A Diner's Guide to Mars - by Maciej Cegłowski
Mars For The Rest of Us
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A Diner's Guide to Mars<br>To the Michelin stars by hard ways
Maciej Cegłowski<br>Jun 24, 2026<br>∙ Paid
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NASA’s first brush with malnutrition came during the Apollo 15 mission in 1973. Over the course of three strenuous moon walks, astronauts David Scott and James Irwin grew dehydrated and started exhibiting an irregular heartbeat. By the time the two returned to the orbiting command module, they were clearly exhausted and were struggling to complete basic tasks. They had also inadvertently left a number of items behind on the moon.<br>Analysis after the mission concluded that dehydration and lack of sleep had exacerbated an electrolyte deficiency that had probably set in during the final days of training before launch. NASA estimated that the lunar astronauts had lost about 20% of their body potassium (later work also implicated magnesium). Irwin experienced the more severe heart symptoms of the two, and it’s possible that his lunar exertion did him lasting harm; he died of a heart attack in 1991.<br>On the next moon mission, NASA overcompensated, fortifying the astronauts’ food with lavish amounts of potassium and pushing them to imbibe an orange drink laced with the element. An accidental open mic moment captured astronauts John Young and Charlie Duke discussing the effects of this diet while relaxing after a moon walk.<br>Young : I have the farts, again. I got them again, Charlie. I don’t know what the hell gives them to me. Certainly not...I think it’s acid stomach. I really do.<br>Duke : It probably is.<br>Young : (Laughing) I mean, I haven’t eaten this much citrus fruit in 20 years! And I’ll tell you one thing, in another 12 fucking days, I ain’t never eating any more. And if they offer to sup(plement) me potassium with my breakfast, I’m going to throw up! (Pause) I like an occasional orange. Really do. (Laughs) But I’ll be durned if I’m going to be buried in oranges.
NASA dialed down the potassium on the the final mission. But the heartbeat episode was just one of many dietary lessons the agency learned the hard way on Apollo. The moon landings were the first time NASA had to integrate meal planning into a large, complex mission, and there was a lot to get wrong. Perhaps the most important lesson was that Apollo food rations, a system of dehydrated pouches and rubbery cubes, were borderline inedible. A man who described himself as a “human garbage can” volunteered in 1969 to eat the Apollo diet as a test and declared that after four days, all the joy had gone out of eating.<br>He had regrets at the first meal, breakfast. The sausage patties seemed like flavored ground rubber and left a long lasting and sickening aftertaste. After one day, the tester’s appetite was much less than usual and by the third day mealtimes were unwelcome and eating was unenjoyable work. Space food similar to normal every day food was good but food designed for space was very bad. Chocolate and peanuts, which could have been left alone, were ground up and converted into bite-size cubes that stuck to the teeth.
To make matters worse, the water astronauts used to reconstitute their food contained large amounts of dissolved hydrogen gas, leading to bloating and more space farts. The Apollo crews also struggled with the mechanics and hygiene of zero gravity dining. In his memoir, Irwin describes a typical Apollo mealtime in some detail:<br>We had Velcro all over the spacecraft and on the meal packages, so to keep track of things we’d stick our dinner on the wall, course by course. If you nudged the meat course accidentally, it would take off, and you would have to float after it or get the help of a buddy downfield.<br>The soups were probably the most popular food that we had on board. We also had a variety of meats in aluminum foil—ham, frankfurters, turkey, and steak, in flat slices except for the frankfurters. The meats had different consistencies, but all had the same taste. When we cut open the end of the aluminum package and slid the meat out, the gravy or grease would slide out in blobs and float around the spacecraft [...] when we had finished eating, we had food all over us like a bunch of two year olds.<br>The food packages were very compressed when we started out, but after you finish eating the food you end up with packages that are twice as big, and you have the problem of stowing them away.<br>This involved cutting open another bag, breaking out our supply of yellow bacteria pills, and putting a few into each bag along with remnants of food. Then we would wind up each bag like a spent tube of toothpaste and shove them into the large plastic bag and pop that into a container. You had to squeeze everything real tight, or the bags would fill up with oxygen and billow out. We didn’t have room for that, and we didn’t have room to grow a crop of bacteria either. Sometimes, with all the bags around in different stages of the cycle, it looked as if the Monday...