Hey this is my first post so I hope it's in the right area. What does everyone think the main food source would be aboard Asgardia? It seems inefficient to raise animals up there, so would a vegetarian diet be the standard?

Goodnight! I think the human body can get used to everything. Our body is able to synthesize any vitamins, trace elements .. We are consuming one meal, and complete each. I think that the main diet Earthlings - Vitamins are organic in liquid and solid form, as well as grasses and plants. I think that it will be possible to create new kinds of plant life.

Rasing livestock isn't as inefficient as lifting food constantly. It's also pretty inefficient to attempt to make exisitng biological systems adapt when it could be given what it's already adapted to.

Sensibly, before even begining construction of components to build long term mass residential habitations you would consider providing for. Considering the square foot requirements alone to provide for a per-person long term survival, let alone a decent life, you'd first deploy agricultural and energy farms. Both of these would be outputting beyond requirements as technically the bulk of the population would still be planetside awiting residential facilities so the excess can be sold to Earth to fund other initatives. If we can amass the rersources to build habitation for a nation in the stars, then popping out 150 or so - preferably double that - farms over a decade or so shouldn't represent any significant hurdle. There's quite a lot of room between here and the moon. As this begins to scale appropriately, you can then deploy livestock facilities, or maybe have them in smaller scale on the other farms. As supporting infrastructure begins to scale appropriately, then you start assembling pieces of the residential facilities.

I know a few labs have made progress towards growing things like "chicken" meat, or proteins. So in addition to farms, I see protein powders being common in early stages, and likely always available for consumption.

When It comes to real meats, we may have to take an unusual route and raise incects, either for straight consumption or to create (again) protein powders.

Chickens, fish, and goats are the easiest and cheapest livestock I'm aware of, with the best returns.

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Seriously, mass residential long term habitational facilities. Just consider it for a second. To only consider the 170k or so now signed up, that's a small city or so. Just the radiation shielding in the outer hull for a vessel of that capacity let alone the inner pressure vessel, the miles and miles of cabling, kilometer after kilometer of piping, the environmental control systems, the power generation(likely require gigawatts), the thermal dissipation(likely require terrawatts, and a hundred square miles of radiator panelling) etc etc etc - being able to provide for that, being able to provide for a few hundred "farms" will seriously be a trivial afffair.

We'll of solved so many problems just getting to that stage, failure to solve these problems means it's not happening. You can consider protien powders, if you'd like. Or even insects. I can see "how" for "real meats", however. I'm not keen on the idea of "synthetic meats" - or harvesting protiens from "waste" and turning that to "food" and would heavily discourage either option - but if you'd really want to entertain things that at best sound largely desperate, who am I to stand in your way.

As an attempt to summarize EyeR....

Basically by the time Asgardia is functioning, food problems will be a thing of the past.

I sincerely believe that Asgardia should be a vegetarian nation. Or at least, most of our diet in plants and vitamins capsuls. First of all, cattle raising is a big responsible for world's pollution and shortage. It takes a large amount of land do raise one single cow, in a world that is overcroweded (and large amounts of land to plant soy to feed the cattle). It takes a lot of water (15,000L, according to UN) to produce 1kg of meat, in a world that has drought in many places and many people are dying of dehidration. Besides, the actual cattle industry does not care about the suffering of animals, doing avoidable things that only brings pain, and ignoring the protocols of merciful treatments. Second, all the proteins that we found in meat can be easily substituted by the proteins that we found on vegetables like lentils (and beans in general), broccoli, spinach, brussels sprouts, among others, with the benefit that those vegetables has a lot of protein and a few (and good) fat, unlikely the red meat. That would definitely improve population's health, preventing diabetes, hypertension, heart diseases, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, cancer (especially prostate, colon and breast cancer), cataracts, arthritis, osteoporosis and would reduce allergies. Also, seems to me much more viable to plant adaptable vegetable and grains (maybe investing in the construction and development of greenhouses) than to raise cattle.

P.S.: the only vitamin that can't be found on a plant based diet is B12 (we found it on eggs), that can be easily produced in labs and taken in pills.

Best regards, Martine.

Hemp seed flour is most probably the best base space food.

Lets try to keep GMOs out of space!!

I've been on Soylent, then Joylent Vegan diet for 2 weeks now (With a single bowl of Pho noodle soup added once a week for emotional sustenance). So far, I feel great, and there's nothing wrong with me as far as I can tell.

While a liquid diet over a long period of time may not be emotionally satisfying, Soylent and Soylent alternatives have everything your body needs, in the right proportions, according to modern science. I think they're really onto something here as potential for space food.

Given the environment, and space requirements, I believe the 'meat' eaters (such as myself) should be able to satisfy their dietary desires through the use of insect-based proteins. Insects are small and useful on a space station (bees and ants in particular) and other insects can be grown for the sole purpose of being ground up and turned into protein pastes, which can then be synthesized into more fibrous meals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entomophagy

Seriously, though, we will be needing honeybees on the space station.

Unlikely, far more likely to require them on farms. My previous comments regarding exhibiting depseration still apply.

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Or the same link, clickable - and with less tracking:

http://bigthink.com/ideafeed/answering-how-a-sausage-gets-made-will-be-more-complicated-in-2020

On the subject of lab grown meat - again desperation - but sure, if that's what you want then it should be arrangable. I'd personally only entertain real meat. Real food is a much more sensible option, overall.

Will it be like the ISS food? like in bags and sort? if we are going to live there  longer than a year it is not efficient to have 0 gravity, maybe in some spots for fun, but not threw out the whole thing. In order to make this a possibility, we NEED to get a solid gravity on a space station and make sure it is good enough for the human body, for eating and many other things. Personally i think the ISS could do better on its food options. How would we keep our food? how will it be packaged? will it be like the ISS?