Menu 4 Mars
21.08.2023 - 11:48
/ theunconventionalgardener.com
/ Emma Doughty
A few years ago, a pair of New York artists Heidi Neilson and Douglas Paulson started a fun project called “Menu for Mars“, aiming to figure out what astronauts might eat on Mars. Every month for a year, the Menu for Mars Supper Club met at a New York restaurant, “gathering recommendations, suggestions and opinions from restaurateurs about what food they would prepare on Mars”. During these research missions, the group hosted a wide range of experts and learned about related topics such as horticulture and composting, nutrition and culinary anthropology. Mission 3, the Meal Replacement Picnic, was particularly gruelling. They sampled an array of meal replacement products and found most of them to be barely edible (and certainly not a replacement for a genuine meal). Afterwards, they had to send someone to get emergency sandwiches.
Their amateur analog astronaut antics culminated in an art installation, with a working kitchen where a variety of people cooked up dishes they thought would work on Mars, and visitors were invited to get creative with a “fully stocked pantry featuring dried, powdered, thermostabilized and dehydrated Mars-feasible ingredients”.
One of the food-related issues on the International Space Station is that astronauts find their sense of smell and taste diminishes. Their solution is liberal applications of hot sauce. As the Menu 4 Mars crew continued with their research, they realised that the frequent dust storms on Mars might stir up an unpleasant taste.
“There’s a lot of thinking that Mars will smell and taste like peroxide,” said Paulson, “so we started building a spice pantry based on Ethiopian food, thinking that those strong flavours — chilli peppers, cumin, cardamom — would help mask the
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