Food for space travellers. Is it all plant-based?

#1

Spider silk clothes.
Will space travellers be vegetarian? Vitamin B12 is a challenge.
Apparently space travellers need variety in food and crave fresh fruit and vegetables…
The researchers are worried about how to grow cereals.
Ideas?

Carnivore ZC SurfTurf-tember! 30-day September Challenge. 2022
#2

from the net: Space stations have a fully functioning oven so that astronauts can enjoy these foods at an ideal temperature. Just a few treats they much on include candy, fruits, peanut butter sandwiches, and nuts. Main meals, meanwhile, comprise chicken, beef, seafood, and pasta dishes. Drinks, too, are abundant; they range from fruit juices to lemonade-----

another blurb: The first meal astronauts eat before venturing into space is traditionally a breakfast of steak and eggs

---------now if up there without any chance of ever getting resupplies, I think they live on algae til they fade away :wink:

we don’t have ‘travellers’ out there without resupply right now ya know so a space station, even tho some may be up there a year or so…they get resupply of ‘real food’ still.

I think answers and solutions will change IF we are talking voyages of decades or more on a spacecraft etc. but we aren’t there yet.

#3

It reminds me of scurvy and sailing the world in 18th and 19th century ships - the “outer space” adventurers of the past.

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(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #4

Interestingly, even in those days it was known that fresh meat had anti-scorbutic properties. The need for Vitamin C was an artefact of food-storage problems aboard ships on long deployments out of sight of land. The Royal Navy settled on citrus fruit as a dietary supplement, because lemons and limes were a lot easier to store than livestock aboard ship. As long as a ship could re-provision regularly, scurvy was not a problem, but when all the animals had been butchered (those that were not washed overboard during bad storms), the shipboard diet reverted to ship’s biscuit and salt beef. It was at that point that scurvy began to be a problem aboard that ship.

With the advent of steamships and their generated electricity, refrigerating enough fresh meat for an extended voyage ceased to be a problem.

#5

yea so true that conquering the ocean was to them back in the day like conquering space travel. Just as dangerous for sure :wink:

alage contains vit C but ya know…no one has ever existed ever with only 1 food supply? Have they? Where a human could not ever, never ever get ahold of some kind of variety? I can’t think of one.

but being trapped in space animal husbandry can’t really be ‘a thing’ I would think?? but heck, isn’t that when they WILL grow a steak in a petri dish and slap on the BBQ out on the galaxy grilling deck? heehee

So we have never seen humans existing on Earth long term like it would be in space on ‘what limited food’ so I guess that is a massive issue to truly handle and only time will show on that one I guess if we ever hit long term space travel and can’t get to shore or take an exit off that lonely highway to hit a diner for a burger??

#6

and it prevented beriberi too… Okay, it wasn’t such a problem for Westerners but when people in the Japanese military lived on mostly white rice, that wasn’t pretty. There were wars where 1/3 of casulties happened due to beriberi… The navy was fine at that point as they followed dietary advice but whoever made the decisions about the land soldiers didn’t believe the guy and ignored the advice… It was the same with the scurvy in the West, the solution was there, said and proven but some people in unfortunately high positions were “stubborn” for too long while masses suffered and died.

#7

It has me wondering if there is a guineapig size ruminant that could be bred for space travel? Rather than bread for space travel. They’ll all end up eating rats, maybe?

There is a small cat sized antelope…