Ideas - Dinner on Mars: How to Grow Food When Humans Colonize the Red Planet

Episode Date: October 14, 2024

Two food security experts imagine what it would take to feed a human colony on Mars in the year 2080 if we colonized the red planet. From greenhouse technologies to nanotechnologies, they figure we could have a well-balanced diet on Mars, and argue there are lessons on how to improve our own battered food systems here on Earth. *This episode originally aired on Oct. 4, 2022.

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Welcome to Ideas, I'm Nala Ayed. It's the year 2080, and the first human colony has been established on Mars on what passes for a Friday night a half century from now. And that is the dome with the lake, as it's usually called. So I'm imagining myself staring out through the dome by the lake, looking up into the cosmos. Maybe Earth is a small little dot in the distance. The city has developed to the point where one dome is much larger than the others and contains a significant water body that serves a lot of purposes as a heat sink, as part of the atmospheric control and part of the water system, but it's also very pretty.

There's probably a large number of weather balloons floating around in the atmosphere that will be concentrating the sun's energy onto solar collectors on the ground. solar collectors on the ground. And so imagine we are on a lakeside terrace. And of course, the temperature is pretty much perfect. And we are surrounded by plants, by trees with fruit, by vines, by small patches of crops. There might even be a few birds, although that's stretching it a bit. And so we're enjoying, there might be some wandering musicians, and the place is filled with life. And what will there be to eat? Oh, there's going to be a pretty diverse and vibrant menu that is put together from the ground up. And I'd probably be staring at a salad freshly picked and produced with a few cubes of that grown salmon culture for flavor and for protein.

protein very plant-based a lot of fresh leafy greens a lot of fresh fruit not as much in terms of grains as we would be used to on earth because they're quite expansive crops so that might be a little luxury if you actually have pasta that's made with wheat that would be a an unusual occasion and as evan mentioned the protein probably going to be coming from advanced fermentation or from tissue culture. I do think, though, we would still have some very good fermented beverages because humans take fermentation wherever they go. So there might be some Mars bourbon kicking around. And a milkshake, a fermented dairy protein milkshake. I think we can't forget that as well, Lenore. Definitely, definitely.

It's interesting. I think we might even have a little bit, at this point in the city's development, we might have some hydroponically grown grapes to actually make a bit of a Martian wine to capture that Martian terroir. And caffeine. I mean, we can synthesize caffeine quite easily. And we can imagine, you know, some of the very luxurious plants that we'd be harvesting around that Martian lake might produce a small amount of coffee.

So some sort of mixture of synthetic coffee mixed with the real stuff would also be, you know, something we would be drinking at the end of the meal, I think. I'm Evan Fraser, director of Errol Food Institute at the University of Guelph. I'm Lenore Newman. I'm the director of the Food and Agriculture Institute at the University of the Fraser Valley. Evan Fraser and Lenore Newman are the co-authors of a thought experiment turned into a book called Dinner on Mars, the technologies that will feed the red planet and transform agriculture on Earth. What is it that inspired this whole Dinner on Mars thought experiment in the first place?

whole dinner on Mars thought experiment in the first place? Well, it was, you know, March 20th or so, 2020. And I was, I think, like everybody else on the planet, a mixture of anxious and scared and bored and terrified about this yawning gap that opened up in front of me. And so, as I recall, Lenore, I started texting you and I started saying, I think interesting things are happening, but I'm really bored and I'm scared. What do you think? And we started texting and one text every other day led to 30 or 40 texts an hour led to a conversation that was essentially, well, we can't travel anywhere physically, but maybe there's somewhere we can go to in our imagination. And this was at the point where, you know, Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos were sort of blasting off in their rockets. And so everyone was talking about space exploration and we sort of thought, well, wait a sec, maybe we should just sort of imagine, a silly imagining, what would dinner

be like if we ever made it to Mars? And at some point, you know, after about six weeks of this, we realized this wasn't a silly exercise anymore. It was deadly serious because we were talking about real science, real issues. And then we were starting to apply the lessons that we were sort of imagining being playing out on Mars. We were starting to apply the lessons that we were sort of imagining being playing out on Mars. We start imagining how they might transform food systems here on Earth. And this is where things get really both exciting and serious in that we are not only imagining how we will sustain a new generation of exploration outside of this, the planet that we call home, but also how we need to change how we eat here on Earth.

