A new research from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has found that the delicious smell of food cooking at restaurants, food trucks and street vendors might be negatively impacting air quality. Researchers at NOAA's Chemical Sciences Laboratory (CSL) released the startling findings from a multilayer study of what they call "underappreciated sources" of urban air pollution. They focused on three cities in the United States - Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Boulder in Colorado - where they measured human-caused volatile organic compounds (VOCs) related to cooking.
"If you can smell it, there's a good chance it's impacting air quality," researchers said in the study.
For the research, experts measured all sorts of different VOCs across the US from different sources like vehicles, wildfire smoke, agriculture and consumer products. "We kept seeing a specific class of compound in the urban measurements, what we call long-chain aldehydes, that we couldn't explain from these other sources," study author Matt Coggon said.
The researchers found that Las Vegas, which has one of the highest number of eateries in the United States, has persistent air quality issues. On average, 21% of the total mass of VOCs present in Vegas' outdoor air were from "cooking activities," NOAA estimated.
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The administration also found elevated levels of VOCs in Los Angeles and Pasadena, California. Overall, researchers concluded that air pollution from cooking is vastly underestimated and could account for nearly a quarter of VOCs in urban areas. The problem is even more acute indoors and inside homes, experts warned.
"Cooking emissions could be the single largest missing source of urban VOCs in current air quality models, which could have important ramifications for air quality management," the study said.
What this means for air quality management remains to be seen. But having the data, Mr Coggon believes, is the first step. "It's crucial to have the full picture of emissions and sources to help policymakers understand the effectiveness of their decisions," he said.
