Crickets and gastrodiplomacy: The future of space food

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Crickets in zero G, this week on Planetary Radio. I'm Sarah Al-Ahmed of The Planetary Society, with more of the human adventure across our Solar System and beyond. As we look to build a more sustainable permanent presence for humans in space, we're going to need to find new and innovative ways to feed our travelers. This week, we'll hear from Team Insecta, a group of Canadian students who are exploring crickets as a viable source of protein and a kickstarter for space agriculture. To kick off our conversation about space food, we'll also hear from Newton Campbell, Jr., a member of The Planetary Society's board of directors and co-founder of Heritage Space Food. We'll talk about gastrodiplomacy and the importance of representing many cultures in the foods that we take to space with us. We'll close out our show with What's Up? with Bruce Betts, our chief scientist. We'll take a look at one of our STEP Grant winning projects that are studying the complexities of growing plants in space. If you love Planetary Radio and want to stay informed about the latest space discoveries, make sure you hit that subscribe button on your favorite podcasting platform. By subscribing, you'll never miss an episode filled with new and awe-inspiring ways to know the cosmos and our place within it. Also, Apple Podcasts is now available in the browser, so if you want to get it from there, you can now find it without an Apple device. If there are two things that I'm most passionate about in this world, it's space and food, closely followed by video games and cats, but who's counting? Food is about so much more than sustaining our bodies. It's about happiness, about connecting with our friends and family, expressing our cultures, and enjoying the bounty provided by our beautiful planet. If you think the search for life is difficult, imagine how much harder it's going to be to find an alien culture with anything close to tacos, sushi, and fattoush. Our first guest today is Dr. Newton Campbell, Jr. He joined us a few weeks ago to discuss his appointment to our board of directors and a few other topics. He's joining us again for a quick chat about the importance of representing as many cultures as possible in the food that we take to space. Newton leads the Australian Remote Operations for Space and Earth or AROSE consortium, but he's also the co-founder of Heritage Space Food, a gastrodiplomacy nonprofit dedicated to representing food cultures and communities in space. Hey, Newton, welcome back.

Newton Campbell Jr.: Hey, Sarah. How's it going? It's good to be back.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Well, the last time we had you on the show, we were talking about what felt like so many different subjects, AI, ethics and space, Australia's new lunar rover, the Roo-ver, best name ever. But at the end of that conversation, you brought up briefly that you were a co-founder of this nonprofit called Heritage Space Food, and we barely even got to brush the surface of that topic. And since we're talking about food and space this week, I thought it'd be the perfect opportunity to bring you back on to talk about that.