planet that we call home, but also how we need to change how we eat here on Earth. I think one of the surprises of the pandemic and one of the not so wonderful surprises was how severe the food problems became and how quickly they did. And that basically the world food system went into crisis and has remained in crisis ever since. And certainly there's been a lot driving that. The pandemic, ongoing and worsening climate change, and then, of course, war and political discontent. And what those of us in food and agriculture have realized is we've probably left the era where food was easy, with easy kind of in quotation marks. But there were definitely 50 years where food got cheaper and cheaper and easier and easier to procure to the point that a lot of people on Earth didn't have to think about it very hard. And it is becoming clear that we're leaving that era. And I think one of the catalysts for this, for me, was Elon Musk and his discussion of a city on Mars kind of brushed aside the food. And, you know, Evan and I knew that it was actually a

big question because you can't send food to Mars. It's simply too far. And that's always how we've worked around this problem in space is just taking the food with us. And we started to realize, though, that the Earth is becoming a lot more like Mars in some ways, in that our own system of takeout in the middle of winter, for example, is breaking down. And as we did this exercise, we realized solving these problems for an environment where you have no cushion, where there is no natural world per se to give you a hand, you actually start to solve these problems on Earth as well. And that became the driving theme of the book, was a lot of the changes you need to make to make food work on Mars

actually would really help us out here on Earth as well. So right now we've got a very paradoxical situation. At the level of food security, we have this weird world where both the number of hungry and the number of obese people are rising on the planet. So that's a crazy statistic in and of itself. And then there's the environmental costs at a global level of our food system. Food is the number one driver in our losing fight to protect biodiversity. Food is the world's largest user of fresh water and the largest source of water pollution. Agri-food systems create about a third of the world

greenhouse gases, and we waste about a third of the world's food. So when you put all of that together, we realize that we've got a system that really isn't working for consumers, both. There is a world of stuffed and starved out there. It's not working for the environment. And then it's probably not working for migrant workers. And the level of worker exploitation that's in the food system is very, very significant worldwide. And of course, there's the animal welfare issue. The animal suffering caused globally by the food system is enormous. You add all those things up together and you think there has to be a more efficient way of doing these things. And it's that sort of feeling of what could the alternative be that led Lenore and I to think,

well, maybe if we imagined a food system on Mars, we'll unlock some solutions for here on Earth. So I'm sold on the idea. I'm imagining the scene that you're creating. But logistically,

how is it even possible, Evan? Describe to me the conditions on Mars that you'd have to contend with in setting up this Martian colony. Well, I mean, it's going to be really hard to feed a community on Mars. There's no question at all. On one hand, you have virtually no water. And what little water is there is frozen into the regolith. The regolith, that's a fancy word for essentially Martian dirt. And it's kind of like permafrost, doesn't have a direct analogy,

but let's imagine there's some water crystals frozen in the soil. There's carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. There's way too much solar radiation, but not enough solar energy because Mars is a lot farther from the sun than Earth. So there's less warmth there. So it gets really cold and you don't have the sort of what called heat units that plants need to flourish. But you've got punishing solar radiation because it doesn't really have a strong atmosphere that gets rid of the radiation. So you've got these wild swings in temperatures. It's generally too cold. You've got no organic matter at all. You've got very little water and too much radiation, but not enough solar energy. It's a bit of a disaster, but you do have things like carbon

dioxide and other basic building blocks of life. And so I think when you start imagining life on Mars, you start with some sort of algae or cyanobacteria that can eat that regolith, absorb some carbon dioxide, and in doing so, it will produce organic matter and oxygen. And if you can start that process going in some sort of tank, and scientists on Earth have simulated Martian conditions and have got cyanobacteria that will eat and flourish under those conditions, well, then you've got the basic ingredients on which you can build something more elaborate. So where exactly on planet Mars would the ideal location for this colony be?

So I went down a deep, deep rabbit hole on the best location to produce food on Mars. The scientific consensus is there's two possible locations. Somewhere around the northern pole of Mars, there's actually a crater filled with ice. And a European space agency explorer discovered that a number of years ago. And so it would have the advantage of being a crater and it's got lots of water, but it's up in the pole. So it gets really, really cold. So a group of architects a few years ago sort of did some visioning on this and decided that there's a tunneling into a cliff face kind of in the mid-latitude, slightly north of the equator on Mars would probably provide a way of buffering people against the solar radiation. It's a little bit warmer because it's closer to the equator and there is frozen water in the, essentially the permafrost there. So there was sort of a Goldilocks zone

and this crater identified that would be a kind of a good halfway ground that would provide enough benefits to probably be worthwhile investigating setting up a colony. And in imagining their Martian colony, both Evan and Lenore took inspiration from what's already been developed here on planet Earth. Yes, so I went down a very deep rabbit hole about greenhouses. And because the truth is, we don't entirely just farm outside on Earth. We create little environments for our plants. And there have been a few very large experiments to try and bring entire ecosystems indoors for various reasons, for pleasure or for scientific experimentation. And one of the ones that inspired me is this series of domes in the south of England called the Eden Project that encloses a series of biomes in an old mining pit.

