Social media has experienced rapid growth in recent years and has been subjected of discussions on a wide range of topics including new lifestyles and eating habits, providing a great opportunity to obtain spontaneous consumer information. In this sense, the present work aimed to understand the perception of Twitter Ò users about themes of veganism and plant-based diets. The social networking data mining methodology was applied to measure the relationship between both terms. The significant differences found were analysed using the global chi-square (v 2) test, and their sources of variation were investigated by the chi-square per cell. The results indicate that the vegan group's posts are more related to the categories of recipes, trends, criticism and negative comments about veganism, being more often citing sources when compared to the other group. The results of the plant-based diet group are more significantly related to the impacts of nutrition, physical activity and consumer health. In conclusion, Twitter Ò has proved to be an interesting tool for obtaining data on (re) produced food publications on social media and their results can guide the market and the academic environment in creating new products, services and marketing strategies to answer the needs of specific consumers.

Industrial livestock production presents a growing problem on a global scale in terms of animal welfare, environmental sustainability, and human health. One solution might be cultured meat, in which animal tissue is grown in a controlled environment using cell culture technology, thereby making the raising and killing of animals for food unnecessary. This approach shows great potential of meeting all the requirements of a humane, sustainable and healthy form of meat production. However, a great deal of scientific, technical, cultural and legislative challenges must be overcome before cultured meat can reach costcompetitiveness. Lack of funding is the main barrier to further development, and considerable upfront investment is needed for cultured meat to attain commercially viable retail prices. We therefore strongly support increased funding of cultured meat initiatives. This entails, in order of priority: research and development of technology suitable for mass production, promoting fact-based public discussion regarding the technology and its societal implications, and eventual marketing of end products to consumers.