Palm Oil's latest competition... Yeast?!

My last post hinted at being more conscious of the products we use and the food we eat in the context of environmental change. While the distinction between eating beef and chicken is easy, some products contain ingredients that have enormous environmental impacts, yet we may never have even heard of them!

Palm oil is derived from a tree species known as Elaeis guineensis (the African palm oil tree). While it originated in Africa the tree can be grown anywhere with a warm and moist climate, most notably South East Asia where 85% (World Wildlife Fund) of global palm oil is produced.

What other species thrive in warm and wet conditions? Answer: those that comprise a rainforest.

This is where the problems arises. Palm oil became the most consumed vegetable oil in the world in 2002 and while you may not cook with it you can be sure it is in a number of the products you use on a day to day basis such as shampoo or detergent. Such a high demand for the product means more and more land is needed to produce it. When this land inevitably overlaps with tropical forests the economic incentive is to clear the land and expand palm oil plantations.

Perhaps the most obvious change that occurs when rainforest is replaced with palm oil plantations is the change in biodiversity. An area which once would have contained literally millions of different species is reduced to the equivalent of a desert. Plantations exhibit monoculture whereby to be most efficient palm oil tree and only palm oil trees are grown and harvested.

A palm oil 'green desert'. 

These ecosystems are irreplaceable and so when they are gone, so too are the benefits that they bring (Bell and de Zylva, 2014), not to mention the loss of huge carbon sinks which remove CO2 from the atmosphere and produce O2 through photosysnthesis (Pan et al, 2011)

How can we reduce Palm Oil consumption?

The trouble with palm oil is that it's found in practically everything! This makes simply not using it very difficult and making conscientious consumer decisions almost impossible. Luckily it appears there may be an alternative. 

Yeast?!

Yes yeast. A very specific strain called Metschnikowia pulcherrima which has previously been used in South African wine-making produces an oil with very similar characteristics to that of palm oil. Importantly this yeast can be grown practically anywhere and survive off almost any organic feedstock! This means as long as the matter contains carbohydrates it could feasibly be used to kickstart the growth of the yeast (Whiffin, 2015)

No more deforestation? 

Land uses for yeast production would be massively lower than those of palm oil, up to 100 times less. Importantly, the production would not require the warm, moist conditions that oil palm trees do and therefore would not require land occupied by precious rainforest. 

There is real promise to this discovery as well. The laboratory that made this discovery has received significant backing. At the end of last year they received a £4.4 million grant to fund further research into scaling the process up to an industrial scale and determining if this would be viable globally (University of Bath, 2015).

In this video, lead engineer Dr Chris Chuck explains where they hope to take the project in the near future (credit to University of Bath). 

Many hurdles still await the engineers at Bath however it is inspiring to see work being done in areas such as this to create viable, and sometimes improved alternatives to established uses of natural resources. I'm certainly interested to see what alternatives are popping up in other aspects of the industrial farming business! Eco-friendly fertilisers, selective pesticides, less noxious cows?!