Study Finds Cooking Smells Are Actually Air Pollution

It's not just your home cooking that's the problem.

The smell of cooking food can be a mouth-watering temptation when we're hungry, whether we're walking through our neighborhoods and smell someone's dinner through their window or entering a restaurant and getting a whiff of what the kitchen is whipping up. And while these smells are often welcomed by people, it turns out they can have a negative effect on the world around us. 

A recent study published in the Atmospheric Chemistry & Physics journal by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration looks at the possible pollutant effects of cooking smells from our own kitchens and other sources like food trucks and street vendors. Scientists at NOAA's Chemical Sciences Laboratory spent years exploring lesser-known sources of urban air pollution and concluded: "If you can smell it, there’s a good chance it’s impacting air quality."

To do this, they focused on three cities—Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Boulder, Colorado—to study volatile organic compounds (VOCs) related to cooking. “What we’re looking at from cooking are primarily oxygenated VOCs, or volatile organic compounds," study lead author Matt Coggon said in a statement. "These are quite reactive in the air, so we expect they’ll be important for air quality."

“Over the years we’ve measured all sorts of different VOCs across the U.S. from different sources, like vehicles, wildfire smoke, agriculture, and consumer products,” Goggon continued. "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."

Related: These Are the U.S. Cities With the Worst Air Pollution in 2024

The most surprising results came out of Sin City. In downtown Las Vegas, scientists found that 50 percent of the human-caused VOC emissions were from volatile chemical products (VCPs) such as personal care products, fragrances, paints, and adhesives; the remaining half was split nearly equally between cooking emissions and vehicle exhaust. They also found similarly concerning elevated levels in L.A. and nearby Pasadena. 

The next step for the team is to determine how much ozone may be attribute to these cooking emissions. Their goal, Coggon said, is to help leaders in their efforts to tamp down on air pollution. "It’s crucial to have the full picture of emissions and sources to help policy-makers understand the effectiveness of their decisions," he noted. 

It looks like some unpleasant smells like gasoline and smog aren't the only destructive odors in the air.