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!?

Before sharing my verdict (it's the last paragraph below), I'll quote my favorite passages:

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!

As always, to study Mars is to end up studying Earth, and to speculate how we might live on Mars is to reexamine how we currently live on Earth.

Lenore Newman and Evan Fraser, bored during the lockdown of the spring of 2020, starting chatting over Zoom about armchair travel ideas, and hit on the idea of writing about Mars so they could, mentally at least, get as far away from current problems as possible.

The entire book reflects these feeling of two smart people having a conversation about a topic they love, giving the text a more breezy, conversational feel rather than being something overwhelming dense and technical.

But it does get into techniques as they research and explain how current food production on Earth works (spoiler alert - its terrible) and what we, as a species, might due with a blank slate, some proper advanced planning, and a lot of technology at hand they we could be using, but, for various politcal and capitalistic reasons, we aren't.

Thanks to Netgalley and ECW for access to this arc.


I requested this book because it sounded fascinating. Space flight, colonies on Mars, and ... gotta have food to feed the colonizers. This is brought home by the intro chapter which discusses Captain Sir John Franklin's famous 19th century search for a Northwest passage that ended in starvation for him and his crew. One thing right off the bat, the book is written as a sort of third person discussion between the two authors which I found very odd and off putting. They also mentioned Covid a lot as it was just shutting down the planet right as they began - via Zoom - talking about and then writing the book. I hate being reminded of Covid.


These two geek out as they put a lot of thought into what will need to occur before humans might have a snowball's chance of surviving on Mars. There will probably need to be a lot of prep work via robotics before humans arrive. And as with the early Moon missions, a lot of that science and industry could have profound uses here trying to fix the mess that our current climate and food production systems are in. There are lots of tidbits of information about how scientists are now working to improve farming and soil conservation that are interesting, heartening, and also (due to the above mentioned "mess situation") downright depressing. Other neat and interesting historical facts are mentioned which helped make up for the depressing.


As interesting and fascinating as the subjects are, I will reluctantly raise my hand and admit that at times, it's a bit more intense and scientific than what an armchair reader probably wants. I hope that the things that scientists are working on can help turn the tide on modern food production and how it affects our planet and that one day, we will have a colony of bold adventurers on Mars. B-

My thanks to both NetGalley and the publisher ECW Press for an advanced copy of this book explaining the difficulties of providing sustenance for planned colonies on other planets.

The casual discussion among a certain subset of people about crossing a vast distance to a not so distant planet, landing, living and thriving in an environment where nothing is provided and everything has to be shipped to or created somehow shows quite alot about the people who toss of these ideas. These are people who have never been truly out in nature, never had a house go dark without a generator, never had to think where their food came from, nor how it tastes. The supposed great thinkers use money as intelligence, thinking wealth will take care of all. Unfortunately gold Krugerrands aren't too nutritious, nor taste that good even with a nice aioli dressing. Of course they can read and hire the authors Lenore Newman and Evan D.G. Fraser whose book Dinner on Mars: The Technologies That Will Feed the Red Planet and Transform Agriculture on Earth looks and tests many of the ideas that future colonists will need to survive from radiation, to water and food especially and even the spiritual guidance and care that plants can provide.

The book begins with the authors discussing different things in the terrible first days of lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic. What at first begins as a way to pass time for people who suddenly found themselves stuck inside instead of wondering fields, and discussing agriculture grew to something bigger. If trained explorers on Earth could die because of an inability to produce food, what could a Martian colonist do. Soon thoughts of chemicals, in the soil, and what might possibly be in the air passed between them. Frozen ice might provide water, but how would things grow, what kind of radiation proof greenhouses could assembled. From there questions about a revolution in food production for Mars, moved to the same ideas being done on our little planet. Would this new technology cause a agricultural renaissance on Earth, and what is being done know, that can be adapted to two worlds in the future.

The book is not only informative but very entertaining as well. You can tell the authors like each other and work well. The narration might be a little odd for some people, the third person view, but it works and I enjoyed the way information as shown. The technology and scientific information on agriculture, space travel, even the design of greenhouses is explained well, and was easy to follow. Some stuff was a tad, no a lot above me, but in turn I learned quite a bit. Not just about food, but on radiation, what is happening on Earth in agriculture and what is going wrong in our food chain.

A fascinating book with a science fiction feel, like a documentary from the future in book form. This is how we got to Mars, and this is how we live there. Very well presented, and even better very entertaining. Recommended for science readers aspiring botanists and people who would love to live on the moon. Also for science fiction fans, and especially for science fiction writers to use as a source for ideas, or for trying to get in the heads of characters who live millions of miles from home.

