What happens when two food scientists get bored in a pandemic? It turns out, they start to brainstorm how they would feed a colony of humans on Mars. What might seem like a trivial question is actually a more nuanced exploration of how we can sustain ourselves on Mars, and what we can learn from this thought experiment back on Earth, too.

My guests this week are Drs. Evan Fraser and Lenore Newman, two food scientists that started a series of conversations to pass the time during lockdowns, which then turned into something much more important. Dr. Evan Fraser is the director of the Arrell Food Institute at the University of Guelph, and Dr. Lenore Newman is the Canada Reseach Chair in Food Security and the Environment at University of the Fraser Valley. They developed the series of conversations into their book, Dinner on Mars: The Technologies That Will Feed the Red Planet, and Transform Agriculture on Earth. Using leading-edge agricultural technology, the answers to their questions are weird, wonderful, and sometimes disgusting – like lab-grown chicken breast or cheese and ice cream made from vats of fermented yeast! Evan and Lenore structure their book through online conversation, and show how setting the table off-planet can allow for thinking about how to supercharge efforts to produce sustainably here at home as well.

Learn More About Evan and Lenore:

• Book: Dinner on Mars
• Social Media: Evan (@feeding9billion on X, @arrellfoodinstitute on IG), Lenore (@DrLenoreNewman on X)
• Evan's University Website: https://geg.uoguelph.ca/faculty/fraser-evan
• Lenore's University Website: https://www.ufv.ca/food-agriculture-institute/meet-the-team/lenore-newman.html
• Conversation Canada Article on Dinner on Mars