Dinner on Mars

Regular readers of my book reviews will know just how much I love books that pull together threads of topics I have explored through reading other books and that is certainly the case with Dinner On Mars. I highly recommend this not-so-fanciful flight to readers who appreciated Regenesis by George Monbiot, Just Enough by Azby Brown and After Meat by Karthik Sekar. In Dinner On Mars, food scientists Lenore Newman and Evan Fraser recount their Covid-era Zoom calls together in which they posited the theory of a human community building the first town on Mars and asked, if that were to happen, what would those people have for lunch?

There's a delightfully irreverent tone throughout the book so, although it contains a lot of cutting edge science, I found it to be a wonderfully entertaining read. Newman and Fraser find themselves forced to think ingeniously around problems including a much lower gravity and bone-chilling temperatures. There's also the issues of limited water and other resources which we are finally starting to face up to back here on Earth too. In fact, if we can engineer our way out of those crises, we might not need to throw Earth away in favour of Mars at all! Fortunately Newman and Fraser have the experience and the contacts to get inside a wide variety of enterprises already underway and I was fascinated to see just how far along to commercial reality some of these science-fiction sounding projects are.

If you're interested in accessible science, problem solving, and ideas on how to save the Earth - or you just really want to go to Mars - you'll probably love reading Dinner On Mars just as much as I did. Its conversational style makes it an engaging, easy read, albeit one with a philosophically serious message.