A vegetarian salad, cooked with ingredients grown in space, would be the best nutritional option for astronauts.
- Researchers have developed the ideal meal for astronauts.
- It meets their specific nutritional needs and is made from fresh ingredients grown in space.
- It is a vegetarian salad, notably composed of seeds, cabbage and peanuts.
Four astronauts will circle the moon in 2024. This time, the expedition will last ten days, but space agencies are planning much longer future missions, notably to Mars. To do this, everything must be carefully planned… Right down to the astronauts’ diet. In ACS Food Science & TechnologyAmerican researchers explain that they have developed the ideal plate for these space explorers: a vegetarian salad.
Astronaut meals: ingredients rich in nutrients and cultivable in space
“Astronauts in space burn more calories than humans on Earth and need additional micronutrients, like calcium, to stay healthy during prolonged exposure to microgravitywarn the authors in a press release. Additionally, future long-term missions will require growing food sustainably and circularly within the spacecraft or space colonies.” If scientists now know what cultivation methods are possible in space and what the needs of astronauts are, the nature of meals had not been studied. This team decided to remedy this by creating a fresh meal , tasty and with the necessary nutrients.
A vegetarian salad fulfills all the needs of astronauts
Using a computer technique called linear programming, they identified a combination of foods to meet the daily nutritional needs of a male astronaut while minimizing the water needed to grow the food. The researchers then checked the sustainability of food in space, selecting ingredients that required little fertilizer, time and space to grow. Non-edible portions had to be able to be recycled. They found that a vegetarian meal of soybeans, poppy seeds, barley, kale, peanuts, sweet potatoes and/or sunflower seeds offered “the most effective balance between maximum nutrients and minimum agricultural inputs”. This combination does not provide all the micronutrients an astronaut needs, but those that are missing could be added through dietary supplements.
Food for astronauts: a salad considered tasty
Then the meal was tested on Earth. Several people tasted this meal and one of them said: “I wouldn’t mind eating this all week as an astronaut“. Other people weren’t as complimentary, but they did have more. Now the researchers plan to develop an option tailored to the needs of female astronauts and find more space-adapted crops for their database .
