What foodstuffs would you like to see go to space?

[Rhyshaelkan]

The premise is this.

Through the use of asteroidal materials, your organization/government/cabal/company, large structures similar to O'Neil's island 3 habitats are built. Say 20km × 6.366km in dia. for the outermost shell yielding an area 20km² at 1g. Concentric shells are built inside the first at decreasing levels of gravity to maximize land yield(animals and plants do not require beautiful vistas to provide food :D). The innermost shell filled with water for the growth of fish and other sea life.

But I do not want these structures to have any bearing on my question. Short to say we have the land area for whatever tasty foodstuffs you can desire.

So what would you desire to go into space?

Break it down as finely as you desire, genetic strains of beef, onions, tomatoes, different milking animals to yield radically different cheeses. Anything. I am trying to compile a list of such tasty food items.

Variety is the spice of life. Bringing and supporting all these various food producers will serve two important goals. Improving the quality of diet for space bound peoples. And preserving as much diversity of food life from our home planet Earth as we can.

[Rhyshaelkan]

All of these quoted from the ClassicBattletechForum

Marwynn

"The only fish I really eat is in sushi. And the only sushi I eat these days is spicy salmon handrolls. So get a crapton of those buggers.

Kobe beef, specifically the Wagyu cattle. Water Buffalo from the Philippines "Carabao" for its milk, italian plum tomatoes... Rice? I would say Botan or Milagrosa. Green bean strains, bokchoy, tamarinds, sweet white onions, Newfoundland potatoes (sorry Idaho), sweet potatoes, corn, chinese broccoli and cauliflower, baby carrots, and enough wheat to make pasta.

Oh and chicken. Lots of chicken. Also lamb, yaks, and some goats.

For the fruit orchards: Those small oranges, Cebu Mangoes from the Philippines (these are the sweetest frelling yellow mangoes anywhere), Bosc pears, Chinese Fuji Apples, Strawberries, plantains, watermelons, coconuts, honeydew and cantaloupe. Papaya... avocado, ube root, and lychee.

Nobody bring any sharks into space. "

Ruger

"Calamari, Snow Crab, Shrimp, Yellow Corn, Bean Sprouts, Vidalia Onions, Green Peas, Cantaloupe, Cucumber, Yellow Squash, Zucchini, Mushrooms, Beef, Chicken, Smoked Sausage, Apples, Watermelon, Peaches, Green and Red Bell Pepper, Bannana Pepper, Bannanas, Lettuce, Cheese (especially provolone and Monterrey types), Pepper, Garlic, Chives, Potatoes (NOT sweet), Broccoli, Green Beans, Pork (for roasts, barbeque, bacon, ham, etc.), Salmon, Cabbage, Wheat, Cinnamon, Grapes (preferably seedless varieties)..."

Vash the Stampede

"The most important thing that needs to survive in space for all time is our brewing traditions, except for domestic macro. If you drink that swill, you deserve what you'll get.

So... basically, all the grains and other miscellaneous things (molasses, potatoes, ect) that are used to make that stuff."

Ajax_Wolf

"For food animals, I'd say chicken, sheep, pigs and goats would be best. Cattle require to much space and food from the return on investment to be positive. Cows are single births and take longer to give birth, while sheep using have twins, and sows can have litters 4 times a year with 8-12 piglets per birthing. Goat's milk is actually better for you also. As much as I love a good steak, I don't see cows being raised in a hab.

As for veggies, two shools of thought: one is the multi harvest plant (ie tomatos, peppers and brussel sprouts), and the other is a plant you eat in it's entirely (ie lettuce, cabbage and celery). But since your hab is basically a bunch of phytotrons, you can set whatever conditions you need to grow whatever veggies you want. But you can leave yellow squash and egg plant on Earth when in burns to a cinder."

Sigma-LS

"Lots and lots of spices and peppers. You can take very little and make it tasty with good spices, otherwise eh.

I'm also probably in the minority here but habanero peppers and those little red chile peppers my chinese friends always bring me are a must! Pepper bushes are hardy too.


