Food, power, shelter and air are essentially the big issues for space colonization. With the lab protein I was speaking of the possibility of shipping a close to self sustaining bio reactor in a box to a colony to solve for the food issue. I mentioned this as it's an evolving technology that may be closer to prime time at the same time as the solar panels concept the article mentioned.

> I mentioned this as it's an evolving technology that may be closer to prime time

Unlikely. We have yet to master nutrition when it comes from plants, it will be even worse for a bioreactor. Unfortunately, the list of food ingredients that you see listed in minimum recommended intake values is woefully incomplete. There's a whole bunch of micronutrients we get from food that are difficult to replicate.

Bioreactors could be useful for making supplements (say, Omega-3) to offset specific deficiencies.

Consider that such a technology would make anyone who invented it on Earth a billionaire many times over. But it's hard to do, even with plants and gravity.

And even if we did have nutritionally stable food for this long, there's a growing amount of evidence that even just mechanical food processing is enough to make it _unhealthy_ – if it comprises the majority of your consumption – and that it causes metabolic problems (irrespective of additives). And that's on Earth.

If we are to eat just processed food in space, we'll need a lot more research on this. It would be better if we just grew food from plants.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8747021/

That can't be right? Canned foods last a long time. MREs do as well. Pasta/Rice?

Lots of foods last a long time, but nothing right now exists that can be stored for multiple years without freezing and still provide a nutritionally complete diet for a crew.

The problem is not finding food that is still edible after years in storage, but food that the crew can eat long term without getting sick and without developing deficiency diseases. For example, the Pentagon says you can't eat MREs for longer than 21 consecutive days.

The space food problem is genuinely hard and interesting, you can get a sense of it in this paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221455242...