Well, hello, my name is David Harland, and I am the chief global growth officer for the Eden Project in the southwest of England. So to imagine the Eden Project, I want you to imagine a big hole in the ground, a former mine from which humans have extracted, in this case, China clay. And we took that former mine and we breathed new life into it. So what you see today is some very large plant conservatories that look a little bit like big bubbles. They're the largest plant conservatories on the planet. And in those bubbles, in those biomes, we have got a fully highted rainforest, we've got a Mediterranean zone, and then lovely lush gardens all the way around in that bowl. The Eden project covers an area about the size of 35 soccer fields. So when you step into, say, the rainforest biome, the first thing that probably hits you is the scale of the building.

It's a very large space. The height of the rainforest, the smells of the Mediterranean, perhaps if you were there. And what we do is that we take people on a journey around various of the tropical zones of the world, and it finishes particularly in an area which demonstrates how dependent we are on the natural world. So you see things like cocoa that turns into chocolate.

You'll see the stories of palm oil. You'll see bananas even at another simple level and many more things because the purpose of Eden is to remind people that we're dependent on this rather wonderful planet of ours and we're part of it, not apart from it. Well, the reason for doing it in a former mine was to take a place that was apparently hopeless,

that had been used up by humans, that was sterile, that was derelict, and breathe new life into it. You know, by that very was sterile, that was derelict, and breathe new life into it. You know, by that very act of transformation, you can get into a dialogue that the future remains ours to make, that hope isn't lost. Well, plenty of people have imagined us, you taking biomass structures to mars um i think our view is that we'd rather look after the planet that we've actually got right now um and we have a little bit of a joke here you know if you sent some astronauts off up into space but they crash landed into let's pick a country burkina faso it would look pretty fantastic so shouldn't we

really concentrate on the areas of this world that we can work with and protect and conserve and mean that we don't have to go and build biomes on planet Mars? Ultimately, what we're trying to do is to connect people to the natural world, to remind people that we're a part of the natural world, not apart from it. people that we're a part of the natural world, not apart from it. The greenhouse windows of the Eden Project are made of three layers of a special kind of plastic that inflate to create two meters deep pillows. And the biomes are home to hundreds of thousands of thriving plants and trees. It's mostly for educational purposes. It's not a true closed system because they do bring in water and air and such.

But it does serve to show that one can create these little communities of plants that support each other indoors. And we've seen that in the Victorian era. It was very popular to create these kind of pleasure domes full of plants. And right back into history, people have been obsessed with growing plants out of their own ranges. And that often requires greenhouses. It's now a cliche that necessity is the mother of invention. But in the case of greenhouses, inventing them was actually a matter of life and death. The first greenhouses on Earth were actually built in Roman times.

And they were very small, and they didn't have glass the way we do. They actually used translucent rock. But the reason they were doing this is the Emperor Tiberius was a very strange man. the Emperor Tiberius was a very strange man. And he had these fits of illness that might have been real, might have been kind of imagined. He was prone to anger. And he'd hold up at his pleasure palace on the Isle of Capri. And his doctors told him that he really should be eating a snake fruit every day for his health. And he became a bit obsessed with this. Snake fruit is also known as Persian cucumber. It looks a little like a cucumber.

And the problem was they don't grow year round, even in the warmth of the Bay of Naples. And so he told his gardeners he wanted one every day, no compromise. And the problem was, if he didn't like one of his servants or his staff, he threw them over a cliff that was called Tiberius's Leap. And of course, they fell to their deaths. So, these people had a lot of incentive to develop a solution. To say the least. had a lot of incentive to develop a solution. To say the least. And yeah, and so they put together the first working greenhouses to grow these cucumbers for Tiberius.