As the two of us have gone on this imaginary mission, we've come to believe a Martian community can and will feed itself successfully, and that in doing so, develop technologies that will revolutionise agriculture on Earth. [loc. 86]
I greatly enjoyed Lenore Newman's Lost Feast: Culinary Extinction and the Future of Food, so I leapt at the chance to review her new book, co-written with fellow food scientist Evan D. G. Fraser. Dinner on Mars was conceived during the early months of the Covid pandemic, when the authors were unable to travel or meet in person. It's a thought experiment that begins with the fate of Sir John Franklin's Arctic expedition, and examines the unique environmental challenges that must be met by a self-sustaining Martian colony. There's a lot about soil, radiation, insolation and so on: but there's also an emphasis on the human side of the equation, the spiritual/emotional need for greenery and plant life, the role of shared meals in a society, the importance of food as a pleasure and not merely as fuel.

Newman and Fraser examine the failings and inefficiences of modern agriculture -- which relies on the suffering of animals, the availability of cheap labour, and the profligate (ab)use of non-renewable resources: they describe and decry the ecological impact of dairy farming, and the environmental and health problems caused by agricultural industry. As much as 30% of all food produced is wasted.

Food production on Mars, where every input and output must be carefully balanced, would likely tend towards a vegetarian diet, perhaps with 'meat' grown by farming animal cells, rather than the animals themselves. Digital tools and monitoring systems would enable the system to be fine-tuned; new technologies would be developed as solutions to problems that don't even exist on Earth.

"But you do realise that it will be much easier and cheaper just to save Earth than go to Mars to figure these things out?" asks one scientist. Quite accurate, but the lure of Mars is an attractive one -- there are frequent references to Musk, Bezos and Branson in Dinner on Mars -- and if 'space science' can revolutionise life on Earth, that's another benefit of the space programme.

I found this an inspiring read, despite occasional pronoun weirdness: the oddity of a co-authored book that refers to the authors individually in the third person and collectively in the first person plural. ("Lenore thinks that Evan may be onto something here. In one of our conversations, she noted ..."). Dinner on Mars appeals to me as an SF reader, as well as a reader of social anthropology and the history of food. I was especially cheered to find a mention of Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy as 'a classic everyone should read': indeed, I'm oddly tempted to reread at least Red Mars, to see how ideas about feeding a Mars colony have moved on since the 1990s.

Highly recommended, fascinating, and extremely relevant to life on Earth, Dinner on Mars is a book I'll be recommending to many of my friends.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this honest review. UK publication date is 11 October 2022.

Clearly and competently written, this non-fiction is easy to read but ultimately I struggled to stay interested past the first twenty-five percent. I'm not sure exactly what I expected when I requested this book but it didn't work for me the way that I hoped.

I found this such an interesting read and one that really made me think. It focuses on what foods and methods of obtaining foods would be best to bring to new planet when starting a new society. Due to this, it touches lots on sustainability and which are the most efficient methods of growing foods, minimising waste, and making the most of the limited space available. I loved the back and forth between the two authors of the book and the dynamic they had going on. I was able to learn a lot about the culture around food from this book and it has left me feeling more responsible for what I eat and how they may be impacting the environment now and in the future.

I enjoyed this book. The tone is friendly and conversational. I really felt like the authors were talking to me. My favourite parts of the book were the personal anecdotes and the interactions between the authors. I very much enjoyed the authors’ own stories. While this is a science book, all the science is clearly explained. Although ostensibly about producing food on Mars, the book has many lessons for food production on Earth. Many of the footnotes are informative, not just citations. Overall, this is a worthwhile read for anyone interested in space exploration or in agriculture.Thank you to Netgalley and ECW Press for the advance reader copy.

"About 30 percent of the food we produce is wasted, and the 'western diet', which has spread over much of the world, is so rich in simple carbs, sugars, and fats that it has caused obesity and diabetes to become top public health concerns. The world would need to almost quadruple fruit and vegetable production if everyone were to switch to the kind of diets proposed by national food guides. In short, our food system is a mess, not fit for feeding us in the twenty-first century".

Dinner on Mars, on the surface, is a sci-fi approach to the Mars Question. If life on earth becomes wholly inhospitable, can humanity repopulate in Mars? The book is also a manifesto on how to establish a sustainable, self-sufficient agri-system, introducing a "do-over", we could establish through international efforts with an overhaul of current food policy. After-all - anything we do on Mars has to be tried and tested here first.