You know the funny thing is though that you're going to have to deal with a lot of things like fertilizers, pesticides, etc. that are going to be a constant drain on your resources through imports. And you can't fake good soil so you're going to have to take it from somewhere. When there is so much land on earth why would it be feasible to even have anything like that?

Anyway, when given the option of anything and everything, take anything and everything (minus pests like crop fungus and bole weevils etc.)

Honestly who would take celery and lettuce over squash and eggplant though? Actually celery raw has a NEGATIVE net caloric value but is great for flavoring all sorts of dishes. Anything lettuce can do can be done better by Spinach or Mustard Greens or Turnip Greens. I'll give you cabbage though. Going to make some stuffed cabbage tonight now and some spaghetti squash. "

Cannonshop

"Go with needs first: Rice, Beans, tomatoes (all easy to grow with decent yeilds), supplement with grapes. Why Grapes? you've got climate control and can control the chemistry, grapes grow on vines so there's no risky "Big root" problems like you get with most fruit trees. Peas are good too. For meat, Rabbit has a high meat-value for mass (Higher than beef does), same for Gerbils and chickens. If you've got enough spin-gravity, goats produce milk, and are more meat-and-other-products efficient than beef as well (and on the right diet, Goat tastes like Venison-which makes sense, the North American deer is from the same family of animal...) Pork, if you're not going Kosher.



Come to think of it, GM your crops, and you might be able to have "apple vines" and "Pear Vines" or something. People have a habit of filling whatever empty space they have (I've witnessed this-a buddy moves out of a studio apt. into a condo, and somehow he can't find places for all his shit) so as big as your orbital is, it's probably still going to have volume issues.

Peppers are not only a good spice, they're good by themselves, and provide some very useful nutritional value."

Maddyfish

"Catfish and Tilapia for food fish, hogs, turkey, goats, for meat, bonus-goat milk and cheese. Soybeans, potatos, green beans, spinach, and rice as the primary veg crops-bonus Soy milk. Hemp, not weed, hemp for clothes and all the other stuff that can be made from it. Raspberries, strawberries, tomatos, apples, and oranges for fun. And of course honeybees. You must have honeybees for pollination-bonus honey."

Shin Yodama

"Balti's, Indian Curries, Chinese Curries, Thai Curries, Black Bean Sauce, Chicken Satay "


Just thought I would share their thoughts here.

[moonus111]

I always wonder if we will get space fatties. Men & women who throw caution to the wind and let their bones rot in the deepness of space. Food being so plentiful because of the abundant energy of the sun, they eat like cows eat grass. This constant gorging and lack of gravity takes its toll on their form and changes them into giant floating bags.

I think Jabba the hut will be human in the future. Although, its just one possibility. I like to think the best will happen and I'm just babbling. When they build it I want farming on earth to be phased out economically, but the food I want is soilent green, naw I'm joking. Poking fun at the spirulina stuff.

The food I would really want is shark, just imagine space sharks in 0g, low pressure water. Better yet we could really make a bang and put it in a movie. That's an awesome idea! SPACE SHARKS

Also I have a passionate belief that life has a more important role to play in space than it currently is portrayed. Plants/Animals can be domesticated and used to serve more purposes than food, and air. Reality dictates that they are required to make beauty, and there is no reason that man alone should populate the stars.

Examples:
-Bees (although there are ways of getting around the pollination problem)
-algae (can be used for terraforming)
-dolphins (entertainment - imagine the oddity of a dolphin in a floating bubble tank everybody will want to see it)
-whales same reason
-companion animals
-an animal that dies under very slight radiation may be used as a redundant indicator
-The Millennial Project suggested Oaks on the moon would grow extremely tall.
-Birds can be used for 0g environments that have air for what purpose I can only imagine
-Last there's no way we're ever going to be able to Mine Jupiter-Neptue-Uranus-Saturn without some form of life doing some kind of work. The reason to mine these planets is for the extreme amount of gasses available. You know for a giganitc gas filled space station millions of miles across to hold the trillions of people who are going to come.

