Let us enjoy delicious space foods - It enhances health and solves the food problem on Earth -

Providing foods to space crew is the important requirements to support long term manned space exploration. Foods fill not only physiological requirements to sustain life, but psychological needs for refreshment and joy during the long and hard mission to extraterrestrial planets. We designed joyful and healthy recipe with materials, which can be produced by the bio-regenerative agricultural system operated at limited resources available on Mars. The fundamental composition of our recipe is unpolished rice, soybean, sweat potato and green-yellow vegetables. These four items are known to be low Glycemic Index (GI) food materials. Supplement food materials to fulfill the nutritional requirements we chose are loach, silkworm pupa, termite, snail, fruit fly, and cassava. They are also low GI materials. Sensory tests were conducted on our candidate recipe, in terms of taste, appearance, and flavor. We succeeded to develop joyful and nutritious space recipe at the end. Since energy consumption for physical exercise activities under micro- or sub-gravity is less than the terrestrial case, choice of low-GI foods is essencial to suppress blood sugar level, and prevent the metabolic syndrome. Because of less need of agricultural resources at choosing ecological members from the lower ladder of the food chain, our space recipe could be a proposal to solve the food problem on Earth. In this sense, our space recipe contributes to welfare of all the people of nations and areas, regardless of space-faring or under-development. It would be one of early spin-off of our space agriculture study, and hence we wish to get wide support from people. We are open to accept proposals from people for this purpose based on their own unique cultural and historical background. Diversity that can be obtained by this entry may enhance the robustness of space agriculture, if properly managed.