Newton Campbell Jr.: Oh, yeah. No, I'm more than happy to talk about Heritage Space food. This is one of my 18 jobs, as I like to call it. The notion about Heritage Space Food really came from some conversations that I was having between myself and a good friend of mine who is a bit of a celebrity chef. Her name's Dalia David. She's a wellness chef. Her focus is on, all right, how do I craft food, craft meals that help people with both obviously nutrition but also their psychological wellness, their physical wellbeing, et cetera, et cetera. So we were having a conversation one day a little bit about diversity, equity, and inclusion. It was a bit of a bummer conversation because both of us had just been through a couple of events that really soured us, and she started talking about the notion of, "Well, tell me things about space that it is that you're doing," not having any notion that, "Hey, this might be something that I could get into." She just wanted to hear about things like the journey to Mars and what we're doing with Artemis, et cetera, et cetera. And so we started having this conversation and I told her, "Look, the hardest problem that the astronauts are going to deal with when they're actually on the ship, it's not the mechanics of getting there. It's not even space radiation." Both very hard problems. We haven't even figured out the space radiation problem yet. It really is psychology. You're talking about a journey that right now would be six to nine months. NASA's trying to bring it down at three months with one of its new NIAC programs, but you're talking about a journey that's six to nine months to get there. You have to wait a year for Earth and Mars to realign, and it's going to be six to nine months on the way back for the Mars journey. We're also talking about astronauts living in sustainable environments in on or around the Moon. In those spaces, they're going to be dealing with aspects of loneliness, depression, anxiety, all of these things. And so we have to really be thinking about their psychology. And so the first thing she asked me was, "Well, what are they doing about food on board?" Thinking that, yes, it's okay to analyze their psychology, talk about ways of... the activities that they can do, medications they can take, et cetera. But from a food perspective, that does a lot for your mental health, how you eat, what you eat, things like that. Not just the nutrition of it, but aspects of culture. Everybody remembers that favorite dish from mom or dad when they were a kid. Everybody remembers the thing that they ate growing up in their culture or whoever raised you and what their favorite thing was. And that does bring a sense of warmth in a lot of ways to people. And so we started talking about that and the fact that these are going to be the loneliest people ever. Not to be a bummer about it on Artemis. So what if we were able to bring a little bit of Earth's cultures on the journey? Artemis is hopefully going to be the most multicultural journey that we've ever constructed. We're at 43 countries that are now signed up for the Artemis Accords to establish the sustainable environment on around the Moon to set up a path for going to Mars. With that, while not all of them are going to be sending astronauts, some of them will. And then they will want aspects of home on that journey, aspects of home that will help deal with that loneliness, deal with the fact that they are very far away and doing this job, being our emissaries to the stars. And so with that, we started thinking, well, what if we could identify what are those cultural requirements for food for the astronauts? Most of the time when we're talking about space, we're talking about nutrition because there's so many problems that the human body has to deal with when we're going to space that have to be addressed by what people are eating. You have bone density issues. You have muscular tissue starting to strip away. You have issues with eyesight and all of these other things that occur just being in a no pressure or low pressure environment or a no gravity or low gravity environment. So we're often focused on those and the requirements for those. What do we have to do to plants in order to genetically modify them, to pack them in with vitamin D? Things like that. But less often, I'm not saying it's not considered at all, but less often we consider the cultural requirements of something. Heritage Space Food is a nonprofit that Dalia and I started with our third co-founder, Stephanie Wan, with the idea of promoting those conversations. And then out of those conversations falls these cultural requirements that we can then yield to the space food habitat and space food engineering community. So most of what we're doing is focused here on Earth. What are the cultural requirements? How do we bring aspects of culture through to the space sector as we're sending our emissaries off to the stars. And we're getting ready to produce a series of media events and media content that focus in or around those conversations. We really want to be able to have astronauts have access to food from all over the world, whether it's from a place that you're from or not, right? I'm not Ethiopian. I love Ethiopian food. I would want to have something like that on board the spacecraft. I would want to have I'm imagining a refrigerator full of food with each of the drawers having a different flag on them so that the people of Earth can carry our culture on this grand adventure for our explorers.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Humanity has been in space with a permanent presence on the ISS for 20 years, and I'm sure that there is-

Newton Campbell Jr.: Really.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: ... in-built bias in the foods that we provide people there and is probably already impacting the people that have been in space.

Newton Campbell Jr.: Absolutely, 100%. Look, there is an overwhelming amount of our astronauts that have been trained, gone through the astronaut program, that are of Eurocentric backgrounds. And that has had an effect on the food that we've produced thus far in space. It's food from very specific backgrounds, right? It's not always food that may even be the most appropriate for space in terms of maximizing nutrition, things like that. And we have tried to deal with their sense of loneliness, their sense of depression, all of those things, through that lens. But again, as we diversify, as we're getting ready to put the first woman and person of color on the Moon through the Artemis program, we are going to need to diversify. And like I said, it's not just about the food from your culture, being able to have access to home, not just home from the local sense, not just home from where you grow up, but home as in Earth. Having each of the cultures of Earth represented on that ship that goes to Mars is going to be so important, and we need to start having those conversations and innovating around that capacity now. I was at an international STEM conference this weekend where the folks over at Illuminate FNQ. So FNQ here in Australia is Far North Queensland, the far, far north regions of Australia where there's thousands of indigenous folks in various communities around there. The Yoruba people are one of many of the groups there, and the Yoruba-ran organization called Illuminate FNQ had a really big STEM conference this past weekend at Trinity Bay High School. A number of the different high schools in the local region actually came around and had students there that were there to listen to us talk about our careers in STEM, our careers in science, so on and so forth. And they asked the most amazing questions. And I do want to give a shout-out to one of the young aboriginal girls, Shania, who just asked the most amazing questions during one of our STEM round tables, questions of how this actually impacts people in her community. What can she do going forward? What can we do to really focus on some of the indigenous youth that all are just so full of opportunity in Australia? So I just wanted to give a quick shout-out to her and a shout-out to the folks at Illuminate FNQ. What a fantastic festival. I'm hoping to bring so many more people from the space community there next year.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Do you have any advice for anybody who wants to find a way to help more people be represented in space through food?