I forgot to mention the brandings of moon cheese that will crop up.

[Neanderthal Man]

My dream space habitat (broadly speaking here, could be about any place, on a planet, inside a planetesimal, a Bernal sphere) would be characterized by an Edenic edible landscape. There would no doubt be something akin to annual-based agriculture, but the environment would be engineered according to permacultural principles. Dozens of varieties of fruit trees and shrubs, nut trees, herbs, perennial vegetables, vining plants, and many other things forming an ecosystem more of less devoid of harmful or inedible plants.

Besides value in providing an overabundance of sustenance, the environment would be aesthetically rich and conducive to human well-being.

As for more formal food production I don't think livestock are a good use of resources. The amount of water and other resources required to produce a pound of beef could have gone to produce vastly more pounds of legumes, grains and vegetables, and animals would be consuming oxygen. Such plants could also be used ecologically for environmental purification, oxygen production and biomass production (used for, among other things, producing fertilizers, fuels, bioplastics, textiles, building materials). Another consideration is the increase danger of disease exposure and mutation associated with livestock in close contact with humans (the set of Eurasian pathogens that reduced the population of the Americas by more than 90% are owed to our domesticated lifeforms).

Of course livestock may also be used for the production of various materials but the inputs required in the case of animals are just too costly in my opinion. It makes more sense for permanent space culture to adapt to a vegetarian diet. Meats grown from animal stem cells and other real or potential feats of biotech don't strike me as very appealing, but this is probably just a personal sensibility. If animal material could be produced in a way that was logical (cost vs benefit) it may be worthwhile, but to me effort is better spent on other things.

Perhaps in another way it would be ideal to leave behind the exploitation of other sentient creatures for food and raw materials.

Having a few animals, maybe some foraging turkeys and ducks native to the permaculture landscape, would hardly be a problem on a resource rich colony, but something that could be called a meat-based diet, even if possible, seems like a waste. I also speculate that a moral aversion to so-called "speciesism" may become more prominent in the mainstream ethics of the future. I'm not an animal rights activist and I don't find meat eating in itself to be immoral, but I imagine a future world in which the distinction between human and animal is less pronounced and there is a great diversity of extraterrestrial life (imagining here a terraformed Mars, possibly Venus, and adapted indigenous biology), and maybe species descended from homo sapiens with varying degrees of sapience. Perhaps fully extraterrestrial lifeforms will enter the picture. In any case, I see a philosophy which grants sentient creatures a status higher than mindless raw materials as more enlightened and worthy of an interplanetary, and perhaps interstellar civilization. To me industrial meat production embodies a 'raw materials' philosophy (just look at a CAFO or battery cage factory farm). Small-scale traditional farms in which domesticated lifeforms are allowed to live lives expressive of their nature are more acceptable but irrelevant to space colonization in my estimation. I also imagine encountering an extraterrestrial civilization in which the dominant species is as superior in mental faculties to us as we are to pigs. We would likely object to their using us as livestock. Or perhaps this superior of ours is an AI of Earth origin (jokingly calling to mind the Matrix). From us they might learn that "inferior" creatures make excellent renewable raw materials. Except in this case the Matrix is wrong because they'd never bother maintaining a fantasy world for our pleasure. It is more likely that we'd spend our unnaturally short lives in dark confinement jacked up on antibiotics so as not to succumb to the grotesque environment.

[Neanderthal Man]

The premise is this.
The innermost shell filled with water for the growth of fish and other sea life.
I think the concept of aquaponics as part of a sustainable cycle is pretty solid. I can imagine various types of fish, crustacea, and related creatures being integrated into a living system with a high ROI even in many space-based scenarios. This seems more logical to me than trying to provide a significant portion of a community's diet via conventional livestock. Unlike livestock, which would require growing large quantities of food (i.e., animal feed), aquacultures could be designed as self-contained renewable ecosystems that could theoretically maintain themselves so long as they weren't overexploited.

