Preliminary Automated Determination of Edibility of Alternative Foods: Non-Targeted Screening for Toxins in Red Maple Leaf Concentrate

Abstract

Alternative food supplies could maintain humanity despite sun-blocking global catastrophic risks (GCRs) that eliminate conventional agriculture. A promising alternative food is making leaf concentrate. However, the edibility of tree leaves is largely uncertain. To overcome this challenge, this study provides the methods for obtaining rapid toxics screening of common leaf concentrates. The investigation begins with a non-targeted approach using an ultra-high-resolution hybrid ion trap orbitrap mass spectrometer with electrospray ionization (ESI) coupled to an ultra-high pressure two-dimensional liquid chromatograph system on the most common North American leaf: the red maple. Identified chemicals from this non-targeted approach are then cross-referenced with the OpenFoodTox database to identify toxic chemicals. Identified toxins are then screened for formula validation and evaluated for risk as a food. The results after screening show that red maple leaf concentrate contains at least eight toxic chemicals, which upon analysis do not present substantial risks unless consumed in abundance. This indicates that red maple leaf is still a potential alternative food. The results are discussed in the context of expanding the analysis with open science and using leaf extract from other plants that are not traditionally used as foods to offset current global hunger challenges, and move to a more sustainable food system while also preparing for GCRs.

Rapid repurposing of pulp and paper mills, biorefineries, and breweries for lignocellulosic sugar production in global food catastrophes

“…There are several other risks to global agriculture; abrupt climate change, superweeds, crop pathogens, super crop pests, super bacterium, slow climate change that is extreme (>5 •C), or pollinator loss (Pearce et al, 2019). This raises the question of how much worse a shock to the global food production could be.…”

“…These alternative food solutions included natural gas digesting (methanotrophic) singlecelled protein, food from leaves (Pearce et al, 2019), sardines, mushroom or bacteria growth, ruminants, and lignocellulosic sugar production (Denkenberger and Pearce, 2014). This previous work estimated that cellulosic sugar could scale to reach 100% of global calorie requirements after one year (Denkenberger and Pearce, 2014).…”

“…Seaweed is expected to scale to meet global caloric requirements after 3-6 months (Mill et al, 2019). Initial screening for toxins in leaves found the red maple leaf to contain at least 8 toxic chemicals, but could be consumed in small quantities (Pearce et al, 2019). Building resilience in the food system is critical alongside continuity of supply (Seekell et al, 2017), but unless food is already being largely produced from bioresources, there is likely to be a large discontinuity in production globally during the gap between stored food running out, 4-6 months after the catastrophe, and the highlighted alternative foods beginning production (Baum et al, 2015).…”

U.S. Potential of Sustainable Backyard Distributed Animal and Plant Protein Production during and after Pandemics

“…The existing biomass could form an important source of food. For instance, leaves can be ground up and the liquid that is squeezed out can be boiled to form a leaf protein concentrate [117]. It may be possible to break remaining cellulose into edible sugar at the household scale [118].…”

Open source software toolchain for automated non‐targeted screening for toxins in alternative foods

“…Fortunately, high-resolution mass spectrometry (HRMS) has allowed for non-targeted screenings where no prior information is available for identification of unknowns in a sample [14] . Further, a recent study, provided the preliminary steps for obtaining a rapid toxics screening process of common leaf concentrates to be used for alternative foods [13] . In non-targeted screening, experimental evidence is needed to confirm the identification using a suitable algorithm.…”