Newton Campbell Jr.: Well, first and foremost, much like we plug planetary.org, I'm going to plug heritagespacefood.com. We have set up our website in preparation to have discussions, interview different people, and actually think about events that we can have. So if you want to get involved in this, definitely go to heritagespacefood.com. Outside of that, getting involved, if people want to get involved in the space food and space food nutrition side of things, there's a number of avenues that NASA has provided in order to do this. NASA has a number of competitions that they work on among students such as the Deep Space Food Challenge which just concluded in Columbus, Ohio. Two of our co-founders were at that event where they simply work on, hey, here's a particular dish or a particular set of dishes. How do we actually bring these foods into space? That typically runs through high schools and colleges that are working on these programs. I know down here in Australia, we have RMIT, which has a really significant food lab and two universities that are actually working with JPL on plants in space where the question is, all right, for the plants that are supplying these ingredients, how do we pack them with the right nutrients? How do we genetically modify them? So on and so forth. So there's lots of these different avenues. And if you don't want to do specifically food, we also have to keep in mind the habitat, the environment that is surrounding what you eat. What you eat is just as, if not less, important than how you eat it when it comes to certain cultures, or how it's prepared. So thinking about questions in terms of space habitat engineering, which happens at a range of universities across the country, small projects from Arizona State University to University of Buffalo have different projects on space habitat engineering. How can you inject some of these cultural requirements into those avenues, into those domains, I think is also a way to get involved.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Well, thanks for joining me to talk about this and for working on something that I think is going to make so many more people feel welcome in the space community. This is some really important stuff.

Newton Campbell Jr.: It's always great to talk to you, Sarah.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: There are so many tricky bits when it comes to feeding our space travelers. Ensuring that we have a lot of different cultures represented in our food is an important aspect. But before we can fully tackle that challenge, we have to master the basics. How do we ensure that our astronauts have a balanced diet? And how do we make our food systems sustainable as we move away from Earth? On space stations like the ISS, we can send up supply runs to our astronauts. But as we look to build a permanent settlement on the Moon or then move on to Mars, we have to create closed systems that can support our astronauts' health and wellbeing without depending on Earth. Our next guests are Hunter Brzezinski and Cassandra Stabile, laboratory researchers at Carlton University in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. They're members of Team Insecta, one of the most recent groups of students from the Canadian Reduced Gravity Experiment Design Challenge or CAN-RGX. Can-RGX is the first microgravity research competition for students in Canada in collaboration with a National Research Council of Canada and the Canadian Space Agency. It allows Canadian post-secondary students to design and test small experiments on the NRC's Falcon 20 aircraft. Low gravity flights, which are sometimes called parabolic or zero G flights, simulate weightlessness by flying on parabolic trajectories. Passengers experience brief periods of microgravity during the downward phase of each parabola, which gives them time to conduct low gravity experiments without having to launch all the way to space. Although I'm pretty sure that both Hunter and Cassandra would totally take that ride up to the ISS. Team Insecta is a student research group from Carlton University's Department of Biology led by Professors Heath McMillan and Sue Bertram. They're exploring the suitability of crickets as a food source in space by first testing how low gravity environments affect crickets in the short and long term. Welcome to Planetary Radio, Hunter and Cassandra. It's great to have you.

Cassandra Stabile: Hi, thanks for having us.

Hunter Brzezinski: Great to be here.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: So your team is one of several that was accepted in one of the most recent rounds for the Canadian Reduced Gravity Experiment program, also called CAN-RGX. Can you tell me a little bit about the program?

