Space Food

Lenore Newman and Evan D. G. Fraser, two long-time friends and colleagues, were accustomed to travelling “around the world, studying the global food system.” But in March 2020, while bored and locked down, they began to feel that “all those other countries might as well have been on another planet.” From the comfort of their homes in British Columbia and Ontario, respectively, Newman and Fraser decided to combat their lockdown boredom with a thought experiment: How will people eat on an actual other planet? The result is Dinner on Mars: The Technologies That Will Feed the Red Planet and Transform Agriculture on Earth, which explores one of the greatest challenges in the history of agriculture.

“Self-sufficiency, food sovereignty, and self-reliance,” they write, “will be the order of the day” for any off-world colony, including their imaginary Martian settlement, BaseTown...