Spatial nutritionist sends mushrooms in space to study for Mars Travel

This also told test is based on a conversation with Flávia Fayet-Moore, a nutrition scientist and founder and CEO of Foodiq Global, a nutrition research company. On a March 31 Spacex Flight starting from Florida, the company plans to send their mushroom experience in space as part of a partnership with NASA and SpaceX. This test was published for duration and clarity.

About two years ago, I started to think that we should try to grow mushrooms in space.

I’m doing nutritional, culinary and mushroom health benefits for seven years.

There are a lot of interesting things on the mushrooms that make them suitable for the task.

First, mushrooms develop very quickly. I explain to everyone and it blows to learn that sweet brown mushrooms – these small mushrooms you see in the store – and Portobellos are the same mushrooms. These are the same mushrooms, but the Portobellos are harvested two days later as the little ones. They grow so fast.

The end -to -end culture cycle for mushrooms is around 45 days. It’s not very long, so we don’t wait 190 days to harvest something like other plants. They also need minimum resources, such as water. They do not need sunlight to synthesize because they are not plants, and they can prosper in very small spaces. Without forgetting, they are very resilient and they are really good for surviving different changes in their environment.

And they are completely edible. You can consume all mushrooms so that there is no waste. So let’s say that you grow tomatoes, you don’t eat the whole plant, so there is plant waste, and you need to know what to do with that. The beauty of mushrooms is that when they decompose, you can reuse inevitable plant waste as part of the necessary substrate for them to develop, so they help close this loop in agriculture. If you have already gone to a nursery and have a mushroom compost that is treated with a substrate of mushrooms, you know that it is really rich in nutrients, and it is ideal for cultivating more plants.

But above all, NASA prioritizes whole foods on supplements, because there is an advantage in eating whole foods. In the science of nutrition, you know that when you start to complete, it is not the same effect in the body that nature provided for the combination of nutrients. Mushrooms are therefore an entire food source of very high nutrition; They are nutrients in our food groups, from vegetable grains to nuts and seeds through fish and meat.

Astronauts receive 1000 IU of vitamin D daily to maintain bone health, and fungi can naturally produce vitamin D when exposed to UV light, just as humans can. So, fundamentally, we can obtain 100% of our vitamin D needs with only 100 grams of mushrooms.

There are also research showing that when you add mushrooms to a meal, you can add less salt, which is really important because, in space, having too much sodium exacerbates the amount of calcium that is laundry of the bone. It is therefore a countermeasure for having a low sodium diet.

And if all this was not enough, what Really Cool about mushrooms is that they are very rich in Umami. It is the fifth basic taste, like sour, sweet, salty or bitter – and, unlike other flavors, Umami seems to be well preserved in a space environment.

It’s like a plane. Have you ever ordered a wine on a flight and then tried the same after landing? It has a different taste. Everything is attenuated. It is lower humidity and higher cabin pressures that change palatability. Not with mushrooms, you always get this Umami flavor.

This is where it becomes particularly interesting for long-haul space flights, such as the genre that we will have to take to arrive on Mars. Can you imagine eating thermostabilized and dehydrated foods for five years? I can’t.

The most important thing about food is nutrition, of course, but food is much more than that. It is a fundamental element of our culture and our survival and our mental health. At the international space station, astronauts love to meet at dinner and eat and exchange food. It is nostalgic, but it is also comfort. They are isolated, they are far from home. Food therefore becomes a way to connect with each other, but also to connect with their culture, their families and the things they love.

This is why we look at space cultures.

This month, my company joins forces with NASA and SpaceX to complete the first study to cultivate mushrooms in space. If everything goes as planned, I think we have just unlocked a key element in the long-haul area, the kind of thing that will help us reach Mars.

On March 31, on a SpaceX FRAM2 flight from Florida, we send our mushroom experience in space to see how they grow. The flight is three and a half days, and as they mainly double every day in size, we hope we will see something promising. Since we do not send them to the ISS and we expect months to recover them, we will actually get relatively quickly results, and we hope to publish our results this fall.

My daughter will be with me the launch day. When I started talking about sending mushrooms in space a few years ago, I would never have imagined that I would arrive here. I’m so proud to show him that when you have a dream, you just have to continue and you can use your passion to help us arrive at a new border.