How what we eat on Mars could determine the future of food on Earth

When the first Korean went to space in 2008, kimchee flew, too. Space kimchee is no ordinary kimchee. Usually teeming with beneficial microbes, the fermented gochugaru– and garlic-coated cabbage needed to be bacteria-free lest cosmic rays cause them to mutate.

To create space-ready kimchee, scientists at the Korea Food Research Institute zapped it with radiation, killing the bacteria but retaining 90 per cent of the flavour, according to the New York Times.

Sealed in cans or plastic packages, the scientists stymied any chance of rogue fermentation, which could have caused the kimchee to bubble over in the spaceship. They also dulled the aroma by as much as half, in an effort to appeal to the other astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS).

Their space kimchee “looked like it was 100 years old,” Soyeon Yi, South Korea’s first (and so far, only) astronaut to fly into space, told NPR. And though it wasn’t especially tasty, ”still I like it, because I can feel my home.”

Evan Fraser, the director of the University of Guelph’s Arrell Food Institute and co-author of Dinner on Mars (ECW Press, 2022), recounts the story of space kimchi to illustrate a point.

Feeding astronauts on the ISS and beyond — into deep space and, ultimately, Mars — involves more than efficiency.

“We can’t ignore these psychosocial aspects of food, these emotional aspects of food,” says Fraser.

“When you think about space exploration, we’re acknowledging that people are going to be in very harsh, difficult environments. And so, these psychosocial aspects of food become even arguably more important than ever before. Because a good meal at the end of a day as an astronaut is going to be really, really intrinsic to the feeling of well-being.”

In Dinner on Mars, Fraser and co-author Lenore Newman — Canada Research Chair in Food Security and the Environment at the University of the Fraser Valley — delved into the agricultural technologies that will make feeding the red planet possible.

Newman and Fraser’s thought experiment of what people would eat in their imaginary Martian settlement of BaseTown also serves as a lesson in how we might improve food systems here on Earth.

Of all the technologies they investigated for Dinner on Mars, cellular agriculture and vertical farming have the potential to be “truly disruptive,” says Fraser, both in the positive and negative sense of the word.

On the one hand, these technologies are disrupting systems that might have problems associated with them, he explains. On the other, managing the way they unfold will be a challenge — for sustainability and animal welfare, as well as for the people whose livelihoods could be upended.

At the outset of their pandemic project, Newman suspected that a Martian food system would be based on plants and algae with animal agriculture playing a minor role. She was surprised by how difficult it was to make the case for animals on Mars, which served as “a reminder of how inefficient it really is to produce animal protein.” There are no cows or pigs in BaseTown and no chickens, either.

Since importing these animals to Mars is unlikely, we’ll have to do things differently, Newman concludes. Cellular agriculture such as precision fermentation (which uses microbes to produce proteins) could have a huge impact, both on and off planet Earth.

“If (these technologies) displace animal agriculture to any degree, it frees up massive amounts of land that could be rewilded, for example, to capture carbon and return to ecosystem services,” says Newman. “The potential is incredible.”

Animal agriculture is an area where Newman and Fraser disagree. Through her research on cattle, Newman came to the conclusion that “cows are perhaps the most destructive invasive species on Earth.”

Settlers displaced the bison to make room for cattle on the Canadian plains, for example. Unlike cows, bison are designed for life on the prairie, Newman underscores: they live outside in the winter, eat snow and use their hoofs or muzzles to break through ice to find water.

“They’re an animal that’s supposed to be on the plains, and we’ve put cows there. And it’s hugely inefficient,” says Newman. “That’s something I’ll take out of this, is, ‘Huh, even on Earth, if we’re going to eat animals, they should be a lot smaller than cows.'”

Fraser sees animal agriculture as a way of creating economic values in grassland ecosystems and considers it an important part of many sustainable food systems where livestock recycle nutrients by grazing and leaving manure behind.

“I’m not willing to go as far as saying the end of animal agriculture is nigh because of these technologies,” he says. “What I am going to say, though, is that many of the ways we currently do animal agriculture, especially in confined feeding operations, have a lot of very serious animal welfare problems to it. It has a huge environmental burden.”

Those systems need to be replaced, Fraser emphasizes. A range of alternative proteins are likely candidates: plant proteins and, to a greater extent, cellular agriculture.

In the next 10 years, Fraser expects “remarkable advances” in precision fermentation. He predicts that though cellular agriculture won’t completely overtake its animal-based counterpart, it will help define how we feed ourselves in the future.

Products such as chicken nuggets, frozen beef burritos, ice cream and industrial cheese will become less dependent on animals and more dependent on microbes for their ingredients.

