With advancements in space technology, more and more astronauts are preparing for longer space missions. To make sure that the astronauts get flavourful and nutritionally rich meals at space stations, a team of researchers from the US, the UK, Australia, and Spain have developed an ‘optimal’ space meal. This meal reportedly caters to the nutritional needs of male astronauts. The researchers published their findings in a paper titled “Modeling of Space Crop-Based Dishes for Optimal Nutrient Delivery to Astronauts and Beyond on Earth”, which was published in ACS Food Science & Technology, a research journal, on December 13, 2023.
In the paper, the researchers highlight the importance of their study and wrote, “These assessments are essential steps toward feasibility in long-term human space missions, for example, to Mars.” They mentioned that they based their meals on the recommendations of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and considered “up to 36 nutrients and 102 crops” in the meal prep.
Throughout their study, the researchers “evaluated 10 scenarios (“space dishes”) for daily full-nutrient supply to one astronaut, with four scenarios being vegetarian (crops only) and six being omnivorous (crops and meat).” Finally, they settled on a vegetarian salad that was made with ingredients like soybeans, kale, poppy seeds, sweet potato, barley, and peanuts.
This salad was served to four people to judge its “palatability, i.e., the space food acceptance”. While one person loved the salad and said that he “wouldn’t mind eating this all week as an astronaut.” The other three people were more reserved with the praise. This meal was also calorie-rich, considering that astronauts burn more calories than an average person on Earth. On its website, NASA mentions that the “increased need for calories and other considerations of space travel make a specialized diet necessary for space explorers.”
While preparing the meal, the astronauts gave primacy to sustainable food production within the spacecraft. The researchers aimed to pick ingredients that caused minimum wastage and were easy to recycle. The paper read, “Each scenario was analyzed for the capability of plant growth, including the required planting area and crop growth time and productivity; from the viewpoint of optimizing performance in space.” It is interesting to note that over the years astronauts have managed to grow several plants such as tomatoes, potatoes, lettuce, and green onions in space in small quantities.
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