And basically what they did was they enclosed a small pile of manure, which generates heat as it decomposes, with translucent rock that let light in, and they would wheel these little mini greenhouses in and out of shelter. And they did manage to create a crop where no crop would be possible outside. And that technology developed over the years. But yeah, it came out of these very nervous gardeners who really needed to solve this problem. So beyond conclusions about the man, what does that tell us about

how technologies can evolve over the centuries? Well, often what we find in agriculture is usually it's problem driven. We have a challenge, we set out to solve it, often because we need more food or we need a different type of food. And what we find is there tend to be these little breakthroughs where someone suddenly imagines something. And in the book, we talk a lot about these keystone developments in history where someone imagines a new way of doing something. in history where someone imagines a new way of doing something and then what happens is it tends to stick for a while because it's not very practical until other secondary technologies appear and what we really find is to build a city on mars that feeds itself is thousands of these little innovations and breakthroughs have to build on each other like a wave. And I'll pass it over to, I mean, Evan has some good examples.

I'd love to discuss an example, the development of nitrogen fertilizers. How were crops in North America farmed before the advent of that particular technology, Evan? So if you go back a little over 100 years, most farmers in most farming systems around the world struggled to get enough nitrogen, plant-available nitrogen for their plants to grow to their full potential. And normally, pre-industrial times, pre-1920, you would either scrape bird dung off of an island in the South Pacific and use it to fertilize your crops. You would collect whatever manure you could from your local cattle and livestock and human feces, or you would plant leguminous crops, peas, clovers, things like that,

which actually have the ability to take nitrogen out of the air, which is not plant available, and make it fixed so that plants can use it. Well, I mean, in the 1920s, a German chemist and a German engineer learned that if you heat air up to really, really hot and

compress it down, so it's really, really under a lot of pressure, you can actually create plant available nitrogen. And that's the beginning of nitrogen fertilizer. So that was one of these keystone technologies that Lenore just mentioned. You could suddenly produce as much nitrogen as you could ever hope to do. Burned a lot of energy in doing so, burned a lot of natural gas, but you could do it. But there was a missing piece of technology though, because when you put that abundant nitrogen from a synthetic source onto a crop in the 1920s, the crop grew so large that it just fell over.

It couldn't sustain its own weight with its extra nitrogen. So there needed to be a next piece of technology developed, and that was plant breeding, a job for the plant breeders. And Norman Borlaug, who's often seen as what's called the grandfather of the green revolution, bred dwarf varieties of wheat and rice. And these dwarf varieties of wheat and rice were able to use the nitrogen and bring a crop to harvest weight. And so suddenly you then have a bunch of technologies together, the fertilizer, the plant breeding, irrigation, and herbicides. And suddenly farmers were able to produce vastly more food than they

ever were able to before. And that transforms society. That unlocks the human population growth over the 20th century. On Ideas, you're listening to Dinner on Mars with food security experts Evan Fraser and Lenore Newman. Ideas is broadcast on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. You can also find our podcast through your favorite podcast app. I'm Nala Ayed. Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goldtar and I have a confession to make.

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For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. Major breakthrough technological innovations are the result of thousands of mini-eureka moments that came beforehand. And those innovations are inspired by a pressing need. Food security experts Lenore Newman and Evan Fraser are looking at innovations here on Earth and gazing into the future, the near future, when the first human colony is established on Mars. They're co-authors of Dinner on Mars, the technologies that will feed the red planet

and transform agriculture on Earth. so i would say the green revolution was the last big transformation in agriculture and that was in the 1950s and 60s when suddenly the application of those technologies fertilizer herbicides irrigation and plant breeding uh bring us an ability to produce far more food than the world ever had before but we need a new transformation. And that's what Lenore and I are saying the dinner on Mars will bring. It will bring a digital transformation of our food and farming systems that will allow us to not only produce a lot of food, but produce a lot of food with very few inputs, which is where the conceit of producing food on Mars comes from. So putting aside Mars, do you think we're anywhere near of discovering another kind of

transformative technology here on Earth? So yes, I believe we are. I believe the application of artificial intelligence, the application of genomics, the ability to use robotics. I think that sort of suite of digital technologies, those same technologies that have given us the internet and smartphones and are transforming medicine, I think these technologies are just now beginning to be applied at scale and at volume within our food system, and that we are at the beginning of a wave, a very, very disruptive wave of technological innovation in food that means that the future will be radically different than the past. And with that will come a lot of good things in terms of sustainability, but also a tremendous number of challenges.