I realize I've sort of botched your question since practical constraints and/or optimization wasn't the point. What I'm driving at though is that space cultures may adopt vegetarianism early on and future space people will not have a taste for charred animal flesh, perhaps the opposite. I take a great deal of speculative license of course.

[Rhyshaelkan]

After coming up with the thread topic I realized what it was. Just a shopping list for everything tasty. I watched such interesting programs such as Modern Marvels on the History Channel. When it came to some topics like eggs, milk, cheese, beans, potatoes, etc I realized that there are many foodstuffs that I do not know about. If we went to space we would probably like quite a variety of foods. Not just what is efficient.

I for one want to keep meat in my diet as long as I live. :D Even beef :eek: However I agree due to inefficiencies of beef I think it would be quite regulated. However, we are also able to step into the other aspect of preserving Earth's biosphere in other forms. Even if it might not be for eating :P

We might build some of these shells to, since everything in space is artificial, replicate certain vistas of Earth. The African savanna, where lions, cheetah and other species can play out their lives without interaction or pressures from humanity. North American plains where the buffalo and wolves can play.

But that gets me off the topic for this thread ;) Great posts.

-dolphins (entertainment - imagine the oddity of a dolphin in a floating bubble tank everybody will want to see it)

Exactly right. We could replicate entire environments, nature parks. Part for our enjoyment and part to preserve.

[Neanderthal Man]

After coming up with the thread topic I realized what it was. Just a shopping list for everything tasty. I watched such interesting programs such as Modern Marvels on the History Channel. When it came to some topics like eggs, milk, cheese, beans, potatoes, etc I realized that there are many foodstuffs that I do not know about. If we went to space we would probably like quite a variety of foods. Not just what is efficient.
The industrial food system of today is severely lacking in variety from my point of view. Cattle, hogs and chicken radically dwarf any other possible meat animals. Our agriculture is dominated by huge monocrops such as corn and soybean. In spite of shipments of produce from literally all over the globe the typical produce section is remarkably thin in variety when you consider the wealth of varieties available in a typical seed catalog.

Supermarkets are dominated by processed, packaged foods which create an appearance of diversity but the range of raw materials from which this plethora of products is manufactured is surprisingly thin.

Of course global trade takes the edge off quite a bit. We have access to a great many spices, fruits and seafoods from every region of the globe. The most popular fruit in the USA, the banana, comes from the tropics. Although I resent this system to some extent. My favorite tropical-type fruit is actually indigenous to the eastern USA (where I live) but you will never find it in stores and few have even heard of it. I speak of the North American paw paw. I amuses me that we ship bananas from tropical regions and completely neglect an indigenous fruit with such potential. Similarly, there are innumerable species and varieties of berries, tree fruits, nuts, and other fruits of the Earth that are simply not known for one reason or another. Sometimes pure historical happenstance, sometimes because they are not suited to industrial agricultural production (although they may be superior in qualities such as flavor and nutrition).

One of my favorite grains in amaranth seed (technically not a grass but colloquially referred to as a grain). I grow several varieties and find it to be fabulously productive and more efficient than conventional grains. It is nutritionally superior to every old world grain (e.g., wheat, barley, millet, oats, spelt, etc.) and contains complete protein which is quite rare among plant food sources. Unfortunately the Aztecs employed the grain in religious ceremonies which led the Spanish to outlaw the grain (apparently they made effigies of their gods which the Spanish interpreted as a demonic mockery of the Eucharist). Just one of many examples. My main point is that I too desire maximizing diversity in our diet but in my point of view the possibilities for plant-based agriculture have not even been adequately explored on Earth. It gets even more awesome when considering the far future and the possible species of plants that could come about on a terraformed Mars, or something like that.

