Forget canola and corn, soybean and peanut oil. Soon we may all be cooking with oil made from algae.

A company called TerraVia is marketing an edible algae oil — Thrive Culinary Algae Oil — that may be the first of its kind. The forward-thinking cooking oil is said to be sustainable (made from a highly renewable food source) and healthy. According to the Thrive website, it is higher in monounsaturated fat than other cooking oils; about one tablespoon of it contains about as much of this “good” fat as does one whole avocado.

The site also boasts that this pond-borne product (actually, the algae in the oil was “originally sourced from the sap of chestnut trees in Germany and a freshwater pond in the Netherlands,” Munchies reports) has a lower percentage of saturated fat than any other cooking oil — a whopping 75 percent less saturated fat than olive oil.

TerraVia says algae oil — which is fermented in a few days, using renewable plant sugars, and is expeller-pressed, refined and bottled in a waste-free process — is better not only for the heart, but for the earth as well.

According to the Thrive site, Thrive algae oil (which, it must be noted, is said not to taste like whatever you might think algae oil would taste like) is on track to be “one of the most sustainably produced cooking oils,” with more of it “produced per acre of land, and [with] a lower carbon and water footprint, than nearly all cooking oils.”

Worth a fry? Fry not?

Photo courtesy of @thrivealgae