In October 2022, two books about Mars were released. I'll review each and then give my recommendation on which is best.
The Red Planet is a Mars guidebook, revealing Mars's geologic history and current state. The second book, Dinner on Mars, explores leading-edge AgTech to reveal how we will feed a Mars settlement—and ten billion Earthlings too.
I plan to interview Simon Morden about his book so let's start with that.
The Red Planet: A Natural History of Mars by Simon Morden
I've read many books about Mars, so I expected to learn little from this book.
I was so wrong!
This was a tour guidebook revealing many facts about the red planet. For instance:
Many know that Mars has the Solar System's biggest volcano.
But I didn't know that Olympus Mons is NOT the tallest mountain in the Solar System.
It's the second tallest.
Mars's Hellas is the solar system's largest single extant crater. 2300 km across by 9 km deep.
Mars has the biggest canyon we know of. Valles Marineris is 2000 km east-west, 200 km wide, and 10 km deep.
Mars's Great Dichotomy explains it's uneven.
The south is 2 km higher than the north.
Can methane appear on Mars without volcanic activity?
It has 28 large volcanoes.
Thin lava made flat volcanos with 4-degree slopes, so if you stood on a Martian volcano, you probably wouldn't realize it.
Perchlorates are chlorine-rich compounds that are lethal at Mars-level doses.
Solar flares increase the solar radiation 200 times because Mars lacks a magnetic field & its atmosphere is too thin.
Inhaling the dust is a killer: it produces silicosis.
This book is readable and fast-paced.
VERDICT: 5/5 STARS
Dinner on Mars: The Technologies That Will Feed the Red Planet and Transform Agriculture on Earth by Lenore Newman and Evan D.G. Fraser
I adored this book too! I've read many books on Mars, and this one taught me so many things! If the book above taught me about Mars' geology, then this book is all about food on Mars! What will Martians eat!?
I'll quote my favorite passages below:
Perhaps Carl Sagan was right when he wrote, “For all its material advantages, the sedentary life has left us edgy, unfulfilled. Even after 400 generations in villages and cities, we haven’t forgotten. The open road still softly calls, like a nearly forgotten song of childhood. We invest far-off places with a certain romance. This appeal, I suspect, has been meticulously crafted by natural selection as an essential element in our survival. Long summers, mild winters, rich harvests, plentiful game — none of them lasts forever. It is beyond our powers to predict the future. Catastrophic events have a way of sneaking up on us, of catching us unaware. Your own life, or your band’s, or even your species’ might be owed to a restless few — drawn, by a craving they can hardly articulate or understand, to undiscovered lands and new worlds.”
It should be possible to put cyanobacteria at the base of the Martian community and use it to turn locally found Martian ingredients into a food system that could function without regular supply runs from Earth.
The bewildering diversity of life we witness is made up of some relatively commonplace atoms. Here the scientist’s job can scan the genetics of plant life and then show how these basic building blocks can be assembled into new things — new nanoparticles, new forms of protein.
People are drawn to spaces with plants, water they can touch, places to sit alone and with others, and places seeded with food. Others have built upon Whyte’s work to show people can stand small living quarters if they have views of nature.
Martians will eat something closer to a nutritionally “recommended” diet rather than indulging in what is today the average Earthling’s diet.
Plants can turn only 3 to 6 percent of the total solar radiation that lands on their leaves into sugars (aka, chemical energy).
The bottom line is that Mars generally receives somewhere around 50 percent of the solar insolation of Earth. This means that putting a greenhouse at the Martian equator would be somewhat analogous to putting a greenhouse on Devon Island in Northern Canada.
C4 plants — can keep photosynthesis going even when it gets hot. Overall, only about 3 percent of flowering plants are C4, but together this group produces about 20 percent of global photosynthesis.
Every single input can be used with total efficiency, and that every output is imagined fulfilling multiple purposes. Maybe it’s this mindset — more than the technologies themselves — that we need to adopt on Earth?
Our ability to produce [lactase] fades with time, and as it goes, so too does our ability to digest milk and other dairy. Globally, about two-thirds of the human population react to milk in this way, though some populations can stomach dairy better than others
Cellular agriculture (cell-ag). This emerging technology proposes to produce meat and milk but without any animals.
Perfect Day began selling cell-ag ice cream in the U.S. during the summer of 2020, followed by cream cheese in 2021.
“But why would we take animal farming, which is horridly inefficient and ethically bankrupt, with us to a new planet?
Eat Just and Future Fields are working on churning out bulk plant-based
Mosa Meat and by 2020 was boasting he could produce the same burger patty for about ten Euros. Mosa is currently working on perfecting producing cellular animal fat (to mix in with the muscle cells) and is also working to perfect the process of brewing vegan growth serums. Post admits to being on a crusade to ensure that there are a lot fewer cows on the planet in the future. He argues that today’s cattle population of one and a half billion cows needs to drop to about 30,000.
