Banquets from Kerry, plant life on Mars
KERRY football supporters who journeyed for hours on the famous Ghost Trains to All Ireland football finals in Dublin in the last century and scientists planning a possible space mission to Mars some three decades from now have a common link.
The football followers from The Kingdom never left home on the midnight trains for marathon trips to Croke Park without a selection of home made sandwiches wrapped in brown paper.
Some were also known to bring along Paddy bottles filled with tea, milk and something stronger, wrapped in woollen socks and secured with makeshift corks made from the pages of the previous week’s issue of the Cork Weekly Examiner or The Kerryman.
Now, the same basic principle of travelling with specially packed nutritious food for a journey to the Red Planet later this century is being adopted by scientists, who are faced with a daunting challenge - how to produce food for a mission to Mars that will probably last 24 months - six months to get there, 12 months on the planet and six months to get back.
European and American scientists, backed by top chefs, are working hard at finding a solution. The present generation of space food comprises freeze-dried or tinned food whose contents are usually suspended in a jelly or a sauce to prevent them from dispersing messily in zero gravity.
Experts say this worked well in trips around Earth’s backyard, such as on the International Space Station or the Apollo missions to the Moon. But a trip to Mars is much more daunting.
For the weight of taking ready-made food, oxygen and water to survive a 1,000 day mission by a six person crew will be 30 tons, which rises to 120 tons when water for washing is added. And that is equal to the payload of the biggest rocket.
The European Space Agency (ESA), one of the exhibitors at the global food fair, SIAL, in Paris last week, is among those trying to come up with solutions.
ESA revealed in Paris that it has teamed up with the French gourmet company ADF to define recipes which could create good food for space travellers using a very limited number of raw materials, which it might be also possible to grow on other planets.
Christophe Lasseur, ESA’s biological life support co-ordinator, said at the moment all food for space missions is brought from Earth.
“For longer missions to Mars, however, we cannot bring everything, so we are researching into which plants to cultivate in space.”
The plants identified as having good potential for providing the necessary vitamins, protein and carbohydrates for astronauts are tomatoes, lettuce, potatoes, soybeans, spinach, onions and wheat, as well as rice.
Solving the problem of food production on long space missions to Mars could also bring new production methods to the food industry on Earth.
Some of the space experiments have already led to cost-effective systems in the food industry for cooling, packaging, preservation and disinfection.
It would surely be an ironic twist if one of the beneficiaries of those experiments in the years ahead is Kerry, the leading global food group.
For it began and is still headquartered in the heart of The Kingdom, whose football supporters travelled on those adventurous missions to Croke Park all those years ago with plentiful supplies of their own specially prepared food.
