The potential of future foods for sustainable and healthy diets

Altering diets is increasingly acknowledged as an important solution to feed the world’s growing population within the planetary boundaries. In our search for a planet-friendly diet, the main focus has been on eating more plant-source foods, and eating no or less animal-source foods, while the potential of future foods, such as insects, seaweed or cultured meat has been underexplored. Here we show that compared to current animal-source foods, future foods have major environmental benefits while safeguarding the intake of essential micronutrients. The complete array of essential nutrients in the mixture of future foods makes them good-quality alternatives for current animal-source foods compared to plant-source foods. Moreover, future foods are land-efficient alternatives for animal-source foods, and if produced with renewable energy, they also offer greenhouse gas benefits. Further research on nutrient bioavailability and digestibility, food safety, production costs and consumer acceptance will determine their role as main food sources in future diets. Human diets strongly affect prospects for relative sustainability, affecting health, land, water, biodiversity and livelihoods. This study finds that select ‘future foods’, including insects, seaweed and cultured meat, provide major environmental benefits compared with current animal-source foods while safeguarding key micronutrients essential for human health.