Tag: Food

The ESA formed two research teams to explore the possibility of cultivating meat in space as a viable food source for astronauts. If successful, this would provide astronauts with nutritious food during deep space or long-term missions from Earth.

How so? Cultivated meat would be able to overcome the typical two-year shelf-life of traditional packaged supplies. Since there are limited resources in space, growing fresh food would be required to increase the resilience and self-sufficiency of a mission. British and German teams working independently studied the existing protein food alternatives for space, such as plants and algae, to cultivated meat in terms of nutritional value. What they ended up with were several different cultivated meat production methods and bioreactor technologies.

It’s something that is still in its infancy, so we proposed a roadmap that outlines the steps required to progress the necessary technologies and fill current knowledge gaps. Hopefully, we will see soon the European Food Safety Authority granting similar approvals and the research rapidly progressing. The feeling is that we are at the beginning of a process that could transform the industry, making the conventional meat production model obsolete,” said João Garcia, ESA researcher in cultivated meat for space applications.

[Source]