Environmental Impacts of Novel Foods in Diets: Incorporating Nutritious Protein Alternatives in Optimized European Diets and Meals View Digital Media

Focused Discussion
Rachel Mazac  

Global food systems face the challenge of providing healthy and adequate nutrition through sustainable means, exacerbated by climate change and increasing demand for protein by the world’s growing population. Recent advances in novel food production technologies (e.g., cultured meat, cellular agriculture) demonstrate potential solutions for improving the sustainability of food systems. Since little research exists on the nutritional content and environmental impact of novel/future foods (NFFs) in meal and diet level comparisons, models are needed to fully understand the environmental impacts of incorporating novel foods in diets. This study compared the environmental impacts of current European average and vegan diets with diets including NFFs. The environmental impacts of the foods were based on life cycle assessment (LCA) studies. We optimized current European diets using linear programming to model possible future options for reducing the environmental impacts of food consumption while meeting nutritional and cultural acceptability constraints. We also demonstrate the potential impact reductions with example meals where animal-sourced proteins are replaced with plant-based and NFF proteins. Replacing meat in current diets with NFFs reduces global warming potential, water use, and land use by more than half and still meets nutrition constraints. This model also meets cultural acceptability constrains for currently consumed foods and assumes that NFFs would be acceptable. NFFs offer possibilities for nutritious, less environmentally damaging future European diets, and can feasibly replace currently consumed animal-sourced proteins if produced and widely available at-scale.