Do We Need to Farm Oil Crops?

When you pull a pie crust out of the freezer aisle at the grocery store or a sleeve of cookies off the shelf, it’s likely that one of the ingredients they contain is dietary fat, such as soybean or palm oil. These oils are agricultural products, but do they have to be?

A new study out of the University of California, Irvine, published in the journal Nature Sustainability, shows that chemically synthesized dietary fats, or food fats made scientifically in a factory—not harvested from a field—could be a viable way to reduce environmental impacts in the agriculture sector. 

“We could drastically reduce some of the land that we’re using for things like oil crops, if we were making these in a factory and not using land at all,” says Steven Davis, PhD, Earth System scientist and lead author on the paper.

The amount of global agricultural land used for oil crops has nearly tripled in the last 60 years, making it one of the top three categories of agricultural products in terms of land use.

Palm oil, for example, is in many processed foods at American supermarkets. It has also come under fire because palm oil plantations in Asia, Latin America and West Africa have resulted in deforestation and negative impacts on human communities. Decreased land demands could lead to reforestation or preservation, which may benefit ecosystem biodiversity and reduce water use.

“If we targeted just a small amount of some of the very worst offending sources of these oils, palm oil plantations or soybeans that are grown on areas recently cleared in the Amazon, we can make very large reductions in some of the greenhouse gas emissions,” says Davis.

Fats could be synthesized at scale, says Davis. Using a source of carbon dioxide and hydrogen, the