Have you ever wondered what astronauts will eat on a long space journey to Mars? Well, scientists may have cracked the code! They have designed a meal that has all the necessary ingredients to sustain astronauts during a multi-year off-Earth trip. However, if you’re a meat lover, I have some bad news for you.
Image credit: ACS Food Science & Technology
This space-faring dish is a completely vegetarian meal, carefully crafted so that each ingredient can be grown in space. The scientists behind this groundbreaking creation aimed to find a combination of fresh ingredients that would meet the nutritional needs of an astronaut while minimizing the amount of water needed to grow them. Factors such as the amount of fertilizer, time to grow, space needed, and the possibility of recycling inedible parts of the meal were also taken into consideration.
So, what’s on the menu? The chosen ingredients for this perfect meal include soybeans, poppy seeds, barley, kale, peanuts, sweet potato, and sunflower seeds. While this meal may not provide every single nutrient required, it covers most of the bases, with supplements making up the difference. In fact, the researchers published their meal in the ACS Food Science & Technology and even cooked it to try it out themselves. And guess what? They loved it! One tester mentioned that they wouldn’t mind eating this meal all week if they were an astronaut, and others even went back for seconds.
However, it’s important to note that this study was specifically designed for the needs of male astronauts. To cater to the needs of female astronauts and to expand the variety of crops available, scientists plan to run a similar model and collect more data.
Lead author Shu Liang, from the University of Adelaide’s School of Chemical Engineering, emphasized the importance of identifying combinations of crops that can be successfully grown together to provide a balanced and palatable diet for astronauts. This research is a crucial step toward the feasibility of long-term human space missions, such as a journey to Mars.
So, if you’ve ever fantasized about being an astronaut and wondered what you would eat in space, now you know! The perfect space flight meal for Mars colonists has been revealed, and while it may not satisfy your meat cravings, it’s a remarkable culinary achievement for the future of space exploration.
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