“Animal agriculture uses huge amounts of land, energy, and water. I know you think there are some situations where animals can be raised in ways that meet environmental or ethical standards but, overall, the way the world produces animals today is madness.
If I’m going to eat fish on Mars, I want it to be grown in the lab and printed by a 3D printer.”
Finless Foods, which is working on replicating bluefin tuna; BlueNalu, which is planning to offer a variety of seafoods; Shiok Meats, a company pioneering the production of shrimp, crab, and lobster; and of course, Wildtype, among others. Finless even sent cells to the International Space Station where they were cultured and shaped into spheres using a 3D printer.
At any given time, there are twenty-three billion chickens pecking away somewhere on the planet, destined to serve our insatiable desire for cheap protein.
In 2017, Eat Just announced they would be growing chicken nuggets using cellular agriculture. The result was 70 percent synthetic (cellular) meat,
Eat Just’s chicken for public sale, and restaurant 1880 became the first place on Earth where one could find cultured meat on the menu.
Heme is what makes meat red, but it is also found in plants. Impossible uses heme found in soy, but companies are increasingly making their own heme using a process similar to the fermentation.
Globally producing analogues for beef (Mosa Meat, Aelph Eatery, Upside Foods), chicken (Eat Just, SuperMeat), seafood (Wildtype, Finless Foods, BlueNalu, Shiok), leather (Modern Meadow), gelatin (Geltor), dairy (Perfect Day,TurtleTree), and eggs (The EVERY Company, Eat Just). But the industry, aside from some outliers, is concentrated in a few key geographic areas, including California’s Bay Area, Singapore, Israel, and the Netherland’s Golden Triangle.
Is it possible to design a system that is both economically efficient and closed-loop here on Earth as well as in space?
Aquaponics, these operations attempt to mimic closed-loop systems by bringing fish and vegetable production together under one roof.
For breakfast, the average Martian would probably consume some kind of nutrient-dense bar that would be algae-based. This might be flavored with insect protein but most of the insects would be used to feed fish.
When it comes to lunch, hyper-fresh salads
Along with the salad, we imagine folks eating a 3D-printed fish or chicken cutlet where the proteins are either grown in a bioreactor or are derived by yeasts.
For additional protein, there would likely be some yeast-derived cheese added to the salad.
Bread products, however, are probably going to be scarce given that it would be difficult and expensive to set up domed habitats capable of growing any quantity of wheat, corn, rice, or barley. Pasta and baked goods will be a luxury to be savored. But at lunch or dinner, there might be potato pancakes or some small pastry made from potato flour.
At dinner, BaseTownies would sit down to a printed chicken breast and another salad, perhaps washed down with a glass of faux dairy milk or some juiced berries from the vertical farming operations. For a special occasion, the inhabitants might enjoy an actual real-life fish.
For dessert, sweetener proteins synthesized in the biofoundries might be mixed with synthetic egg proteins and a little bit of (very valuable) flour to create small biscuits that would accompany ice cream or a milkshake (again made with yeast-derived dairy proteins).
For an evening greasy snack,seasoned fried protein balls (salmon, beef, and chicken flavored) and fries could be common.
Overall, the Martian diet we foresee is likely to be sensible, tasty, and well-balanced. The biggest difference between what we are imagining and what we eat on Earth today is the lack of livestock products and the relative dearth of simple carbs. But, over time, we think the inhabitants of Mars will not miss these products all that much. Folks there will be, by necessity, eating a diet much more aligned with what nutritionists and national food guides recommend we eat. If
Our key message is that it is on Earth where this food revolution will have the biggest impact.
Ten species dominate about 39 percent of the planet — 14 percent dedicated to cropland and another 25 percent held for forage and grazing (that is almost entirely devoted to cattle).
It is the abundance of land, water, soil, and species — an evolutionary heritage that Mars will never have — that has allowed us the luxury of developing food and farming systems that are staggeringly inefficient.
VERDICT: The authors didn't set out to be vegans, but that's one of the many fascinating conclusions of this book. Because resources are abundant on Earth, we can afford to be incredibly inefficient. Eating meat is the most inefficient way to get protein. That's the lesson of planning to eat dinner on Mars. Martians will teach Earthlings how to grow food 1000x more efficiently! 5/5 stars! PERFECT!
Which book is better?
It's hard to say because I gave both books five stars.
It depends on what interests you. Those who want to understand Mars's geology and geography should read The Red Planet. Those interested in learning how we might live on Mars should read Dinner on Mars.
Without knowing what interests you, I recommend Dinner on Mars over The Red Planet because it has profound implications for eating on Earth.
