Dinner on Mars: The Technologies That Will Feed the Red Planet and Transform Agriculture on Earth

by Lenore Newman, Evan D. G. Fraser

Overview

“This culinary cosmic outing is as creative as it is informative.” — STARRED review, Publishers Weekly

From Impossible Burgers to lab-made sushi, two witty, plugged-in food scientists explore leading-edge AgTech for the answer to feeding a settlement on Mars — and 9 billion Earthlings too

Feeding a Martian is one of the greatest challenges in the history of agriculture. Will a Red Planet menu involve cheese and ice cream made from vats of fermented yeast? Will medicine cabinets overflow with pharmaceuticals created from engineered barley grown using geothermal energy? Will the protein of choice feature a chicken breast grown in a lab? Weird, wonderful, and sometimes disgusting, figuring out “what’s for dinner on Mars” is far from trivial. If we can figure out how to sustain ourselves on Mars, we will know how to do it on Earth too. In Dinner on Mars, authors Fraser and Newman show how setting the table off-planet will supercharge efforts to produce food sustainably here at home.

For futurists, sci-fi geeks, tech nuts, business leaders, and anyone interested in the future of food, Dinner on Mars puts sustainability and adaptability on the menu in the face of our climate crisis.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781770416628
Publisher:	ECW Press
Publication date:	10/11/2022
Pages:	232
Sales rank:	1,080,969
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.10(d)
Lexile:	1300L (what's this?)

About the Author

Lenore Newman is the Canada Research Chair in Food Security and the Environment at the University of the Fraser Valley. She is the author of the acclaimed Speaking in Cod Tongues: A Canadian Culinary Journey and the award-winning Lost Feast: Culinary Extinction and the Future of Food. She divides her time between Vancouver and Roberts Creek, BC.

Evan D.G. Fraser is the Director of the Arrell Food Institute at the University of Guelph. He is the author of Beef: The Untold Story of How Milk, Meat, and Muscle Shaped the World and Empires of Food: Feast, Famine, and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations. He lives in Guelph, ON, with his wife and three children.

Read an Excerpt

“And that, Evan, is what happens when you head out to the great unknown and don’t pack enough for lunch. It all comes down to food.”

Lenore leaned back in her chair and shivered a little, glancing out her window at the gray rain of Vancouver, Canada. At the other end of the Zoom call sat Evan in Ontario. He was shivering too, though the warmth of 2020’s summer was just starting to push back against a chilly spring.

***

On that day, we were having a bit of a brainstorm. The two of us had been chatting off and on for about two months. We’d been friends and colleagues for years, but with lockdown, our conversation picked up pace.

In the early days of the COVID-19 lockdown, we mostly moaned about lost travel. But in March 2020, all those other countries might as well have been on Mars.

And then, one fateful day, we realized there was a place we could go to and study a global food system if we used our imaginations: we could do a thought experiment on what it would take to live on Mars. This struck both of us as a silly idea at first, but as we pondered, this thought experiment morphed into a two-year mission, conducted over Zoom, one cramped claustrophobic room to another.

It was in that moment, in April 2020, when COVID was new, and there was no toilet paper anywhere, the two of us decided we should go to Mars, at least in spirit. And the first question, of course, was what would be for dinner once we got there? While this may seem like an odd question to ask, it is the one in most urgent need of an answer. Nearly two centuries after poor Franklin kissed his wife goodbye, loaded the last casks of fresh water, and sailed over the horizon, humanity is contemplating a journey into an ever-deeper desolation — outer space. And beyond that velvet blackness, Mars.

This book is about what the first Martian community must do to feed itself. As the two of us have gone on this imaginary mission, we’ve come to believe a Martian community can and will feed itself successfully, and that in doing so, develop technologies that will revolutionize agriculture on Earth.

Seem preposterous? We don’t think so. In our day jobs, we are academics. We write serious books, give serious lectures, and advise senior levels of government in Canada and internationally. In all this work, the two of us have devoted our professional energy to developing strategies to sustainably feed the world’s growing population. We work on figuring out problems linked to climate change and obesity, how to help people emerge from food insecurity, and the best ways of protecting farmland. Despite all this (or perhaps because of all this), in our opinion, figuring out what the first Mars-dwellers will eat is a topic that may define the future of how we feed ourselves.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Martian Singularity 1

