When we go to Mars, we will have to grow everything inside greenhouses. These are artificial environments that we can recreate anyway we want; consequently, we will not have to wait for months for the food to be ready. And who knows, we’ll probably eat synthetic-engineered food anyway.
And instead of taking a cow to Mars, hopefully, we will have cow burgers from cells grown in Petri dishes. I really look forward to not having to eat real cows here on Earth, and I hope it will happen during my lifetime.
As I attended the Mars Desert Research Station trainings as an analog astronaut, one of the jobs we had to do was… eat. One of the biggest problems that we yet have to solve for space travel is food procurement.
Once you know what you are going to eat for long-duration space missions, it is easy to figure out what food you need to produce.
I had two experiences with food so far in my life: Romania, where I grew up, and Wellington, where I moved when I was about 30 years old.
You can only eat cake when we tell you to
When I was growing up, cake was something you traditionally had in the cold months. There were no supermarkets, and my grandparents had a traditional family. They gathered grains in summer, when we ate light food like fruit, and we had lots of bread, cake, and meat during winter, when there was no fresh food, so vitamin C always came from sauerkraut.
Romania has a very complicated eating schedule, so old that it even made it into the religious calendar (no surprises here). Any Orthodox calendar has detailed instructions on what to eat and when, what not to eat and when you can party. Eating meat is forbidden two days a week for the entire year and during fasting periods.
Old women from the village always said these were instructions from God, but if you look a bit deeper, some of these instructions even make sense.
Our food before globalisation and supermarkets
As in Romania, there are four distinct seasons. Traditionally, people had four types of food.
In summer, when temperatures can rise towards forty degrees Celsius the diet was mostly made of sour soup (ciorba or borscht) – with polenta if you lived in the country, lots of fruits, which are plenty and delicious, and lots of vegetable stews and of course who could afford, dairy. Fried eggplants, peppers, and tomato salads make even now the best summer food.
In autumn, people ate what they harvested. When the leaves from deciduous trees turned golden and red and then fell, potatoes, corn, carrots, of course, grapes, and pumpkins were ready. If you didn’t have a freezer, and we didn’t, you could keep some of these in your cellar for a few months until early December. Some of these foods (corn, potatoes, peppers, tomatoes, squash) are recent additions to our diet, having been brought to Europe in the last four to six hundred years. This didn’t seem to bother anyone, and we gladly included them in our diet.
What we ate for Christmas
In winter, when temperatures easily drop to minus twenty degrees Celsius, and all is covered in three months of white (snow), people eat lots of bread, dairy, sweet food and meat. The soups are thick and sour, and must always be eaten first to help the stomach digest the meat. The desert is always last. Every household in the countryside used to grow and ritually sacrifice pigs on Ignat – just before Christmas, and the leftover meat was made into sausages and some preserved in big jars to eat throughout winter. In Romania, Christmas is mostly white, and it gets very cold. The land freezes beneath the white blanket of snow, and temperatures are mostly below zero. I remember as a child, people were always unhappy when someone died in the wintertime, as it was very hard to dig the graves. Digging the ground – we tried ourselves many times as children, and it always felt like digging in ice. Of course, that is because the soil is frozen. You needed a pick. I myself would have rather split wood for the fire than dug anything in winter.
Winter days were also amazingly short; before you knew it, at about five in the afternoon, it was getting dark. The whole season lasted for three months: freezing-cold temperatures, darkness, and a white blanket of snow. There are people who believe that my recent ancestors survived those long winters by digging for roots in the forest and looking for tiny berries in the bushes. I have seen a few talks that referenced this.
Winter then almost became like a festival of light (read Christmas). Plus, as we all found out during the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s no fun to stay inside your house all day. Any opportunity for a celebration or a festival in the wintertime is great! And you can eat as much cake as you want! If you dare.
And finally, in spring!
In spring, the extra sunlight thaws the soil, and all nature comes back to life, and so it is the season (the only season) when we have an abundance of flowers. Agriculturally, spring was the season to plant the main crops. Not by the stars, as the same presenter tried to convince me, but by looking at signs in the environment. Green leaves and flowers. If it was good enough for nature, surely it was good enough for everyone else.
For the first part of my life, I had a very regimented diet that depended on the seasons, as proper supermarkets only started appearing late after the fall of communism, so not all food was available all the time.
Christmas in summertime is something else!
When I arrived in the Southern Hemisphere, where the seasons are reversed, Christmas falls in summertime. Barbecues on the beach are what we do for it. Kiwis also eat Pavlova, a fluffy cake whose origin they dispute with the Australians.
The first year my mother came to visit, she made traditional Romanian food for Christmas. It was too fat, too sweet and way too much! I was too scared to tell her that I didn’t want to eat her food, so I ate it.
How could I eat so much for Christmas in Romania?
I could because it was cold! And while I don’t remember anyone eating berries and digging roots for Christmas, I do remember the whole country stuffed itself with pork, bread, wine, and cakes all winter long. And it did not feel like too much food.
My friend Melanie said that when she went to Scott Base in Antarctica, she ate about 3 times as much as she normally would, including lots of steak, bread, and sweets, and she still lost weight (Imagine that).
Can you choose your traditions?
When you are used to certain traditions, for instance, a certain type of food, it might feel strange when you finally realise they were designed for different temperatures. I had no idea why I was eating the way I did in Romania; I just knew everyone else did the same, and I never questioned the tradition. The food example is the easiest because everyone has to eat.
Traditional Romanian Christmas food is obviously too heavy to eat in summer. We kept eating it in New Zealand’s summertime because it was the traditional food for Christmas. We also ate it because it tied us to our origins and was symbolically important. For the sake of tradition, I had a sore tummy for many years until I realised we really don’t have to keep this tradition, as it doesn’t align with what nature does here. I think I’m better off with the very indulgent Pavlova and summer salads for now.
Luckily, people in New Zealand are from all over the world and brought their cuisine with them. New Zealand is an amazing, authentic mix of the best food ever. All you have to do is travel through the city and hop into one of the restaurants. Also, in recent years, all types of food are readily available at any time in supermarkets. It feels like a normal thing now, thanks to today’s technology. The same technology will help us grow plants on Mars in the future. I am going to be infinitely curious about what a traditional dinner on Mars will look like.
