Will Cultured Oil Bring a More Cultured Food Future?
It takes a lot of resources to make the fats we commonly use today. Producing palm, coconut, canola, and soy oil from plants comes along with a price tag for the health of our planet.
However, serial entrepreneur Jeff Nobbs thinks he has a solution. As a teen, Nobbs built and sold his own e-commerce company. He then opened two restaurants before deciding to work on addressing humanity’s fat problems by founding his company Zero Acre Farms in 2020. And we discussed his plan on a recent episode of The Business for Good Podcast that’s definitely worth a listen.
Palm Oil Comes with Big Downsides
Let’s use palm oil as an example. It’s found in over half of packaged items sold in the United States, including ice cream, cookie dough, and cosmetics. Even cleaning products contain palm oil.
One of the major advantages of palm oil is that its yield is greater than the cost of production compared to other sources of vegetable oil. As international demand for palm oil and its products rises, plantations dedicated to cultivating it are proliferating in the tropics.
However, the gains from cultivation of this popular commodity come at the expense of equatorial forests. These biomes provide diverse and biologically distinct habitats for numerous endangered animal and plant species. They also support many first nations human communities.
Palm oil trees only grow close to the equator. As a result, cultivating them necessitates destroying large existing areas of tropical forest. This practice threatens human, animal, and plant life, and makes the world’s population poorer, less healthy, and less secure.
For example, first nations Indonesians have lost countless acres of once-lush habitats to expanding plantations, imperiling their ability to access food, clean water, and shelter. While cattle ranching and meat production are the major drivers of global deforestation, they aren’t the only factors driving the destruction of the world’s forests. In both Indonesia and Malaysia, there is a direct connection between palm oil production and increasingly disastrous levels of deforestation.
Addressing the World’s Fat Production Problem
On the show, Nobbs and I discussed the many benefits of replacing traditional vegetable oils with healthier and more sustainable food oils produced through microbial fermentation.
Zero Acre Farms is currently selling its first fermentation-based cultured oil online. Rather than growing plants to extract fats from them, Nobbs is growing microbes that produce an inordinate amount of fat. And as I learned from trying it, the oil performs quite well. It’s helped Zero Acre Farms build a team of three dozen staff and close a recent $37 million funding round. Now the company’s focusing on scaling up and getting the word out about their eco-friendlier fats.
A Natural Process Yields a Healthier Product
Fermentation is a natural process that occurs when certain microorganisms transform sugars into other food compounds with high nutritive value. Examples include the transformation of milk into yogurt, or cabbage into sauerkraut. There are also microbial cultures that produce healthier fats, which is where Jeff is focused.
Think about the process involved in growing a plant and then squeezing out its relatively small amount of oil. It’s easy to see why the “labriculture” of fermentation might be a more efficient route to reach the same goal.
Zero Acres’ cultured oil is high in monounsaturated fats — the type found in heart-healthy macadamia nuts, avocados, and olive oil — so it provides notable health benefits. This is in contrast to the known negative effects of consuming certain saturated-fat vegetable oils. Palm oil is about 35 percent saturated fat, more than twice the percentage of olive oil. Coconut oil is 80 to 90 percent saturated fatty acids.
Better for the Planet
When Zero Acre Farms conducted a recent analysis, its found that its own process of microbe-based fermentation requires significantly fewer environmental resources even than soybeans. And soybeans are, environmentally speaking, a relatively efficient plant. If humans can use microbes to produce large quantities of monounsaturated fats, we can better sustain the earth’s habitats, and ourselves.
According to the company’s research, Zero Acre Farms’ fermentation process for making cultivated oil would result in an 86 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, 83 percent less water use, and 90 percent less land use than current agricultural practices.
Not too shabby.
So check out the episode, get inspired, and let me know what you think!
Paul Shapiro is the author of the national bestseller Clean Meat: How Growing Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World, the CEO of The Better Meat Co., a four-time TEDx speaker, and the host of the Business for Good Podcast.
