California scientists suggest a strategy to ‘eat our way’ out of the climate crisis

Commercializing the production of synthetic dietary fats could relieve pressure on a global agricultural sector that is struggling to decarbonize, a new study has found.

The widespread manufacture of farm-free food could yield numerous environmental and societal benefits — enabling people to “eat our way” out of a burgeoning climate crisis, according to the study authors, who published their findings Monday in Nature Sustainability.

Some benefits would include reductions in water use and pollution, greater local control over food production and decreases in weather-related shortage risks, per the study. Such a shift could also lessen the need for low-paying and physically taxing labor, while returning farmlands to their natural state and enhancing biodiversity.

“Large-scale synthesis of edible molecules through chemical and biological means without agricultural feedstocks is a very real possibility,” lead author Steven Davis, a professor of Earth system science at the University of California, Irvine, said in a statement.

“Such ‘food without the farm’ could avoid enormous quantities of climate-warming emissions while also safeguarding biodiverse lands that might otherwise be cleared for farms,” Davis added.

The raw materials for the farm-free synthesis of fats would be the same as those used by plants: hydrogen in water and carbon dioxide from the air, the researchers explained.

The authors said they focused their attention on fats, rather than carbohydrates or proteins, as they are the “simplest nutrients to synthesize thermochemically.”

Doing so, they explained, would be comparable to the processes that underly large-scale soaps-making and polymer chemistry.

Agriculturally derived fats generate about 1 to 3 grams of emitted carbon dioxide per thousand calories, the authors determined.

Molecularly identical synthetic fats — created using natural gas feedstock — would generate less than a gram of equivalent emissions, according to the authors. And if renewable resources powered that process, that number would be nearly zero.

To evaluate the potential of a widescale switch to synthetics, the scientists focused on the emissions generated and farmland consumed by two dominant oil crops: soy and oil palm.

They calculated that about half of soy and oil palm calories account for about three-quarters of both the greenhouse gas emissions and land usages that are linked to soy and oil agriculture.

While the importance of soy protein might limit the replacement of soybean oil for synthetic alternatives, oil palm has no critical co-products alongside its oil, according to the study.

Substituting synthetic fats for palm oil alone would help producing countries cumulatively reduce about 29 percent of the emissions they generate and about 15 percent of the biodiverse tropical land they consume, the researchers found.

“I like the idea of not depending on photosynthesis for everything we eat,” Davis said. “At whatever scale, synthesizing food will alleviate competition between natural ecosystems and agriculture, thereby avoiding the many environmental costs of farming.”

Nonetheless, Davis and his co-authors acknowledged that people might be wary of accepting food that was generated in this manner.

One solution to this issue would be to primarily use synthetic fats in processed foods, he explained.

“Folks may be less concerned about what kind of fat is in a store-bought cookie or pie crust because they don’t know what’s in there right now,” Davis added.