Let's not assume that technologies are panaceas, of course. Yeah, I totally agree with Evan. precision fermentation that are probably, when they play out over the next several decades, going to make the development of nitrogen fertilizer look like a small change. Farming is about to change more in the next couple of decades than it maybe has in hundreds or even thousands of years. Lenore, just to stay with you for a minute, you both draw inspiration for your dinner on Mars from cutting edge research being done in Iceland. Tell me about what you learned after discovering the work of Dr. Bjorn Orver, who's the co-founder of ORF Genetics. Yes, well, I've long had an interest in genetic engineering of plants and also synthetic biology, where you

basically take plants and other organisms and you can edit them to do things for you, to put it in a very simple form. So one of the ones I follow closely, you might take yeast and modify it to create something other than alcohol. And this is actually pretty common technology now. It's used to produce insulin and also to produce vegetable rennet, the catalyst that makes cheesemaking possible. So existing tech, but being applied in more and more ways. And it's always been kind of on the side of my desk. And every now and then I go back to see how it's going and see if anything interesting has happened. And what I found the last time I really re-engaged and then stayed engaged with this technology was this company in Iceland

growing barley in volcanic regolith using hydroponic fluid, but they weren't growing barley to have barley. The barley had been engineered to create human growth hormones for the medical and beauty industries. And it just, it blew my mind. My name is Björn Ørvar. I'm the Chief Scientific Officer of OrphGenetics and we are located here in Iceland. And we have about 50 kilometers away from Reykjavik. We have this vast land of lava and underneath this lava is the geothermal source and we located our greenhouse on this lava bed. It's actually quite photogenic because you have this black lava and then you have this bright light which is actually our greenhouse and we use geothermal energy also to produce electricity and we run this greenhouse

throughout the year so in the middle of the winter, you have the greenhouse operating. So it is quite, like I say, quite a photogenic thing. You see this black lava and then you have a bright yellow light in the middle of nowhere. It's basically in the middle of nowhere. The greenhouse in the middle of nowhere covers an area the size of a football field and produces 130,000 bioengineered barley plants at any given time in a volcanic rock landscape where the outside temperature averages between 0 and 12 degrees Celsius. Celsius. And if you go inside this house, you see those plants being cultivated on conveyor belts and we use so-called hydroponic cultivation. There is no soil inside the house. We do not

cultivate these plants in soil. However, we use this unique material, which is volcanic pumice. So we basically grow these plants in volcanic pumice and water. Bjorn and his team bioengineer the barley plants to produce tiny proteins called growth factors that originally come from humans and animals. Barley is very difficult in bioengineering. However, it has two really nice qualities. First of all, if you need to cultivate barley outside greenhouse, you basically can do it anywhere in the world. You can even grow barley plants in Iceland, and where the summer temperature is around 12 degrees average.

And you can grow barley in deserts and at high altitude and so forth. So it's a really resilient plant and in that term, a very good plant. However, the most important thing with the barley for our business is that we are bioengineering these plants with new traits and these plants are biologically contained, meaning that they have difficulties in cross-pollinating other plants. So it's a very safe way of producing nutrients, producing new proteins like we are doing in the barley plant, because we know that this barley plant is not going to cross-pollinate some natural vegetation or something like that.

Bjorn imagines that in the not-so-distant future, the animal growth factor proteins developed in barley could be used to create meat that circumvents the killing of animals. Yes, the cell-cultured meat industry is growing very fast. There are many companies around the world that is developing this very challenging technology. However, one of the challenges these companies have is the cost of growth factors in the cultivation. You're probably talking about $50,000 to $100,000 for one gram. So this is just too expensive for this industry. And it would be impossible to produce a meat today using the growth factors that are available now on the market.

They're mostly for research and for the pharmaceutical industry. So we set up with this goal of genetics to try to scale up the production of those mostly animal growth factors, but at the same time bringing down the cost of these growth factors dramatically, probably in the range of 500 to 1,000 times from what you have to buy them for today. Our goal is simply to be able to provide these self-cultivated meat and fish culture companies around the world with inexpensive growth factors at high volume, making it possible for them to develop their technology and also making it possible to produce a consumer product that the consumer basically can buy.

Based on the experience that we will probably gain here on Earth, so to speak. I could definitely see this as a possibility of food production, protein production in space in the future. But first, we have to harness this technology here on Earth. Food security expert, Lenore Newman. I just looked at it and thought, how? How did we go from a farmer in a field with a red barn and a cow to this barley is smart and creates something for us that otherwise would be very difficult to source and make.

