In Dinner on Mars, the reader is reminded not to take food production on any planet for granted.
Growing food on the Red Planet won’t be easy. A summer day may reach 70°F (20°C) near the equator. However, at night, the temperature can plummet to -100°F (-73°C) [1]. That’s a little too chilly for tomatoes! As far as science can tell us, water will be scarce, and the soil has quantities of perchlorate, which can cause lung cancer in humans and inhibit plant growth. Going outside will be impossible without a space suit because of all the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
So, what’s for dinner? In their book Dinner on Mars, Lenore Newman and Evan Fraser look for the answer. Newman is the director of the Food and Agriculture Institute at the University of the Fraser Valley (UFV) in British Columbia. Fraser is the director of the Arrell Food Institute at the University of Guelph [2][3]. Their book is not based on science fiction imaginings but on knowledge gleaned from food production here on Earth.
Dinner on Mars explores the future of food, with the authors suggesting that if we can figure out how to eat well on Mars, we can apply that knowledge and live more sustainably here on Earth, too.
“The technologies in the book are all either in a prototype stage or available at scale,” Newman says.
Welcome to BaseTown
Newman and Fraser ask you to play along. As a new pioneer to the Red Planet, you arrive in 2080 at BaseTown, a gigantic biodome and the main population center of Mars’ 10,000 residents. Finding the food court, you order salmon sashimi, toasted seaweed, a garden salad, and a milkshake. The green salad was grown in hydroponic garden beds. Newman is currently researching vertical hydroponic farming at UFV [4].
“Here, in B.C., we rely on California for leafy greens,” she explains.
However, climate change, albeit drought or unrelenting rain in California, makes that food source unreliable. We need to grow our food, and vertical agriculture is something Newman thinks may be the answer. If the supply chain between California and B.C. is unreliable, imagine the perils of one that stretches between Earth and Mars—140 million miles apart [5][6]. ‘Local food’ takes on a new meaning on Mars.
The milkshake you’ve ordered on Mars is not milk but a fermentation product. In some parts of the world, you can already find ice cream, milk, chocolate bars, cheese, and cream cheese made with animal-free dairy proteins. Cellular agriculture involves growing proteins or fats through a cell culture (growing and propagating cells) or fermentation (getting a microorganism to produce your compound of interest), which UVF has been researching.
Martian Ways
Aside from fresh lettuce and synthetic milk, what other foods does Mars offer? In The Martian, Matt Damon grows potatoes to survive on the Red Planet. Are root crops even possible on Mars?
The answer lies in pond scum, cyanobacteria, to be more exact.
“It underpins the entire food chain,” Newman explains.
On Mars, this microbe could become a hero. On Earth, over-fertilized fields and livestock operations often cause nutrients to run into waterways, causing cyanobacteria to form in giant mats of floating scum. Newman and Fraser highlight European experiments where researchers grew cyanobacteria in a series of stainless-steel tanks that simulated the Martian atmosphere. It grew well, fixing nitrogen (an essential component of healthy soil for healthy plants), producing oxygen, and leaving nutrient-dense organic matter behind. But that is only part of what this bacteria can do for Mars [7].
Scattered throughout the book are other nuggets of research that prove the impossible is possible. There is hope that genetically engineered microorganisms will gobble up the harmful perchlorate in the Martian soil, making it viable for growing root crops such as beets and turnips. So, after chowing down in BaseTown’s food court and scraping the organic matter off your plate into an elaborate composting infrastructure, you will feel confident that when you are offered mashed potatoes for dinner, they have been grown in good soil.
Upgrading The Operating System
For Newman and Fraser, imagining life on Mars and writing a book was a fun distraction from the 2020 pandemic. However, they also make sure to land squarely back on Planet Earth. In the book’s final section, aptly titled “Upgrading the Operating System,” they suggest that by feeding a Martian city, we learn to feed ourselves better and how to use our resources here on Earth more efficiently.
The United States, for example, discards nearly 60 million tons of food every year that ends up rotting and emitting methane (a greenhouse gas more potent than CO2) in landfills [8]. The United Nations says inorganic fertilizers and livestock overgrazing cause soil degradation, compaction, erosion, and deforestation, affecting 34% of the world’s agricultural land [9].
“One of the neat take-home lessons is that when you don’t have the plentiful resources you have on Earth, you really have to create ecosystems and closed cycles,” Newman says. “If we did [the same] on Earth, we could achieve some of our planetary goals like lowering our carbon footprint, making food cheaper and more plentiful, and less resource-intensive.”
Her final words of advice for Earthlings?
“Don’t take food systems for granted.”
Footnotes
1.What is the temperature on Mars? | Space (space.com)
2.Food and Agriculture Institute > Meet the Team | (UFV.ca)
3.Fraser, Evan | Geography, Environment & Geomatics (uoguelph.ca)
4.Distance to Mars: How far away is the Red Planet? | Space (space.com)
5.Food and Agriculture Institute > The Research | (UFV.ca)
6.The Research > Cellular Agriculture > Local Cellular Agriculture | (UFV.ca)
8.Food Waste in America in 2024: Statistics & Facts | RTS (rts.com)
- U.N. report: The world’s farms stretched to ‘a breaking point’» Yale Climate Connections (yaleclimateconnections.org)