Hunter Brzezinski: Absolutely. So it's like you said, CAN-RGX, the Canadian Reduced Gravity Experiment, and it's a nationwide competition here in Canada in collaboration with the Canadian Space Agency, the CSA, and the National Research Council, the NRC. And it's hosted and organized by the students for the exploration and development of deep space organization. And they've done a great job.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Your team is from a biology department. You didn't come from the space angle. So how did you become interested in pursuing crickets as a sustainable food source for space travel?

Hunter Brzezinski: I think most of our motivation actually came from another university that was tasked with a similar project, and it was from the Canadian Deep Space Competition. So this was in collaboration with NASA, CSA, the Canadian Space Agency, and another organization called Impact. And it's a separate organization. They fund innovative works around Canada, specifically STEM. And it just so happened that a team based out of McGill had the idea of creating a habitation module for crickets. They were also exploring the idea of let's bring crickets to deep space. And so we saw this at the beginning of writing our proposal and we said, "We're on the right track. These guys are doing..." They came to the same conclusion that we did, and that's a big reason of why we're here.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: So why crickets is really my first question because there are many ways that we can think about feeding people sustainably in space, but clearly we have some limited resources in those scenarios. So why crickets of all the ways that we could go at this problem?

Cassandra Stabile: Since we know that a fundamental barrier to deep space travel is the absence of a dependable and renewable food system in space, we really wanted to attack this problem with a renewable system that could use limited resources and can be propagated for long-term. So to do that, we looked at what we already knew, which we're all coming from an insect physiology and ecology lab, and we're already working with some Canadian industrial partners that are working with edible insects as food and animal feed. So coming from that angle, we wanted to see if crickets themselves were possible to be in space because they are being looked at as an attractive solution for the food security crisis on Earth. So what if we could bring that up to space?

Sarah Al-Ahmed: That's a really interesting solution. When I brought this subject up to some of my coworkers, their first thought immediately went to closed ecosystem fed by crickets. Their first thought was Snowpiercer, back of the train. But I think more broadly, this discussion about how to create sustainable food sources as the climate changes is really important. And I've heard this, crickets as the solution for this issue before. What specifically is it about crickets versus other forms of insects that we could be using that makes them optimal for this?

Hunter Brzezinski: I would say that because of working with our industry partners who also specialize in insects for feed, specifically crickets, and their go-to characteristics for these guys is that they're high in protein, B12, and they take a fraction of the resources to raise. There are other suitable candidates for insects that we could potentially rear. It's just that crickets specifically have been the most well worked with the last decade, and that's why we thought they would be a very suitable candidate for deep space travel, for instance.

Cassandra Stabile: As well, the cricket industry has started to look into using agricultural waste and things like brewery waste and weeds as for food source for crickets because they're very versatile in what they can eat and what they can grow on. So the possibility of bringing crickets into space and then using a bio regenerative system with astro crop waste as their food would even reduce further the amount of resources we need to put into them.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: That's a really interesting point and brings me to my next question. If we can use them to take the byproducts of agriculture in space and use that as a food source, that's really cool. But I know that there are a lot of people listening right now who are either vegetarian or vegan. We have many people on our team as well that are also vegetarians, and they wanted to know why pursue bugs as a protein source rather than try to go straight for the space agriculture, say legumes or something like that. Is there a functional reason why this would work better in space, or is this something limited to our current lack of ability to farm in space?

Hunter Brzezinski: I would say that some crops can be very demanding in terms of resources, in terms of water, but we're interested in crickets because they would be an alternative to traditional forms of livestock. They would be a meat substitute or something that you could possibly supplement your diet with. But we're interested in the secondary benefits as well, the idea that it could possibly be a circular system and the fact that some of the resources in the crickets can be recycled for other purposes. And I'll give you an example. For instance, the chitin structure that's part of the exoskeleton of the crickets, it can actually be used as a natural insecticide so it can boost the plant's immune system. And if we're considering colonization of distant planets like the Moon or Mars, perhaps it would be best if we can bolster their defense systems. And not only that, but the frass or the excrement of the crickets, they can be used as a natural fertilizer, one that doesn't burn plants like traditional phosphorus or nitrogen fertilizers and one that allows them to grow very well.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: That's really important to think too. A lot of the worlds that we're going to be visiting, say the Moon and Mars, they don't have classic soil like we have here on Earth. We have this regolith that is basically just tiny shards of rock, very, very sharp, very sticky. We're going to have to be able to nitrogenate that soil, do a lot of things to be able to plant in it, and preliminary experiments show this is possible. But if we can do that by bringing a sustainable farm of crickets with us instead of say a bunch of chemicals that not only save space but might also be a more organic way of going about solving that problem. So I love that. But in order to test this, you got to actually go on a really cool experience. So recently, on July 22nd, your team actually got to go and do this micro G environment experiment. How many members of the team did you bring and how many crickets did you bring along for the ride?

