A nutritional space diet must be studied in order to design a space agriculture system that makes habitation on Mars possible. Masuda et al. (2005) examined in detail a menu for life support in a closed ecological system. Their design of various vegetarian menus and plan for culturing plants based on their food requirements provides a good example of a space menu. Silverstone (1993) described cooking of food materials harvested from agricultural ecology composed in a closed dome. Koike et al. (2005) summarized nutritional issues under isolated confinement.
Foods of animal origin are required for human diet as discussed in this article. Since space agriculture will be organized under constraints of its resource available at extraterrestrial environment, efficiency in the use of biomass energy should be optimized. We propose entomophagy, insect eating, for a core component of the space diet. During the archeological age of hunter-gatherers, insects were an important portion of the human diet. This is evidenced by ant, louse, grasshopper and many insect species found in fossil human feces, namely coprolite. Even after several species of animals and plants were domesticated, and stock raising and agriculture started, entomophagy remained a part of different food cultures all over the globe. We can see a diverged culture of entomophagy as an identity of each region.
The development of stock raising and agriculture enables a stable food supply, and the human population has increased as a result. Farming induced a richer linguistic communication among humans, and initiated human civilizations. In an ecological view of the history of civilizations, Umesao (1975) argued that cattle breeding was selected in areas where edible crop plants were hardly cultivated. Instead of farming edible plants, the inedible biomass produced in these areas was converted to edible dairy products or meat by grazing cows or sheep. This is one good example of gene-culture co-evolution, as this culture of cattle breeding has driven natural selection for a lactose tolerant gene among people who live there.. In this way, natural ecology has had a close relationship to human culture, including food habits and civilization.
The improvements in agricultural production on Earth, and the consequent surplus of food, enable us to conduct scientific research on space agriculture. Achievement of viable space agriculture provides a scope for the further improvement and fruitful future of our civilization. On the other hand, the consecutive increase in the human population and the loss of farmland at the global scale warn us of the unbalance between food supply and demand, which forms one of North-South gap in the world.
Our concept of space agriculture for habitation on Mars is designed to optimize agriculture, i.e. keep its production stable and high, with given resources, such as finite physical space. Choosing species of cultivating plants or breeding animals under these constraints is important for both space and terrestrial agriculture and sustainable human life. In our present study, fundamental food materials were selected from this standpoint. Based on composition and amount of food components (e.g. proteins, fat, vitamins) required by humans, we examined several specifications of our space agriculture concept. Even though the number of food materials we examined in this study is small, we can derive many diverse menus from it.
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