From Impossible Burgers to lab-made sushi, two witty, plugged-in food scientists explore leading-edge AgTech for the answer to feeding a settlement on Mars-and nine billion Earthlings too
Feeding a Martian is one of the greatest challenges in the history of agriculture. Will a Red Planet menu involve cheese and ice cream made from vats of fermented yeast? Will medicine cabinets overflow with pharmaceuticals created from engineered barley grown using geothermal energy? Will the protein of choice feature a chicken breast grown in a lab? Weird, wonderful, and sometimes disgusting, figuring out 'what's for dinner on Mars' is far from trivial. If we can figure out how to sustain ourselves on Mars, we will know how to do it on Earth too. In Dinner on Mars, authors Fraser and Newman show how setting the table off-planet will supercharge efforts to produce food sustainably here at home.
For futurists, sci-fi geeks, tech nuts, business leaders, and anyone interested in the future of food, Dinner on Mars puts sustainability and adaptability on the menu in the face of our climate crisis.
A rollicking exploration of the history and future of our favorite foods.
When we humans love foods, we love them a lot. In fact, we have often eaten them into extinction, whether it is the megafauna of the Paleolithic world or the passenger pigeon of the last century. In Lost Feast, food expert Lenore Newman sets out to look at the history of the foods we have loved to death and what that means for the culinary paths we choose for the future. Whether it's chasing down the luscious butter of local Icelandic cattle or looking at the impacts of modern industrialized agriculture on the range of food varieties we can put in our shopping carts, Newman's bright, intelligent gaze finds insight and humor at every turn.
Bracketing the chapters that look at the history of our relationship to specific foods, Lenore enlists her ecologist friend and fellow cook, Dan, in a series of 'extinction dinners' designed to recreate meals of the past or to illustrate how we might be eating in the future. Part culinary romp, part environmental wake-up call, Lost Feast makes a critical contribution to our understanding of food security today. You will never look at what's on your plate in quite the same way again.
