Agreed, for the most part. At a minimum, you'll want to grow fresh veggies for dinner. Depending on your garden to feed you is suicide BUT you should try to work things so that there is a benefit to the program if food production indeed goes well.<br /><br />Simply put, you would always keep an x-year supply of food for the given population level. If you produce enough of what you eat, these stores would not need replenishing at the same level. They would represent emergency rations.<br /><br />The key is to be flexible, so that your group can react to actual results. Presumably they would benefit from eating a lot of fresh produce, so there would be another impetus for success.<br /><br />What I think is important about space food is the transition from individually packaged, highly processed meals to the preparation of group meals from scratch ingredients. The sooner that transition is made, the sooner we can be called space-faring.<br /><br />The key to wanting scratch ingredients isn't just to make tasty space food. The idea is to turn foodstuffs into a commodity instead of a specialty item. There needs to be a different value attached to food than to, say science equipment, but at $10,000 per pound it's all the same. <br /><br />For there to be actual economic activity up there, stuff needs to be priced differently, without the shipping cost swamping the intrinsic value. A Co2 scrubber should be worth more per pound than dinner.<br /><br />To achieve this, the obvious path is to build transportation systems that can send commodities up cheaper but perhaps less reliably, with a harsher acoustic and body force environment. Pancake mix can handle a rough ride. <br /><br />Cheap rockets should be used to get the food up there.<br /><br />There also needs to be an on-orbit distribution system. <br /><br />(edit: 'If you produce enough of what you eat' was 'If you eat enough of what you produce' ) <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>