Evaluating the Sustainability and Nutritional Benefits of Alternative Production Systems and Foods

The food system currently contributes to major negative externalities including greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, water degradation and major nutrient imbalances, e.g. leading to conditions like type 2 diabetes. Improving food qualities and reducing negative environmental impacts are both essential and of increasing urgency. Novel production methods needs to be evaluated objectively and the limits to them assessed. Niche production may be apparently successful, but feeding nations well and with low impacts must be implemented at scale and this needs critical analysis, e.g. a recent Cranfield study showed that a 100% conversion to organic producing in England and Wales would increase GHG emissions. Vertical farming exists in subterranean niches under cities, but can this operate at effective commercial scale? Understanding and quantifying the biophysical limits to supply is critical for the future to enable sustainable consumption with greatly reduced negative environmental impacts.

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) has been used to evaluate individual foods and whole diets, but the explicit inclusion of nutritional properties within analyses is still tentative. The social acceptability of producing and consuming some novel foods could be a major obstacle to uptake.

Two major food areas are considered: (a) meats and alternative high protein foods and (b) high value horticultural crops (for flavour and micronutrient supply). Examples are (but not limited to): plant and fungal proteins (as whole and processed foods), insects for human food and animal (including fish) feed, cultured meat, vertical farming and associated high technology horticultural production methods (hydro and aeroponic methods), both using natural and artificial lighting. Primary production of meats (especially from ruminants) tend to create very high GHG emissions, while much high value horticultural produce is produced in high energy product systems, imported by air freight or imported from highly water stressed areas. Producing alternatives to meats and producing more high value horticultural produce in lower impacting systems is clearly needed.

The hypothesis to be tested is that emerging alternative foods and production methods can make significant improvements in reducing negative environmental effects while promoting better nutrition.
The objectives are:
Identify and scrutinise current and emerging foods and production systems, especially alternatives to meat and systems for high value fresh produce.

Develop the Cranfield LCA food system model to address most promising alternative foods and systems, initially using preliminary prospective LCAs of the new approaches.

Extend the model method to account explicitly for nutrient content enabling this to be part of a functional unit.

Use the food system model (with prospective LCAs) to explore major changes in protein and high value horticultural produce and to identify most promising alternatives to study these in greater detail.
Develop the prospective LCAs with novel primary data to evaluate exemplars in detailed LCAs.

Integrate the environmental LCAs with Social LCA.

Evaluate the limits to production, healthy nutrient supply and acceptability of novel foods and systems