And that really, that single application actually existing in the world, rather than being theoretical, made me realize that science was far more advanced than most people think, and that the revolution that genomics is unlocking is much closer than we thought. There is, even as there's excitement about this, as you say, there's a loud contingent of people who adamantly refuse to consume genetically modified food. Is it going to be required for people to survive on Mars? Oh, definitely. Definitely. And I would say that

the people that go to live in a city on Mars probably are not too worried about genetic engineering. But I would say, too, that throughout history, we always see this with every technological change. There certainly were a group of people that weren't very thrilled with cars and didn't feel... Now, looking back, they might have had a bit of a point, but every technological innovation, there's a group of people

who leap on right away. They're the early adopters, and we know this, and they kind of drive the conversation. They work the bugs out of things. Then there's a group of people that basically just follow. And, you know, they're a group that say right now might have some thoughts about genetic foods, but they don't really look for it. They'll go buy soy in the store. They'll buy cheese and not worry too much about how it's produced. And then, of course, there is a group that is very technologically averse. And I think the weird thing with a Martian civilization, it's going to be a bit self-selecting in that those people probably aren't going to go to Mars. And I think we saw this with a lot of population movements.

People who relocate tend to be early adopters. Evan, I don't know if you would agree, but that would be my thought. Yeah, I think that if we think about technologies on Earth, the world is moving into a place that it is going to be so hot and crowded that we are not going to be able to leave any serious tools on the table in terms of feeding ourselves and managing through the calamitous environmental challenges of the next hundred years. And if we can engineer a crop to be more efficient with nitrogen or engineer a protein supply to be more efficient and the resulting product produces healthy, safe nutrition, then I think that we will be engaging in it. Not everybody all the time. And as Lenore says, there will be a percentage of the population that

because of philosophy and economics can choose for themselves other products. But for the vast majority of people, I think that's the future we're probably going to be looking at. You've pointed out, both of you have pointed out, that the amount of food waste on this planet is far higher than it should be. There's more than enough food produced on the planet to feed everyone, yet nearly a third of food produced goes to waste. What do you think is a realistic way to curtail the amount of food that goes to waste, as well as the amount of waste that is created in the production of food itself. So I think one of the things, and this thought experiment about designing a city on Mars

really highlighted this to me. One of the things we have to realize is that our current industrial system is what's sometimes called a make-take-throwaway system, where we take resources out of the natural environment, we make it, we turn it into something we care for, or we use economically, or we eat or whatever. And then the waste products just get dumped away. And nature doesn't work that way.

Nature works in cycles. The tree drops a leaf, the leaf decomposes and is taken up by the tree for the next generation of leaves, et cetera. And in Mars, where there are no organic molecules, when we produce organic molecules using cyanobacteria, each of those organics are gonna be unbelievably valuable. And so we're not going to waste any of them. We are going to recycle them continually. And so this then means what we have to have on Mars,

which we should be developing on Earth, is a circular economy of food. We need a food economy where the waste products from one step are immediately used and upcycled, not recycled or thrown away, upcycled into higher value products. And so, for example, the waste product of a cyanobacteria tank would be a bunch of dead cyanobacteria. Well, that's actually the valuable organics that are going to be fed then to, say, a colony of yeasts that will produce advanced proteins. In the process, all of these things will be producing oxygen and filtering water. And what we're having to imagine on Mars is a series of modules that the waste products of one become the inputs to the other. And that's something we desperately need. That's the sort of mindset we desperately need here on Earth, where, like the statistics are, that we waste

about a third of the world's food. Here's one example of how this circular economy of food works. Cher Mereweather is CEO of Anthesis Provision. And so one of the recent companies that we worked with was Wellington Brewery. So we went in and the first thing we did was how do we prevent the beer from going down the drain? And then we started to look at, well, what else can we do? Because when the natural process of making beer results in unavoidable byproducts, and that's just a fancy way of saying the leftover spent grains. And so we started to explore or stand in that possibility of what if, if you will, and look at, well, what else can we do with those spent grains?

and look at, well, what else can we do with those spent grains? And the first thing we did was engage with a local company called Okara Solutions, and they were creating animal feed with bugs, in this case, black soldier flies. And we thought, well, the black soldier flies make a higher value feed than just simply feeding the spent grain to, let's say, pigs. So we explored that option and we started to create this high value animal feed that we fed to Izumi Aquaculture and their Rainbow Trout. So we took the spent grain from Wellington Brewery and we fed it to the black soldier fly larva. And then that was fed to the rainbow trout at Izumi Aquaculture. And the rainbow trout was one of the first ingredients

on the plate within the neighborhood group. We then took some of the remaining spent grain as well as spent yeast from escarpment labs and we created a sourdough bread with grain revolution. We then took the detritus or the fish poop from Izumi aquaculture and spread that on the fields at Smoyd Farm. And that helped make the potatoes extra delicious. And then we harvested those potatoes and put them on the plate.

