Analysis: Producing food on Mars could change the way we eat on Earth

What can humans eat on Mars? With space agencies, including the NASA and the National Space Administration of China, hoping to send manned missions to Mars in the next two decades, and tech billionaires like Elon Musk developing plans to colonize the red planet feeding a Martian community would be a key issue to be resolved.

With a round trip taking over a year, Mars is too far away to take. And it costs $10,000 to lift a single pound of material from Earth, meaning space explorers wouldn’t be able to bring their own supplies either. If humanity makes it to the red planet, we will have to develop self-sustaining systems to produce food in one of the most inhospitable environments imaginable.

Preparing a Martian meal would be one of the most technically challenging problems our species has ever faced. Outside the Earth, every molecule of water, every fragment of organic matter and every photon of energy is a vital resource that cannot be wasted. A community on Mars would be exposed to punishing radiation and temperatures that could range from -104.4°C to 21°C. Tasty and nutritious meals would be crucial to the psychological and physical health of space pioneers.

But it would be worth the effort. The technology that would allow us to sustain life on Mars could help solve some of our most pressing problems.

Let’s walk through our vision of what a resident of the red planet would eat on a typical day — and how the technology needed to produce that food could benefit life here on Earth.

Breakfast

Our Martian starts the day with a protein-rich chocolate chip breakfast bar, washed down with a cup of coffee.

Coffee on Mars would be like coffee on Earth, either cheaper instant coffee (with caffeine and artificial flavor) or more expensive real beans that would be a luxury produced in a domed crater that serves as a giant greenhouse. Solar panels, filters and mirrors mounted on balloons would harvest the little sunlight that reaches Mars to illuminate the greenhouse, while filtering out harmful radiation.

The real magic, however, is in the breakfast bar. It is made from algae grown in ponds filled with water that would be harvested by melting ice found in Martian regolith (sandy soil).

The algae would be fertilized with locally mined minerals and carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. This high-protein product would be created to mimic the taste and texture of grains, such as oatmeal, that are commonly found on the earthly breakfast table.

While eating seaweed may seem strange, many of us have already consumed spirulina, which is a blue-green algae (cyanobacterium) known to be highly nutritious.

Lunch

Lunch takes place in the main dining hall, where every inch of free space is filled with greenery, because a basic design principle on Mars is to ensure that every photon of solar energy is used to grow plants. On the menu, a leaf salad with vegetable protein cubes and seasoned with salted seaweed flakes, accompanied by a milkshake.

Green salads are grown in hydroponic solutions under LED lights that are timed to ensure each plant receives the right wavelength of light, at the right intensity, and at the right time to optimize growth.

Most of these plants are grown underground, protected from radiation, in an atmosphere enriched with carbon dioxide (plants generally do better when carbon dioxide levels are a little higher than what humans are comfortable with).

The seaweed is grown in the ponds along with the seaweed that went to the breakfast bar.

The accompanying milkshake is made from dairy proteins produced in specially designed fermentation facilities that use microorganisms to convert starches and sugars into dairy products.

Most of the technologies that go into this lunch menu already exist. Today, vertical farms grow plants indoors and out of sunlight in major cities around the world. While the number of crops they currently produce is limited, within five years many more fruits and vegetables will be produced year-round indoors, regardless of location, helping to ensure food security.

And eco-friendly, cow-free dairy products are already on supermarket shelves. For example, California-based Perfect Day uses fungi to produce dairy protein that is molecularly identical to whey protein in cow’s milk and has been used to make cream cheese, yogurt, and ice cream.

Dinner

Dinner starts with a tomato and avocado appetizer garnished with seeds and nuts, followed by slices of salmon sashimi and boiled potatoes. For dessert, ice cream and small cakes are served alongside fresh fruit. As an extravagance, there’s even a little Martian wine.

The vegetables and berries come from the same vertical farms that produced the green salads served at lunch, while the nuts, avocados and grapes for wine come from the small number of tree crops planted in the greenhouses, which have different zones designed to mimic different Earth biomes. .

As trees take up more space and only produce harvest after a few years of growth, these delicacies are considered a luxury on Mars.

Sashimi comes from salmon stem cells, grown in a laboratory on Earth and now grown in bioreactors until they are ready to be 3D printed into firm, flavorful pieces. Potatoes are a throwback, produced the old-fashioned way in the greenhouse.

As potato cultivation uses less space and fertilizer than grain crops like wheat and rice, sweets served as a dessert are also made from potato starch.

All the technologies that support dining are in the works on Earth today – for example, California-based startup Wildtype is breeding salmon for sushi by growing cells extracted from salmon eggs.

But cellular agriculture is still in the early stages of becoming commercially viable – Singapore is currently the only country to approve cell-based meat for consumer consumption.

We have not yet produced it at scale and more research is needed to develop cost-effective growth media that rapidly growing cells need.

There is also a lot of work to be done to identify and cultivate the stem cell lines needed to make the different types of muscle and fat responsible for the taste and texture of a good piece of meat.

Evening snack

Most of us crave a little comfort food at the end of the day, so we figure our future space explorers will need to relax a bit too — with a few fried salty protein balls and a carbonated drink or potato-based spirits vodka drink.

back to earth

Right now, we desperately need to find new ways to feed people here on Earth, because our food systems are a mess.

Food production is responsible for a third of all global human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, uses more land and water than any other human activity, and is the biggest source of water pollution.

Feeding Earth’s human population comes at the expense of biodiversity, leading to species extinction and habitat loss. Yet at the same time, a third of the world’s food is wasted. Malnutrition, obesity and hunger are on the rise.

Working to establish a community on Mars will likely give us tools that will help solve some of these issues.

Everything — habitable space, water and plant nutrients — will be in short supply on Mars, which means powering a city on the red planet will teach us how to become much more efficient on Earth.

But technologies are not a panacea, and the benefits of building a Martian food system go beyond innovations like cellular meat. That’s because, ironically, building a city on Mars would also help us reconnect with the logic of nature.

On Earth, nature works in cycles. A leaf falls from a tree, decomposes and returns to the ground, where it helps another leaf to grow. But Earth’s agriculture no longer follows these cycles; instead, we consume resources and create waste.

A food system on Mars cannot work that way. On Mars, fermentation facilities would be fed with starches and cellulose left over after the food plants were harvested and processed.

Each organic waste will be carefully composted and returned to the production process, creating a circular food system, so that waste from one step immediately becomes inputs to another.

As we develop advanced food production technologies and design closed-loop food systems capable of powering Mars, we are also developing the technologies and skills needed to rework the food system here on Earth.

By launching humans to another planet, we can learn to save our own.