseed — are formal fine dining, centered on tasting menus. Others, like abcV and Avant Garden, are upscale, with enough gastronomic ingenuity to be listed on the Michelin guide. Dirt Candy is the lone one in the bunch with a Michelin star, one of just a few meatless restaurants nationwide with the honor.

Before applying to Eleven Madison Park, Dias had applied to almost all the city’s high-end vegan kitchens, including Omakaseed and the vegan restaurants owned by the groups Overthrow Hospitality and City Roots Hospitality. But by the end of August, she hadn’t gotten any replies. She decided to look beyond the city’s entirely plant-based upscale options, applying to abcV, which is vegetarian and is owned by renowned French chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s restaurant group. The restaurant’s use of some eggs gave Dias pause, but abcV is still considered vegan-friendly. She really admired its approach to letting vegetables be vegetables instead of leaning on meat substitutes.

“It’s like school. Sometimes the benefits outweigh whatever I may feel,” she said.

Henson, meanwhile, had also sent an externship application to Overthrow Hospitality, which owns Avant Garden and the elevated homemade pasta spot Soda Club among others, but didn’t hear back. (Overthrow Hospitality later told Grubstreet that it plans to close almost all of its New York City restaurants “over time” in favor of launching a national chain of pizza-and-pasta locations.) After inquiring about City Roots Hospitality, they learned the vegan group doesn’t take externs. After doing a trail (or job tryout) at both abcV and Dirt Candy — two restaurants they were excited about — they learned that Dirt Candy’s sole externship spot had gone to another plant-based student in their culinary class.

“I gotta say, it’s been a little harder than I thought,” they said to Grist about a month into their search.

Lunchtime diners at ABCV, a vegetarian restaurant photographed in New York City. Deb Lindsey For The Washington Post via Getty Images

Outside the U.S., plant-based fine dining and training pathways into it for budding vegan chefs look like they may actually be expanding, inch by inch — even in France, of all places. Arpège, a three-Michelin-starred restaurant in Paris helmed by chef Alain Passard, said last summer that it would ditch all animal products except honey. The French culinary school Le Cordon Bleu, meanwhile, has launched plant-based cooking and pastry programs at its Paris, London, Malaysia, São Paolo, and other locations over the past several years.

But inside the U.S., the spotty landscape of meatless culinary school training opportunities just took a hit. While Henson and Dias were still in classes at the Institute of Culinary Education, they learned that their program, which had been entirely vegetarian, would be changing beginning with the following cohort. A previous iteration of the program had been plant-forward but with some instruction in poultry and seafood — taking inspiration from the shuttered vegetable-centric culinary education pioneer the Natural Gourmet Institute. Last fall, the institute’s vegetarian program reverted back to this model, reincorporating a few lessons with chicken, fish, and shellfish.

That shift may not matter much for early-career cooks who are flexible on the presence of meat in their educational program. It might even be helpful for broadening their career opportunities, since they’d be well-poised for work in a vegan kitchen but could also walk into a traditional kitchen knowing how to filet a fish. Vegan or plant-forward chefs who are OK with the presence of meat in their work environment have more places to do haute vegan cooking than those who draw the line at steak. There are 20 or so Michelin-starred omnivorous restaurants around the country that offer dedicated vegan or vegetarian tasting menus — The French Laundry, Le Bernardin, Per Se, and now Eleven Madison Park among them. Many more without a Michelin star do the same. The field of vegetable-centric restaurants that serve meat is much larger.

But for vegan chefs like Dias and Henson who really want to avoid meat due to their personal convictions, shifts like the ones at Eleven Madison Park and the Institute for Culinary Education make it harder to see themselves in the field at all. The U.S. now has only one major professional culinary school offering a vegetarian culinary diploma in person — the Auguste Escoffier School of Culinary Arts in Boulder, Colorado. (Escoffier didn’t respond to requests for comment about whether it has any plans to incorporate more animal products into its in-person or online program.) Marek said Rouxbe’s online programs, which he described as “1,000-percent vegan,” aren’t going anywhere.

While Dias and Henson were willing to apply to vegetarian externships, both said that they wouldn’t have attended the Institute for Culinary Education at all if their program had included poultry and seafood. “I feel kind of lucky that I got in while it was still meat-free,” Henson said.

Courtesy of Autumn Henson

That wasn’t Henson’s only break. In late September, they finally received an externship offer —  from abcV, the same restaurant where Dias was training — with a starting date in early October.

A few days into the role, Henson started running the restaurant’s dosa station solo. Dias, who started a few weeks earlier, had recently learned how to make abcV’s Sichuan tomato broth for her favorite dish — wontons filled with late-summer sweet corn and shiitake mushrooms. She was getting additional instruction in how seasonality figured into the design of a tangy heirloom tomato salad served with fruit. She watched how the chefs chose different fruits to include, depending on what they got from the farmers market.

“It’s always so beautifully presented,” Dias said.

In mid-November, Dias finished her externship, which she called “very enriching.” Between her time at culinary school and abcV, she felt ready to move forward with her dream of menu consulting, developing vegan recipes for omnivorous restaurants, beginning with her family’s. By December, she was back in Brazil, feverishly developing plant-based dishes for a new pan-Asian bar-restaurant her family was opening before Christmas.

Henson’s time at abcV looked a little different. They ended up staying at the dosa station for the entirety of their two-and-a-half-month externship due to what they described as “worker shortages.” When their training ended, they decided to leave haute cuisine and continue their vegan bakery business in California, with the goal of eventually scaling it up to wholesale.

