Learning to cook – on Mars
A Brooklyn kitchen offers the Earthbound a taste of outer space, writes
TUCKED inside a former factory boiler room in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighbourhood is a kitchen dedicated to the care and feeding of Martians – that is, Earthlings who might someday live in a colony on Mars.
Although for some it will come as no surprise that this is happening in Brooklyn, US, that bastion of anything-goes food culture, the concept, cooked up by artists Heidi Neilson and Douglas Paulson, is anything but fanciful.
“It started as an intellectual exercise,” says Paulson. “But we quickly realised creating a hands-on environment was necessary to the discussion.”
What began as the Menu for Mars Supper Club, a monthly gathering of artists, scientists and educators that explored the cuisines of countries with active space programmes, has evolved into the Menu for Mars Kitchen, a 366m2 installation at the Boiler art gallery.
Gallery co-owner Susan Swenson says she found the project intriguing because it combined “the farcical with the very real, using unusual ingredients one could actually find on Mars and applying creativity to invent not only sustaining, but tasty and vis- ually engaging recipes.”
In their design of a realistic habitat that includes a 90m2 kitchen, Neilson and Paulson provide visitors with a glimpse – and taste – of what life on Mars might be like. They consider the types of shelf-stable food that might be transported from Earth, as well as the kinds of fresh foods it might be possible to raise there.
“We started with our imaginations,” says Neilson. “We’re not all rocket scientists, but most people can cook. A kitchen can be a comfort zone, even in a hostile environment.”
Scientifically speaking, life on Mars would involve living indoors in a pressurised structure – forever. So the two artists banned open flames, cooking instead with microwave ovens and induction burners.
Small inflatable greenhouses provide a supply of edible weeds such as dandelion, mustard and purslane, hardy plants that the artists reason would be more adaptable than tomatoes or cucumbers to a difficult environment.
“When you consider all organic matter has to come from Earth,” says Paulson, “and has to first travel through space for five years, you begin to understand how carefully you have to choose what foods will have the biggest impact.”
Consider protein, for instance. While the kitchen is equipped with protein-rich legumes such as dried lentils and beans, which are reliably shelfstable and easy to cook, it’s nearly impossible to imagine raising livestock on Mars.
“Even if you could manage to travel to Mars with chickens or pigs,” says Neilson, “they require a lot of resources, so it probably would be more trouble than it’s worth.”
Eyes on Ethiopia
Looking to other cultures for inspiration, Paulson and Neilson settled on the idea of creating a cricket farm. Using several empty 19 litre water containers, they raised 1 000 crickets that were eventually turned into flour.
But they had another reason for choosing to become cricket farmers: “We thought about the fact that Mars colonists would be living so far from Earth on a planet devoid of life, and it seemed like the crickets would provide a nice sound of home,” says Neilson.
As they learned more about the Red Planet, they realised that frequent dust storms may stir up an unpleasant taste. “There’s a lot of thinking that Mars will smell and taste like peroxide,” says Paulson, “so we started building a spice pantry based on Ethiopian food, thinking that those strong flavours – chilli peppers, cumin, cardamom – would help mask the peroxide.”
Their instincts may have been more scientific than they realised: A team of Italian scientists from the University of Bologna has been studying a volcanic crater in Ethiopia’s Danakil Desert where some conditions mimic those on Mars, including air filled with chlorine and sulphur vapours.
“We thought about the strengths and weaknesses of different cuisines,” says Paulson. “Ethiopian food seemed to tick a lot of boxes.”
Once the habitat was in place, the most important thing was getting visitors to start cooking. “Even when trying to make the same thing,” says Neilson, “like pizza or pasta, the limitation of ingredients and other resources forces the cook to rethink the recipe.”
Some recipes, such as macaroni and cheese, made with a cricket-flour-enhanced pasta, work, while others – notably Paulson’s experimental shake of textured vegetable protein and peanut butter – are a fail. Miracle berries, a West African fruit containing a glycoprotein