"Craig Fink" wrote in message
news
On Wed, 09 Mar 2005 13:41:12 +0000, Carey Sublette wrote:



I think the "cherry box" on the viewgraph: " Improvements in food
storage technology or production technology are also needed to reduce
overall mass and ensure crew health." states the issue accurate, but the
other sentence on the slide:
"Current food preservation technology is not capable of providing
nutritionally viable food for the longer mission durations under study"
is a bit of a misstatement.

Ensuring crew health requires a diet that is varied and palatable so
that the crew eats properly, and the food itself is not a source of
stress on the mission (psychological health).

And the trick is to do it with low mass foods (i.e. dehydrated).

Also, nutrition science is far beyond the RDA stage - finding the
essential individual components in a diet required for health. We all
know about the debates about what makes an *optimum* healthy diets: What
kind of fats and in what proportion? How much and what kind of fiber?
How much flavonoids and carotenoids, and what kinds, with what ratios?
Etc.

I think it is the combined problem of satisfying all of these together,
and quite clearly no one has ever developed a food system like this
before.

The whole viewgraph presentation is about design trade-offs, and the
dietary aspect of a mission is going to involve trade-offs of its own.
For a palatable, optimally healthy, indefinitely storable diet a
solution is at hand right now - just prepare thousands of excellent
meals and freeze them in ready-to-eat form. But this is quite heavy with
all that water. Maintaining the good qualities of those meals but
getting rid of the water mass, not so easy.




I've always thought a garden is the way to go. Lots of ......

When I went sailing a while back, it was the fresh stuff I missed most.
The crunch of a nice salad, squish of a fresh tomatoes, that type of
thing. The lettuce we had after two or three weeks (with no refrigeration)
was great, even though I had to peel off the outer centimeter or so of
scum.

That and human converstion, but that won't be a problem with the going to
Mars. Or, will it?????????

This is the one area where no food preservation technology exists: fresh
salads of tomatoes and leafy vegetables.

These are all high water content plants that don't dehydrate, and don't
freeze - doing anything at all to them beyond keeping them fresh turns them
into mush. Some of these ingredients are still good in mush form (think
tomato sauce and sauerkraut) but they aren't fresh (and lettuce fails
utterly - though I do have a book with a New Zealand recipe for baked
lettuce!). You can freeze salads of some of the more carbohydrate rich,
lower water vegetables - but they aren't what most people think of as
"salad".

It might be worthwhile to have a hydroponic unit on a Mars misson to produce
fresh leafy vaegetables and tomatoes for an occasional delicacy, it could
also provide a "garden spot" for the crew.

Carey Sublette