I for one want to keep meat in my diet as long as I live. :D Even beef :eek: However I agree due to inefficiencies of beef I think it would be quite regulated. However, we are also able to step into the other aspect of preserving Earth's biosphere in other forms. Even if it might not be for eating :P
I regret that my posts are so unorganized. I think surely missions or outposts dependent on food from Earth will include meat (Indian space program aside) as you get a lot of caloric and nutritional bang for your buck. I just think the tables would turn when it became a matter of self-sufficient colonies. I think meat production on a Martian colony within our lifetime would be a relatively low priority. If resources such as livable space, water, oxygen and food became abundant animal production would be feasible, but perhaps superfluous by that time. My more wild speculations about future interstellar culture are based very far in the future and don't suggest that anyone among us any time soon will be deprived of their meat. Well, unless we see a serious Martian colony within our lifetimes. I seriously doubt that animal-based food production would be attempted early on.

We might build some of these shells to, since everything in space is artificial, replicate certain vistas of Earth. The African savanna, where lions, cheetah and other species can play out their lives without interaction or pressures from humanity. North American plains where the buffalo and wolves can play.

But that gets me off the topic for this thread ;) Great posts.

Exactly right. We could replicate entire environments, nature parks. Part for our enjoyment and part to preserve.
Yes! I imagine a far future in which terraforming has happened (at least Mars, possible Venus, Titan, subsurface Europa and Ganymede, some pseudo-terraformed worlds, etc.) and there is a staggering diversity of life in the solar system. Perhaps homo sapiens on Mars would have evolved into a pygmy subspecies. But who knows what the end result would be. Perhaps Martians will be eight feet tall and the Martian atmosphere by then will support everyday human-powered flight. I like to imagine a Venusian landscape dominated by awe-inspiring megafauna and megaflora.

Beyond this I imagine the development of a vast space-based culture, a population perhaps beyond the quadrillions, spread out in innumerable giant habitats throughout the Kuiper belt and beyond (I imagine an expansion into the Oort cloud). By this point our descendants, as well as technology and biology, are so beyond what we know that imagining it is practically boundless.

But anyway, perhaps at first (meaning within the next one or two centuries) we will design habitats to mimic ecosystems on Earth and populate them with terrestrial lifeforms. To me the idea of living in flat, sterile environments is very depressing. I think the practice of landscaping and gardening would be very therapeutic and enriching to colonists on other worlds or in large artificial habitats and may be as universally enjoyed in such cultures as jogging or watching television is in ours.

In the further future, I speculate that we'd have the models, data, and unimaginable computational power to craft novel biospheres for emerging habitable worlds (such as Mars in the process of terraforming). This is why I believe in the end such worlds would have highly unique forms of life and that this unique diversity would only increase as natural selection played out on alien environments. Thousands of years from now this may play out on worlds that we terraform in nearby star systems and possibly on life-capable exoplanets. But I still think that the majority of sapient lifeforms will live in non-planetary habitats. But won't they miss Earth? By the time human-descended sapients begin expanding into the Oort cloud I doubt that they would be inclined to give Earth a second thought. It would be one of perhaps tens of millions of habitable environments and I suppose less familiar to them than Pleistocene Africa is to us. Even if we never encounter preexisting extraterrestrial life, much less alien civilizations, I think the future could look like some of the more far-fetched sci-fi.

Anyway, wow. Sorry for the massive rant. :(

[joertexas]

Rant away :)

There are a lot of good ideas here - hopefully you will get to see some of them put into practice..

JR

[sgeos]

Mangoes, and fruit in general.

[JohnHunt]

I'm vegetarian. So anything fresh from the garden will satisy me. I'm imagining robotic chefs who will cook up an amazing variety -- something new each day, well presented. If obesity remains a problem, there will be genetic engineering solutions found.

I'm not a GMOphobe, but there will be no pests because we won't introduce them. And I don't think there'll be much need for them because we've got such great food already.

As for those of you who need your meat, what do you think of cruelty-free meat grown in a vat? The mental picture is disturbing (to me) but your burger could taste the same.

[Sam Fraser]

I'm a meat-eater, but think it's a shame to devote (waste) so much arable land and water to raise feed for animals we'll later eat. The land could be better used to grow crops for direct human consumption. I look forward to the day vat-grown meat with the same taste, texture and consistency as the real thing is a reality and don't think anyone who's seen the inner workings of an abattoir should be grossed out by the concept.