Reflecting back on their externship, Henson was glad they’d done it but had mixed feelings about its utility. The experience had given them new skills, including familiarity with new produce and herbs — helpful knowledge for developing their own future vegan pastry flavors. But compared to culinary school, which had given them more breadth of knowledge, they weren’t sure it had been truly necessary. They felt it would have been essential — probably more so than school — if they had gone into actual restaurant work, fine dining or otherwise.

In the end, Henson saw their externship less as a prerequisite than as one narrow path among too few.

Fine dining has long functioned as a testing ground for ideas that eventually reach far beyond white tablecloths and Michelin stars. Techniques, flavors, and expectations incubated in elite kitchens tend to migrate outward, influencing what other restaurants attempt and what diners come to want. As fewer of those kitchens commit fully to plant-based cooking, the question isn’t only where vegan chefs will train. It’s whether the knowledge needed to make vegetable-centered food feel ambitious, indulgent, and culturally central will continue to spread at all — or quietly slip off the menu.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Vegan fine dining had a moment. Now it’s over. on Feb 5, 2026.

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This article was originally published by KOSU, an independent news service based in Oklahoma.

Thomas Pablo
KOSU

Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt reaffirmed calls to limit tribal sovereignty during his final State of the State address on Monday, dismaying tribal leaders in attendance.

Stitt said Oklahoma’s criminal and taxation laws should apply to every Oklahoman without exception, giving the state government sole sovereignty.

“Many of us in this room have decried the DEI programs of the Biden administration yet stand quietly by when some say an Indian should be subject to a different set of laws,” Stitt said. “We either believe in equal rights for all or we don’t, and it’s time to choose.”

Tribal leaders respond

Following the address, Choctaw Nation Chief Gary Batton released a statement saying Stitt misrepresents the relationship between tribes and the state government.

“Tribes and tribal members have sovereign rights, which are based not on race, but on treaties and other agreements between our nations and the United States,” Batton said. “Gov. Stitt must recognize this history and respect what it means today.”

Leaders from the Cherokee, Muscogee and Chickasaw Nations attended the address, along with other tribal representatives.

Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin, Jr., called Stitt’s view antiquated, saying the state recognizes the importance of tribal nations.

“Everything he said in there was really to erode some of the most meaningful attributes that are left of tribal sovereignty, that we’re trying to regain and exercise,” Hoskin said. “He would wipe all of those out in service, not to some great day for Oklahoma, but to some diminishment of tribes that really amounts to termination.”

Hoskin also referred to Stitt as the most “anti-Indian tribe governor in the history of the state.”

David Hill, Muscogee Nation principal chief, said the tribes expected negative rhetoric from Stitt. Hill also took issue with Stitt’s reference to the Land Run of 1889, in which he said the land claimed during the Land Run was “unassigned.”

“Our forefathers chased opportunity in the Land Run of 1889, staking claims on unassigned lands and building communities from the ground up,” Stitt said.

Hill said the Land Run should not be aspirational.

“The one comment that I did like, that: ‘When you’re young, you learn to read. As you get older, you read to learn,’” Hill said. “Maybe he should start reading and especially on the Land Run. If you read the history, that’s when more land was taken away from the Native people.”

Oklahoma House Tribal and External Affairs Leader Scott Fetgatter, R-Okmulgee, also released a statement criticizing Stitt’s comments. He said the end of Stitt’s tenure will give the state opportunities to build relationships with tribal governments.

“When the governor, in his last State of the State speech, had the opportunity to correct the wrongs he has inflicted on our state’s tribes, he instead chose to exacerbate the divide and ignore the partnerships that have benefited Oklahomans for years in health care, public safety, education, infrastructure and many other areas of potential collaboration,” Fetgatter said.

Addressing reporters after Stitt’s address, House Democratic Leader Cyndi Munson, D-Oklahoma City, called the governor’s comments “extremely disturbing.”

“We are all aware of the governor’s refusal to work with tribes, but today’s speech highlighted something much darker,” Munson said. “It’s more than apparent that he does not understand the history of our country and our state, and does not respect tribal sovereignty. Tribes do more than enough, not only for their citizens and members, but also the state of Oklahoma.”

Stitt continues vocal opposition toward McGirt

Stitt’s statements continue to challenge the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2020 decision in McGirt v. Oklahoma. That case determined around half of Oklahoma is reservation land and reaffirmed the Muscogee Nation’s reservation was never disestablished, providing a win to the state’s Five Tribes and their ability to govern their citizenry. In the years since, courts have affirmed that other tribal reservations in Oklahoma were also never disestablished.

Stitt, a Cherokee Nation citizen, has battled tribal sovereignty in the courts since McGirt, calling for a single set of laws that spans the state’s area and supersedes tribal jurisdiction. During his 2021 State of the State address, Stitt asked tribes to work with the state to find clarity over the McGirt ruling.

Now, Stitt said he wants to protect the vision established upon statehood in 1907, adding every resident should be subject to the Oklahoma Constitution.

“This issue will continue to split our state, both literally and figuratively, unless we address it head on,” Stitt said. “It will be uncomfortable, and you’re going to have to face down the state’s largest political donors, but we must continue to fight for one Oklahoma.”

The tribal representatives in attendance did not join the applause following that statement.

Hoskin said he hoped Stitt would engage and learn about the tribes throughout his governorship due to his Cherokee citizenship.

“You don’t often see a leader who actually seems to have a lower knowledge base and a lower understanding of the facts and the law and the policy on an issue than when he started,” Hoskin said in an interview after Stitt’s address. “I mean, I’ve got a lot of faults, but I think I’ve improved on some issues that I’ve really been curious about that have challenged me. I’ve seen the opposite out of Governor Stitt on tribal relations. So I can’t make sense of it.

“But I am his chief, and I’d love him to listen to me.”

Sarah Liese contributed to this report.

The post Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt calls for limits on tribal sovereignty, tribal leaders respond appeared first on ICT.

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