And the combined effort of potatoes, beer, the sourdough bread, and the rainbow trout, we created three different meals, three different circular gourmet meals at the neighborhood group restaurants. We need to shift our mindset to one that is in that constant circular perspective, so that there is no such thing as waste. In fact, we don't even use the word waste anymore, but rather here is a set of resources. I'm going to use them for my food production. And when I'm done, all of my unavoidable byproducts will then be used for something else and keeping it in the highest value as possible. And I think that's where we've got to drive to the future. And in Mars, that's where we need to be, that there is no such thing as waste, that everything has value and everything is recognized for its nutrients. And we're always constantly looking for the next thing that we can do with those nutrients.

If we can just zoom out a little bit here in the last few questions, and if I could sort of ask you this sort of bigger question. All of this seems perhaps like a roundabout way of getting out an urgent message. You know, are things so dire that we have to go all the way to imagining life on Mars to understand the urgency of what's happening here on Earth. That's a really, I mean, the idea of Mars as an allegory or parable, I don't think it's really driven by things being dire, though one could say things are dire. But I think what it is, it's a lovely simplification tool. What in physics we sometimes call a toy model, where you strip away all the complications so you can see the simple questions. And I think a good example

of that is we really believe there will be no animals on Mars in the food system, or very, very few, because they simply don't work. Number one, animals just hate being in space as a rule. But more importantly, they're very inefficient. So if we look at the Martian sort of ecosystem pyramid, it has the cyanobacteria, then yeast, fungus, bacteria, and then plants. And the plant is really king on Mars. And the only animal you really encounter are people. And it's kind of a shame we're animals because we're very hard to keep alive. And if we were plants, it would be way easier. But what I really think the lesson we can take from that is the fact that when you crunch the numbers, animals simply don't work on Mars, means that while animals at the scale we do them on Earth don't work either.

It's just the natural ecosystem buffers us from noticing that until it's vastly too late to actually adjust the amount of protein we're producing in this crazy inefficient way. So to me, that's the real power of the Martian model. Number one, I do believe we are going to go to Mars and we will need to eat. So there is that. The base level of the book does solve a problem for us that we set out to solve. But I do think it's also a great allegory that shows you it strips bare that these complicated questions and says, no, at the nub of it, at the heart of the physics of the food system, what do we need to do to not destroy the planet?

Having used that as the way through which to look at this problem. Evan, where is this message going to be best heard or where will it have the most impact, do you think? Well, first and foremost, this is a piece of science journalism. So we are hoping to communicate with a broad public because one of the abiding concerns that I have in my serious academic career is issues around food, sustainability, food and sustainability, food and innovation, food and health, food in the economy are not often heard. We have this perception that

farming and agriculture is a quaint rural activity with a straw hat and a red barn. And it frustrates me that some of the coolest, most exciting spaces of innovation and technological development are happening right now in food. And I wish that the students, the future students would be clamoring for work in the food sector. So for me, I'm trying to land this message to the general public, the upper year high school student, the lower year university student, thinking about what am I going to do with my life? And I'm going to say, I'd like to say to them, you should work in the food system because it is cool, it is unbelievably sophisticated, and it is an area where you can feel like you're participating in a moral mission

to help save the world. And I believe that very, very strongly. So that's the primary thing. The secondary thing is the policy agenda. I do really believe that Canada sits at a unique moment. We have an unbelievable natural endowment that I think we could use better in terms of our agricultural land and our sophisticated workforce. But I think that agriculture needs to be seen as a key component of Canada's innovation strengths, not as, like I said, this quaint rural activity with a red barn and a straw hat, which I worry too many policymakers, too many decision makers sort of have this sort of perception. Yeah, and I think to be a little glib, I would first say I kind of hope Elon Musk reads this book because I know he says that he wants to die on Mars, but I'm pretty sure he wants to do it at an old age and not because he forgot to take lunch. And so, you know, I think, you know, any serious attempt to set up a settlement, you know, on Mars, they probably need to think about these problems. But I agree with Evan. But I agree with Evan. We need to rethink food, and we know that. And it is hard to get that message heard because there is this kind of stickiness of the status quo, and the Earth isn't that different from Mars. It just happens to have, you know, eons of biomatter that have gathered up that we can draw on. Like, it's like someone left us an inheritance. And, you know, if you just burn through an inheritance, it's pretty easy to one day wake up and realize that