“Those will — gradually, at first, and then I think with increasing speed — start appearing on our grocery store shelves. And there will be a transition away from traditional livestock towards those,” says Fraser. “It won’t be 100 per cent, but there will be a whole lot of stuff we currently think of as coming from an animal today.”

Mars’ lack of livestock and rolling fields of grasses (such as wheat, rye, rice, oats, millet, corn and barley) could result in the most significant diet shift, Newman and Fraser highlight.

People have been breeding grasses for thousands of years. Large swaths of Earth are well-suited to growing them, making them easy and efficient to produce, says Newman.

The same cannot be said for Martian regolith (soil), which is “quite toxic.” Martian settlers will need to use blue-green algae (cyanobacteria) to unlock nutrients.

In BaseTown, varieties of algae are the foundation of the food system. Mars dwellers eat a protein- and vegetable-heavy diet — ”in pleasant but standard cafeteria surroundings” — with carbohydrates playing a lesser role.

“I can’t imagine a scenario where carbohydrates coming from grains represent anything like the same sort of contribution to our total net diet that it does on Earth,” says Fraser.

And that might not be a bad thing, the authors suggest. As a category, grains should make up about a fifth of our diet, yet are roughly half of the global food supply, Fraser explains. They’re easy to grow, taste good and are culturally embedded. But there’s a disconnect between what nutritionists recommend we eat and what our agricultural system produces.

By going to Mars, we reconnect ourselves with the logic of nature on Earth.

Evan Fraser

“(Fewer grains) might actually lead to better health outcomes, which is an interesting little twist,” says Newman. “Although if I was there, I would miss my pasta, for sure.”

Fraser adds: “Imagining a scenario where it’s much harder to produce grass, and grass products then become a much smaller part of our diet, maybe there are nutritional benefits to that, if it’s done right.”

Being on a planet where water and fossil fuels are no longer abundant, the weather unco-operative and the soil infertile could result in a more efficient food system that’s tailored to nutritional needs, he underscores.

In this way, adopting a Martian mindset on Earth could go a long way toward addressing issues such as climate change, biodiversity loss and threats to ocean life.

“If we are going to do all of those things, it will require a far, far thriftier, far, far more parsimonious shift in our approach to these problems in our culture,” says Fraser. “And that may be okay, because we can imagine healthy, nutritionally balanced, culturally appropriate foods coming out the other end. But without perhaps the wastes and the excesses that the current earthly food system has run it through.”

These wastes and excesses have broken what American novelist Wendell Berry called “nature’s elegant solution.” In the closed loops of nature, there is no waste, Newman and Fraser point out. Each element feeds into the next.

Closing the loops in our food systems, they explain, is essential to both settling Mars and living more sustainably on Earth. And we don’t have to look very far to see that it can be done.

In Dinner on Mars, Newman and Fraser reference Cher Mereweather’s RePURPOSE project, a circular meal of fish and chips and a pint of beer that started with spent grain at Wellington Brewery in Guelph, Ont.

Farmed insects ate the spent grains from beer production. Farmed fish then ate the insects. The fish excrement fertilized fields of potatoes. Bakers used waste grain and yeast to make sourdough bread, which chefs used to bread the fish.

“That’s a great illustrative example of what you can do when you close the nutrient cycles. And as every school kid knows, nature works in cycles, not in long, stretched out lines,” says Fraser.

Because Earth is so rich in natural resources, humans have developed systems that make sense economically but not ecologically, he says. “By going to Mars, we reconnect ourselves with the logic of nature on Earth.”

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As a result of contemplating space for about a year, Fraser is both excited by the technological potential and awestruck by Earth’s wonders.

“Perhaps by thinking about living on another planet, we’ll develop the tools to save the one that we actually depend on. Because it’s really the only one we’re ever going to have.”

While he hopes that humans make the seven-month trip to Mars, he wouldn’t want to go. “Earth is too good,” says Fraser, laughing.

On the flip side, if she were given the chance to set up food programs on Mars, Newman would happily board a spaceship. She believes we will build Martian cities and that life on the Red Planet will fundamentally alter who humans are as a species.

Newman suspects settling Mars will result in a flow of food and ideas back-and-forth, similar to the dynamic between the Western and Eastern hemispheres during the Columbian Exchange. A Martian-born engineer specializing in cyanobacteria, for instance, might visit Earth to help address our food problems.

“There will be ‘before Mars’ and ‘after Mars.’ And there will be a discontinuity. It will totally change how we think of humanity,” says Newman.

“But the truth is, it’s going to be dangerous. It’s going to be scary. People are going to fail and die in space populating it. And there’s probably no way around that, but that’s always been true. Humans innately look over the horizon, and we’re not going to stop.”

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