Study shows advantages of cellular agriculture

Replacing animal-source foods (ASFs) with novel or future foods (NFFs) – such as cultured milk, insect meal or mycoprotein – or plant-based protein-rich (PBPR) alternatives in European diets could reduce global warming potential, water use and land use each by over 81 to 84%. Finnish researchers headed by Prof. Dr Hannah Tuomisto, who explores the sustainability consequences of transforming the current food systems by large-scale utilisation of novel food production technologies, modeled how different ways of nutrition impact human health and sustainability comparing and combining meat-based diets, with plant-based protein-rich (PBPR) diets and NFF-based diets such as culture-based protein production.

Although the authors consider meat avoidance unrealistic, they have calculated that 60% of the negative environmental impacts could be elöiminated simply by replacing meat products with plant-based or cell culture-based protein. Thus they recommend to reduce meat consumption.

First author Rachel Mazac applied a linear programming model to identify optimal combinations of ASFs, PBPR options and NFFs with the goal of meeting nutritional adequacy, while minimising global warming potential, as well as water use and land use. Feasible consumption constraints related to cultural acceptability were also considered, as well as scalability potential. Overall, the authors found that substituting ASFs in European diets with NFFs (namely insect meal, cultured milk and microbial protein) could reduce all environmental impacts (global warming potential, water use and land use) by more than 80%, while being nutritionally adequate and meeting the constraints for what can be feasibly consumed (Nature Foods, doi: 10.1038/s43016-022-00489-9)

As most vegetarian consumers follow a process-based approach that postulates that healthy food can only be derived from biological systems such as plants instead from artificial processes, replacement of PBPRs by ASFs seems difficult. However, when PBPRs and NFFs are carefully supplemented with micronutrients such as vitamin B₁₂ acceptance for NFFs may improve.

However, perhaps the GHG impact of livestock production is consistently overestimated as livestock production produces only 27% CO₂, 29% N₂O but 44% methane (CH₄). While “cattle are very emissions-intensive because they produce a large amount of methane in their gut,” explains Prof. Dr. Raymond Pierrehumbert from the University of Oxford. “the way in which we generally describe methane emissions as CO₂ equivalent amounts can be misleading as methane only remains in the atmosphere for about 12 years whereas carbon dioxide persists and accumulates for millennia."