The Boat Place 1

A Matter of Horse Shit 10

Part I Red Horizons

Chapter 1 Arrival 17

Chapter 2 Foundation 24

The Jacob Two-Two Challenge 24

In Praise of Blue-Green Algae 28

Understanding the Top Three Inches 32

Farming Microbes 38

Chapter 3 Small Is Beautiful 42

The Weird World of Nano 42

The Biofoundries of Mars 48

Part II Red Eden

Chapter 4 Biophilia 53

Titan Arum 53

The Moody Emperor's Cucumber 56

Let There Be Light 58

Gold, Diamonds, and Fruit 62

Summer in a Box 70

Glass Castles

Petrichor 78

Chapter 5 Grass 2.0 81

Green Fields 81

The Lava Fields of Iceland 86

The Problems with Grass 90

Hacking Photosynthesis 95

The Martian Mindset 99

Part III Red Meat

Chapter 6 I Can't Believe It's Not Cow 107

Inspiring Martian Planners with Fikas and Fjords 107

David, Goliath, and the Swedish Milk Industry 111

Umami and Terroir 114

One Order of Milk, Hold the Cow! 118

Saving Earth with Martian Technology 122

New Frontiers 124

Chapter 7 The Fish of the Sea and the Birds of the Heavens 127

To Catch (or Print) a Fish 127

Teach a Person to Fish and You Feed Them Till the Stocks Collapse… 130

… But Teach a Person to Print a Fish and You Just Might Save the Oceans 134

Winner, Winner, Chicken Dinner 140

The Plant Paradox 144

The Animal Analogue Future 148

Part IV Red Dawn

Chapter 8 Old Macdonald Had an iFARM 153

Farmer 5.0 153

More Food; Less Pollution 158

It's the System, Stupid 163

A Murder (?), Herd (?), Flock (?), School (?), or Swarm (?) of Tractors 165

The Right Stuff 169

Chapter 9 Closed Loops 173

Nature's Elegant Solution 173

Problems with the Industrial Revolution 176

Flying in Even Tighter Circles 178

Our Food Future 183

Chapter 10 Ballrooms of Mars 190

Painting Base Town Red 190

What Shall We Eat on Mars? 195

Conclusion: Upgrading the Operating System 200

Rewilding Earth 200

Don't Bet Against the Food System 204

A Return to the Boat Place 207

Suggested Reading 213

Acknowledgments 217

Editorial Reviews

★ 07/18/2022

Food scientists Newman (Lost Feast) and Fraser (Empires of Food) imagine what it would take to feed a colony on Mars in this fun survey. The same methods that will make feeding a Martian colony possible will also allow Earthlings to feed themselves in a more economic, ecological, and egalitarian way, they posit. Indeed, many technologies required on the Red Planet make sense on Earth—cyanobacteria will be “bred to turn the nitrogen and carbon dioxide in Mars’s atmosphere into organic molecules” and can help with excess carbon dioxide on Earth, and hydroponic beds can be used to grow crops. Neither grains nor livestock will be an option, but the authors point out the potential of some exciting lab-grown Earth-style meat and dairy options at the cutting edge of food science. Their investigation culminates in an imagined evening out in “BaseTown,” Mars’s main metropolis, replete with outfits made of cultured silk and a menu of locally sourced lettuce, tuna, and red beans. The authors sagely advise that on both Mars and Earth, policies that prioritize biodiversity and human labor will have to back up the tech. This culinary cosmic outing is as creative as it is informative. Agent: Tim Travaglini, Transatlantic Agency. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

This culinary cosmic outing is as creative as it is informative.” — Publishers Weekly, starred review

“This slim volume is a fun read and easy to digest. Fraser and Newman manage to critique our current food systems with just the right amount of speculation and none of the sermonizing. What’s more, they leave readers with the knowledge that one of our greatest strengths — culinary or otherwise — is creativity. And that will serve us just as well on Earth as on Mars” — Literary Review of Canada

“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.” — National Post

“Feeding a human colony on the Red Planet would be a staggering challenge. But the technologies we’d use there could help humanity vastly improve how we produce food here — on Earth — providing more nutrition more fairly with far less damage to our planet’s essential natural systems than today’s food technologies. This is a wonderfully creative and entertaining book that’s packed with vital insights on every page. Newman and Fraser are master storytellers, and in Dinner on Mars they offer a feast of science, foresight, history, and imagination that satisfies our hunger for hope in a time of crisis.” — Thomas Homer-Dixon, Executive Director, Cascade Institute, author of Commanding Hope: The Power We Have to Renew a World in Peril

“The book is an eccentric conversation between two wise prophets, Evan D.G. Fraser and Lenore Newman, about what’s wrong with our planet’s agriculture and how it could be right…Rather than setting out a dull prescription, Fraser and Newman deliver a raft of saucy solutions, taken from their impassioned debates over Zoom during lockdown.” — Broadview Magazine

“Highly recommended, fascinating, and extremely relevant to life on Earth, Dinner on Mars is a book I’ll be recommending to many of my friends.” — Tamaranth’s Creative Writing blog

“A fun and fascinating read, Dinner on Mars is a book I highly recommend to anyone asking questions about how we should eat for a healthier, cooler, and happier Earth.” — The British Columbia Review

From the Publisher