someone's taken the furniture back and you don't have any money anymore. And boy, you probably should have thought about that while you were burning that inheritance. And it's kind of what we're doing with the biosphere. And we need to be making the changes now before we make the Earth look so much like Mars that it can only support a tiny number of us. So if you go back to your imagined fancy night out on Mars, is it really a place you'd want to live, Lenore? I'd give it a go, I think. But then, you know, I come from a family that historically we were fishermen and my family owned a fishing company. So I spent a good part of

my youth on a 56-foot halibut boat. And I loved the technical problems. And I think it's how I ended up in physics and then going on to look at the food system, is when you're on a halibut boat in the middle of the ocean, you better have everything you need. You better have a spare thing to put in if after something inevitably breaks. But it does make you think about how to make systems that are fail safe and that work when you're far away from support. And so my brain's always kind of worked this way. Would I personally go? I think it could be quite interesting, especially, you know, if I was got to grow a whole bunch of plants indoors and got to really produce high quality food right where it was being consumed in a sustainable way. I think that would be a pretty neat thing to do. Now, I'd also love to do that on Earth, because I think that's also what we're going to have to do here is produce

high quality food right where it's consumed year round. So it may be that I go to Mars more in my heart than physically. But I think if the opportunity came up, I'd be very tempted. Evan, would you be tempted? No, no, no, no, no, no, no. I don't know. I grew up partly on a farm that looks a lot like, or looked a lot like a 1920s farm with a small barn and a pitchfork and stuff like that.

I would like to stay fairly close to the ecosystems in which my species evolved. I do not want to expose my body to a hard vacuum and the radiation and the this and the that. I think it would be a horrible idea. I think it would be more analogous to jumping on a boat with somebody named Franklin in the 1800s looking for a Northwest Passage.

I think it would be that kind of experience more than a bucolic sort of techno paradise. But I love the thought experiment, and I am so happy to have written this book. So then, to try to end on a positive note, I mean, not that that's not a positive note, but what are your realistic predictions on whether we can turn the tides on climate change and our global food system, global food security, so that we don't have to escape to Mars. I'm definitely an optimist. I think this is the single most exciting time to be in agriculture since some person 10,000 years ago had the weird idea to tame down an or rock and turn it into a cow. Like, I really think we're at this point of this explosion of technology that is very akin to the development of network technology that completely transformed our world.

formed our world. So I'm an optimist that if we can pull together and manage not to annihilate each other with wars and factionalization and scrambles for resources, I feel the next 20 to 30 years are a very exciting time for making a food system that lets everyone have the food that they need to be healthy and happy. Evan, are you also optimistic? Yeah, I am. I'm pretty confident that when the history books of the 21st century are written, there will be a significant, robust chapter on food system transformation. And I'm pretty optimistic that there will be more good news than bad news in that. And I say that largely because of technology. And this is going to sound weird to people who have perhaps read previous books that I've written where I was quite negative on the potential for technology.

But over the course of my career, policy has not delivered transformative change and technology is increasingly delivering transformative change. So it's not to say that it's only technology that's filling me with optimism, but I think technology backed up with good policies are giving us the ability right now to produce more food on less land with fewer inputs. I think we can improve the nutrition of our food. And it's going to require a tremendous amount of technological innovation, like we've spent a lot of time talking about. It's also going to need policy, such as policies to reward farmers for absorbing carbon dioxide here on Earth. And if we could twin technologies to absorb carbon dioxide with policies that reward farmers for doing so, then we will actually, I think, see quite a radical and quick transformation

that will, I think, result in a better food system in generations to come. At least I have to hope that because the alternative is nihilism and despair, and that's not a good place to go at any time. Not at all. Thank you to both of you, Lenore Newman and Evan Fraser. Thank you so much for your time and insights. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Evan Fraser is Director of the Errol Food Institute at the University of Guelph, and Lenore Newman is the Director of the Food and Agriculture Institute at the University of Fraser Valley, Abbotsford. She's a Canada Research Chair in Food Security and Environment. They are co-authors of Dinner on Mars, the technologies that will feed the red planet and transform agriculture on Earth. This episode was produced by Nikola Lukšić. Special thanks to network producer Anne Penman in Vancouver. Technical production, Danielle Duval. Lisa Ayuso is our web producer. Nikola Lukšić is our senior producer. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas. And I'm Nala Ayed.

For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.