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Abstract

Efforts to make food systems more sustainable have emphasized reducing adverse environmental impacts of agriculture. In contrast, chemical and biological processes that could produce food without agriculture have received comparatively little attention or resources. Although there is a possibility that someday a wide array of attractive foods could be produced chemosynthetically, here we show that dietary fats could be synthesized with <0.8 g CO2-eq kcal−1, which is much less than the >1.5 g CO2-eq kcal−1 now emitted to produce palm oil in Brazil or Indonesia. Although scaling up such synthesis could disrupt agricultural economies and depend on consumer acceptance, the enormous potential reductions in greenhouse gas emissions as well as in land and water use represent a realistic possibility for mitigating the environmental footprint of agriculture over the coming decade.