The book is deceptively non-fiction, throwing out fun tidbits about the poor animals who have actually already been to space in our lifetimes and the various technologies that already exist in a small capacity but could easily upscale for the benefit of everyone. The worlds food production greatly mismatches the needs of humans, and "we know that about half of our diets should be fruits and vegetables, but the world only produces a fraction of this, so we don't have anywhere near what we would need if everyone ate the diet nutritionists recommend".

Reading through this evoked so much emotion from me, from considering the failing efforts of greenwashing, 'sustainable' marketing that still leads to promoting excessive consumption, and the ultimate reality that food scarcity is an incoming concern that should be more central on the global agenda. I enjoyed the contribution of three scientists with entirely varied diets and opinions, and felt myself rooting for the project - even when the narrator become less than optimistic.

It's a great, yet bleak read. If we can't save the earth, what's to stop us destroying Mars too?

An Army Fights On Its Stomach. This was a fascinating look at what it would actually take to have a survivable human colony on Mars (or really on any other planetary body not Earth), starting from the same place Generals have known for Millenia: Ok, we got our people there. How do they stay there? First, they need food. From there, the discussion - and the book *is* written as an accessible third person discussion between its coauthors and the reader - centers on how to actually grow food on Mars for a population larger than one. (Sorry Mark Whatney and Andy Weir, but while your science may work for one person in a survival situation just trying to get off planet, it won't work for a livable colony trying to ensure it doesn't become the Mars version of Jamestown.) The science and bleeding edge/ near /future tech that Newman and Fraser discuss is utterly mind-boggling, but smaller scale experiments even in such places as The Land Pavilion in EPOCT at Walt Disney World (a personal favorite ride in the entire compound, specifically for the science it displays in action) show the promise of some of these exact techs. Overall a much more generally approachable discussion than other similar books from active literal rocket scientists (including Buzz Aldrin's Mission to Mars, where he discusses his proposal for moving people and materiel between planets), this one really only has two flaws: First, it discusses COVID quite a bit, as it forced the interactions of the coauthors and their research along certain paths and even opened the general idea to begin with. I am on a one-man crusade against any book that discusses COVID for any reason, and an automatic one-star deduction is really my only tool there. The second star deduction is for the dearth of any bibliography. Yes, there were footnotes frequently, but even these seemingly barely amounted to 10% of the text - which is half to one third of a more typical bibliography in my experience, even with my extensive experience working with advance reader copies. Still, overall this is an utterly fascinating discussion and something that anyone who is serious about expanding humanity's population beyond low Earth orbit seriously needs to consider. Very much recommended.

I read this as an ARC from Netgalley.com.

Are you interested in what humanity will need to do to survive - and thrive - on Mars? Do you like food? Then this book is for you! "Dinner on Mars" follows two food scientists who discuss and debate what people will need to do to feed a colony on Mars, as well as how those technologies will affect how people here on Earth produce and eat our food.

Newman and Fraser discuss lab grown chicken, algae, dairy made from fermented yeast, medicines made from barley, as well as the technology we'll need to create or adapt to engineer it all.

I found this to be an interesting read and I'd encourage anyone interested in science, food, sci-fi, or even business to give this book a shot. You might be inspired to try something new!

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC! Part exploration of current technology, part fantasizing about the future of humans in space, and part manifesto for taking care of our current planet, this book was phenomenally good. I learned so much from reading this, and honestly, this book gave me hope in a world where there seems little actual movement in preserving our current planet, or being able to survive on a new one. This was an absolute fantastic read.

As I started reading this book I found myself overwhelmed by all of the new information, but the writing style made it so much more digestible and easy to read which I appreciate greatly. I also really enjoyed how they involved the reader in their storytelling by introducing a new question and then continuing to answer it throughout the chapter. They consistently introduced current problems and things that are relevant in society today which made it that much easier to read as well. Once I started the first part I was a bit confused with all of the new vocabulary being introduced but with how they used it in context I found it easier. I also really enjoyed how they compared many parts of things on mars to science fiction making it easier for your average reader to understand. I talk a lot about how digestible and easy to read the book was because for the average reader, like myself, who doesn’t know much about science involving food technology, I found myself finishing the book knowing more and being better off than when I started it. I found part 3 of the book to be the most engaging and strongest part of the book for me. I really enjoyed my time reading this book and would recommend it to any reader out there!