Dinner on Mars

If you're interested in worldbuilding for science fiction, then you know food is an important part of that. How a society produces and prepares food has a big impact on many other parts of their culture. And as Lenore Newman and Evan D.G. Fraser point out in their book Dinner on Mars: The Technologies That Will Feed the Red Planet and Transform Agriculture on Earth, thinking about food production in extreme environments can in turn change how we handle food on this planet.

This book was inspired by Zoom chats between the authors during the Covid lockdown, and they refer to that often in the text. However, the "meat" of the book is a thought experiment of how to feed the first colonists on Mars. The authors discuss what's possible--obtaining nutrients from the soil on Mars--and what isn't feasible--transporting animals or growing grains on the red planet. Given the challenges of living on a planet with little water, a thin atmosphere, and reduced sunlight intensity, future Martian colonists will have to be ingenious at maximizing their resources. They would have to rely on blue-green algae, yeast, and microbes to produce the building blocks of food, at least initially. Special arrangements would have to be made to grow plants on Mars (the plants would also produce oxygen and help us maintain a link with nature). The plants might have to be genetically engineered to be more efficient, and they could grown by robots that deliver the exact amount of fertilizer needed. Protein could be printed or grown in a lab, and cheese could be developed from yeast extracts. The authors optimistically end by imagining the types of meals Martian colonists would eat--protein bars for breakfast, salad and printed meat for lunch and dinner, with the occasional treat of something made from potatoes and maybe even a distilled beverage. They describe this as a much healthier diet than what we currently eat and point out that we need those technologies here and now to change our food supply. However, getting these technologies to the small farms around the world may be as challenging as developing them.

Newman and Fraser write in an engaging style that make this book accessible to general readers. If I have to find a fault with their thought experiment, I think that they dismiss carbs too easily. Rice, corn, and pasta are staples in many cultures, and I doubt the first waves of colonists will want to do without them, even if these foods aren't optimally nutritious. If it's impractical to grow vast fields of wheat or rice paddies on Mars, then people will find other ways to create carbs. Perhaps yeasts will be used to churn out simple sugars that can be printed into starches and flours. Or perhaps plants with starchy roots can be modified to be more grain-like. I think the challenge of recreating specific dishes in space or another extreme environment might make for an interesting solarpunk story. 

If you were going to colonize another planet, what kind of food would you want to bring with you and why? Feel free to share in the comments.