This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Flávia Fayet-Moore, a nutrition scientist and the founder and CEO of FOODiQ Global, a nutrition research company. On a March 31 SpaceX flight departing out of Florida, the company plans to send their mushroom experiment to space as part of a partnership with NASA and SpaceX. This essay has been edited for length and clarity.
About two years ago, I started thinking that we should try growing mushrooms in space.
I’ve been researching the nutritional, culinary, and health benefits of fungi for the past seven years.
There are a lot of cool things about mushrooms that make them well-suited to the task.
First, mushrooms grow really rapidly. I explain to everyone and it blows their mind to learn that sweet brown mushrooms — those little cap mushrooms you see at the store — and portobellos are the same mushrooms. They’re the same fungi, but portobellos are harvested just two days later than the little ones. They grow that fast.
The end-to-end crop cycle for mushrooms is about 45 days. That’s not very long, so we’re not waiting 190 days to harvest something like other plants. They also require minimal resources, like water. They don’t need sunlight to synthesize because they’re not plants, and they can thrive in really small spaces. Not to mention, they’re very resilient, and they’re really good at surviving different changes in their environment.
And they’re entirely edible. You can consume the whole mushroom so there’s no waste. So let’s say you grow tomatoes, you don’t eat the whole plant so there’s plant waste, and you’ve got to figure out what to do with that. The beauty of mushrooms is that when they decompose, you can reuse the inevitable plant waste as part of the substrate needed for them to grow, so they help close that loop in agriculture. If you’ve ever gone to a nursery and got mushroom compost that’s treated with mushroom substrate, you know it is really nutrient-rich, and it’s great for growing more plants.
But most importantly, NASA prioritizes whole foods over supplements, because there’s a benefit to eating whole foods. In nutrition science, you know that when you start supplementing, it’s not the same effect in the body as nature intended with the combination of nutrients. So fungi are a whole food source of very high nutrition; they’ve got nutrients found across our food groups, from grains to vegetables to nuts and seeds to fish and meat.
Astronauts are given 1000 IUs of vitamin D daily to maintain bone health, and mushrooms can naturally produce vitamin D when they’re exposed to UV light, just like humans can. So basically, we can get 100% of our vitamin D requirements with just 100 grams of mushrooms.
There’s also research showing that when you add mushrooms to a meal, you can add less salt, which is really important because, in space, having too much sodium exacerbates the amount of calcium that’s leached from the bone. So it’s a counter-measure to have a lower-sodium diet.
And if all that weren’t enough, what’s really cool about mushrooms is that they’re very rich in umami. That’s the fifth basic taste, like sour, sweet, salty, or bitter — and, unlike the other flavors, umami seems to be well retained in a space environment.
It’s just like an airplane. Have you ever ordered a wine on a flight and then tried the same one after landing? It tastes different. Everything is dampened. It’s the lower humidity and higher cabin pressures that change the palatability. Not with mushrooms, you still get that umami flavor.
That’s where it gets particularly interesting for long-haul space flights, like the kind we’ll need to take to get to Mars. Can you imagine eating thermostabilized, dehydrated food for five years? I can’t.
The most important thing about food is nutrition, sure, but food is so much more than that. It’s a fundamental part of our culture and survival and mental health. At the International Space Station, the astronauts love coming together at the dinner meal and eating and exchanging food. It’s nostalgic, but it’s also a comfort. They’re isolated, they’re far away from home. So food becomes a way to connect with each other, but also to connect with their culture, their family, and the things they love.
So, that’s why we are looking at space crops.
This month, my company is partnering with NASA and SpaceX to complete the first study to grow mushrooms in space. If it all goes according to plan, I think we may have just unlocked a key element of long-haul space travel, the kind of thing that will help us reach Mars.
On March 31, on a SpaceX Fram2 flight departing out of Florida, we’re sending our mushroom experiment to space to see how they grow. The flight is three and a half days, and since they basically double in size every day, we’re hopeful we’ll see something promising. Since we’re not sending them up to the ISS and waiting months to get them back, we’ll actually get results relatively quickly, and we hope to publish our results this fall.
My daughter will be with me on launch day. When I started talking about sending mushrooms to space a couple of years ago, I would have never imagined I’d get here. I’m just so proud to show her that when you’ve got a dream, you just have to keep going and you can use your passion to help us get to a new frontier.