Cassandra Stabile: Yeah, so we ended up doing two different flights. So we were able to get four people up onto the plane. I flew with another member, Sophie, on the first flight, and Hunter flew with the other co-lead, Emily, on the second flight. And we brought about between the two flights a couple of hundred crickets on different life stages. We had adults that were about six to seven weeks old, juveniles or adolescents that are about two to three weeks. And we also brought eggs up.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: That's cool to think, because in my brain I was thinking maybe you bring all adult crickets, but what is the benefit of having so many different life stages of crickets during this experiment?

Cassandra Stabile: So we wanted to see how the different life stages were affected by this space flight because in the egg stage, they're very susceptible to different stressors, as well as the adolescents, while adults are more resilient to different stresses, but they're also later in life. So we wanted to see if bringing up crickets at a lower life stage or even before hatching could have long-lasting effects on their fecundity or their ability to reproduce, their growth, the yield that they could result in. Basically we wanted to see if both their gene expression changed and if their ability to survive and create the next generation was possible.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Because I imagine it might impact the young ones much more or maybe impact the ones that are of breeding age and they would pass that on to their offspring. That's really interesting. Before we actually get into the experiments you've been conducting on these crickets, what was the actual flight like? Because I've wanted to do that since I was a child. That sounds awesome.

Hunter Brzezinski: It was fantastic. I think that's the only way to describe it. Something like 2G is an environment you can't really imagine unless you've actually gone through it. But for all the viewers out there, it was you're twice your body weight. You're being pushed down back into the seat, and suddenly there is this brief 20-second window at the top of the flight where you're suddenly weightless and it's like you're in the pool. Your brain is trying to catch its bearings and you're holding onto your seat for dear life because you feel like you're going to fall off the face of the Earth. But it's there and it's real, and you're looking across at the other two members of the team because there was another team that was with us, and suddenly you're brought back down to your seat. And you do that eight more times over the span of an hour or two. So it was a very magical experience. That's the only way to describe it.

Cassandra Stabile: Yeah, it was a once in a lifetime experience, honestly. And being able to share it with another group of students our age also experiencing for the first time. We had some NRC members that are old hat at it, had flown over 100 times at this point, but just to see the joy and hear everybody laughing over the headset, it was amazing.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: What other groups went up with you?

Cassandra Stabile: So for my flight, I shared with a University of Waterloo team. They were soldering in space to see if they created a centrifugal forest, if they can make their solderings better than the voids that you get in space.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: That's really clever.

Hunter Brzezinski: And for my flight, we went out with another team from the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology, and they're working on an ionic thruster with a gyroscope. So it's a very neat and wide range of projects that are happening in CAN-RGX.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: That's awesome, man. I bet what camaraderie by the time you come down from that flight. That must have been so fun.

Cassandra Stabile: Yeah, definitely. By the end of the week, we were best friends with the widest array of people, little biology students getting to meet all these different engineers, them being excited to tell us about their stuff, us telling them all about the crickets. It was great.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Well, for us humans, a ride that is really exciting because we know what's going on, but I'm sure for the crickets, that is a whole stressful situation. So how did the crickets respond to the ride?

Cassandra Stabile: Surprisingly well. I'm not going to say surprisingly because we did a lot of testing to make sure that they would survive, but they survived well. We did end up bringing two clear vials of a cricket each up into the plane because all of our other crickets were inside a sealed Pelican case. So you can really see what was going on inside. But we did bring some crickets up just to see them floating in microgravity. It was very interesting. You can see them sort of paddling their way through like when you hold a dog over the water, but they fared pretty well. When we came down and pulled them out of the box, they were a little groggy, not moving too much, but within five minutes they were back to their usual activity.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Do you have video of these crickets reacting?

