What’s for Dinner on Mars?
Dinner on Mars: The Technologies that Will Feed the Red Planet and Transform Agriculture on Earth by Lenore Newman and Evan Fraser explores the food science, technology, and production methods it will take to feed a settlement on Mars, while meeting the needs of the estimated 9.8 billion people on Earth by 2050. Here’s an excerpt from the book on the potential of cellular food.
One Order of Milk, Hold the Cow!
The question of producing decent cheese on Mars can be made simple: Can we take our cumulative understanding of cheese science, umami, and terroir and combine them together to produce good cheese there? After all, despite their tasty versatility, sometimes oats aren’t enough. We want mozzarella that melts and stretches. We want brie with bite. And when we reach for our Stilton, we want it blue. But without cows or millennia-old microbiomes, is that possible?
Answering this means we need to dig into the space-age stuff, and this requires us to shift focus and meet the newest kid on the food block: cellular agriculture (cell-ag). This emerging technology proposes to produce meat and milk but without any animals. Cell-ag refers to a set of technologies that fall into two rough categories. The first is tissue farming, in which meat and other products are grown in an oversized petri dish called a bioreactor.1 The second approach is more like brewing and involves using yeast (or fungus or bacteria) that is modified to convert sugars into animal protein (instead of alcohol or other more common products of fermentation).
As we are writing, cell agriculture has exploded into the mainstream and every other day seems to bring new headlines that “yet another cell-ag start-up” had struck venture capital gold, raising hundreds of millions of dollars to bring chickenless chicken burgers, finless fish sticks, and cow-free milkshakes to the market.2