Towards a More Resilient and Healthy Food System With Klaus Mitchell

Today, we travel to the UK to chat with sustainability entrepreneur and advocate Klaus Mitchell. Klaus shares his inspiring journey, including how he lived on a canal boat in London to drastically cut costs and scale up his media platform, Plant Based News, where he serves as Founder and CEO.
Klaus dives into his work on environmental documentaries, including his role as script editor for the Netflix phenomenon Seaspiracy. He highlights the devastating ecological impact of fishing on our oceans, emphasizing how bottom trawling destroys 3 billion acres of underwater ecosystems annually—far surpassing the 25 million acres of deforestation occurring on land each year. Klaus also discusses his partnership with the documentary Eating Our Way to Extinction, where he supported its marketing efforts. The film, narrated by Kate Winslet, featured prominent global figures and delivered a powerful environmental message about the deleterious environmental effects of our food system.

Klaus reflects on his various initiatives, such as the free cooking classes he organized in North London to teach underserved communities how to prepare healthy meals from scratch. He also shares his critique of the COP27 conference, where he was a speaker, pointing out the lack of focus on food systems despite their role in addressing climate change. Klaus reflects on his academic background and how traditional medical models often fail to account for the importance of nutrition. He credits his shift to a plant-based lifestyle to reading The China Study during a bike tour across South America. This experience eventually led to the creation of Plant Based News, an award-winning platform with nearly 4 million followers on social media and 80 million monthly impressions. Klaus reflects the challenges and rewards of building a platform that has become a global voice for sustainability.

About Klaus Mitchell

Klaus Mitchell has always had a passion for health and nutrition, initially coming top of his year for Human Biosciences BSc from the University of Exeter, and then doing a masters in The Genetics of Human Disease MSc on a full scholarship at University College London. Upon graduating in 2015, Klaus launched Plant Based News to raise awareness around the health and environmental benefits of a plant-based diet, which now boasts over 4million followers on social media. In 2021, Plant Based News raised over £1 million via the investment platform SeedRS to scale up and expand its reach.

Klaus has been an author of an article published in the journal of Public Health Nutrition, which explored the effect of diet on various health markers; was script editor on the groundbreaking Netflix documentary Seaspiracy; and directs an annual documentary series on Plant Based News, showcasing the developments in the sustainability and alternative protein sector.

About Plant Based News

Plant Based News is a mission-led impact media platform focused on elevating the plant-based diet and its benefit to human health, the planet, and animals.