Cassandra Stabile: We do.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: We do. We do.

Cassandra Stabile: It's currently being held hostage by one of our NRC contacts, but we're getting it from him soon.

Hunter Brzezinski: We're getting approval. It's in the works.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: But they didn't panic or anything, right? They just looked like they were doggy-paddling. The difference I think visually for me is like the difference between how a dogs reacted in zero G versus cats. The dogs just kind of paddled around. The cats lost their minds trying to flip their tails, trying to reorient in zero G. So I guess the crickets don't have that same kind of system that really panics them when they're not knowing where the sun is or what's up or down.

Hunter Brzezinski: It's very interesting actually, because I think Cass, you were telling me that the cricket, we called them the celebrity crickets. So Jiminy Cricket and Chirp Aldrin were their names, and I think the crickets that you... They're the same batch crickets. The ones you brought on your flight, they were a lot more relaxed. But what I noticed in the second flight is that they were actually a lot like a cat and they were trying to orient themselves, and that's something that we were interested in observing.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Yeah, maybe it's a cricket personality thing. Who knows? And there are also many variations of crickets across this planet. What kind of crickets did you take up there and why?

Cassandra Stabile: We work with an industry partner Aspire who uses Acheta domesticus, which is a tropical cricket, most commonly known as the house cricket. And it is an established edible cricket, and that's the one that we brought up on the plane. There are a few other different species of edible crickets that we could have brought up, but it was mostly just our collaboration with the industry partner that made us choose a species.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: We'll be right back after this short break.

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Sarah Al-Ahmed: Other than cricket stress, clearly you guys are trying to do a lot of different tests on these crickets. What were the most important things that you were trying to learn about how they reacted to zero G or low gravity?

Cassandra Stabile: So we wanted to see both their genetic changes or if there were any genetic changes, and phenotypic changes. So in terms of phenotype, like I mentioned before, we were looking at growth coming out of the flight to see if those that flew in our flight treatments were growing slower or smaller than the ones that were in our control. We are going to be measuring them, I think every two days from this point on until they become adults to see if their growth is deviating in any way. We wanted to see fecundity, so their ability to lay eggs and reproduce and create the next generation. And then in terms of gene expression, RNA sequencing. So we're going to be looking at the entire transcriptome, which is really beneficial because we're trying to come at this in a totally unbiased way. We want to just see what is happening overall in the entire organism across the entire genome. We do have specific genes and pathways that we're interested. There's three main genetic pathways when it comes to insects for their immune system. That's the Toll, IMDB, and JAK/STAT pathways. We're going to be keeping an eye on them because we know that these pathways upregulate in a lot of other stressors like cold or excessive heat or a lot of movement and a lot of noise. We know that they're going to react. It could be that the control crickets are reacting because we try to mimic walking them out to the plane, walking them back. They got driven all the way to Quebec. They're going to have some stress there. But so we're going to be looking at those specifically. But by being able to look at the entire transcriptome, we get to see if there are any novel upregulations or downregulations or anything that could be happening in the cricket that we weren't expecting that could be giving us information if they can survive space travel.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Do you think that these changes to future generations of crickets would be more likely due to that exposure to zero G and maybe even more particles from space impacting their genetics directly? Or would it be more of an epigenetic thing that's passed down through this trauma response from being in space?

Cassandra Stabile: At this point, I think we're at a really preliminary stage. These crickets were exposed to just a few minutes of microgravity in this parabolic flight. They were experiencing hypergravity as well, take off, vibrations, temperature fluctuations, everything that you would be experiencing in a space flight. But we don't know how long the space flight would take to really maybe have a detrimental effect or have a really long-lasting effect. So this is really a preliminary study for us. We want to see if in this short amount of time, something happened that we wouldn't really like, or maybe they're doing great and we can do longer studies from this point out. But I wouldn't say at this point that we would be seeing really long-lasting generational stuff. We might be. Not too sure yet, but with the amount of time that they were exposed, I wouldn't expect a huge, huge change in the entire genome.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: And what's interesting about this to me is that I always assumed sending things into microgravity or into space would negatively impact their ability to procreate and things like that. But in some cases we've seen with experiments on the ISS, you'll send, say, a group of seeds up there, and when we bring them back down, it's actually the opposite. The ones that survive it tend to flourish and grow faster and do things we really didn't expect. So it's quite possible that if we had extended periods of time with crickets, not even just in microgravity but in zero G, it might do things that actually benefit them, which might be very strange.

Hunter Brzezinski: That's exactly right. And most of the rationale behind the study actually came from the ISS. So what we start to see in astronauts is that exposure to zero Gs or microgravity can impact their immune system and dysregulate their endocrine system. And a more insect-specific example would be Drosophila melanogaster or fruit flies. And exposure to microgravity in this case ended up rounding out their hearts. And so pitting these two ideas together, we wanted to see if there would be any impacts on, let's say, crickets. But whether or not these impacts will manifest into observable changes like physical changes, changes in weights, changes in survivability, and in measurements. That's something that we'll have to see. But something like gene expression is entirely possible. We're hoping to get a snapshot of what has happened by snap freezing them after the flight campaigns.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: What is the typical lifespan of these crickets and how will that impact how long it takes you to actually track these differences in their genetics?

Hunter Brzezinski: The average lifespan for a cricket would be about, I wanted to say around 10 to 12 weeks. That's the optimal point. And most of the crickets experience their growth by week six, and that's when they become adults. So we're hoping to see any changes manifest by then, or if there's a lack of changes that might tell us some things as well.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: How much food and water does it take to sustain these cricket populations?

Cassandra Stabile: Not much. We brought a little condiment food container of cricket food with us for the entire week, and I think we hardly made a dent in it. A few grams a week could sustain a good size colony bin. So there's not a lot of food that goes into them. And in terms of water, honestly, evaporation will take the water out faster than the crickets drinking it. So we change it out pretty frequently just to maintain cleanliness and to make sure that they're getting clean vials. But again, it's not a lot. They're little 1.5 milliliter tubes of water with a little cotton swab on top, and that's all they really need.

Hunter Brzezinski: And for a bit of a comparison, crickets would be a fantastic source of food. And the reason why is because they take, like what Cass was saying, so few resources. And I believe the figure is something like a thousand times less food and water compared to a cow, for instance. So that is why they are so-called a superior food system or more sustainable.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: And you mentioned earlier that they can do things like eat the byproducts of plants, but are there any other food sources that we could use to feed them that would be sustainable and create a self-contained ecosystem other than large scale agriculture? Could we use some kind of moss or something like that? I don't know what crickets are down to eat.

Cassandra Stabile: Yeah. These crickets are pretty non-specific in what they eat. We have some people in the lab that are studying microplastics and the crickets will eat those up, which isn't very great. But we also have some people researching brewery waste. We got some waste from a local brewery and they were able to eat the spent grain from that. And we're also doing some studies into euglena. So micro algae, they have also been able to consume that. It does affect their growth a little bit, but we're in the preliminary stages that multi-generational studies could show that they adapt to it because they're very adaptable insects.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: It's exciting to hear because I've increasingly been talking to more people who are actually trying to pursue this idea of trying to brew alcohol in space, brew beer in space, and even investigate the different ways that it tastes and feels when you have these carbonated or alcoholic drinks in space. It's a whole new industry. And if they knew that they could team up with Team Insecta and create a whole sustainable ecosystem, I know it sounds a little silly to some people out there, but honestly this is the beginning of a whole new age of us being able to not only feed ourselves in space, but think about the ways that our food systems here on Earth interact. Do you think that you've grown in an appreciation of the ways that we deal with our food here on Earth through this experiment?

Cassandra Stabile: Yeah, I think working in the environment that we have the last few years in the edible insect field, we've had a new appreciation for the amount of resources that go into traditional livestock and the lack of sustainability long term of a growing industry of cattle and chickens and all that stuff. If we can reduce it and supplement even a portion of that protein that we're getting from those traditional livestocks with our crickets, it could become a more sustainable system. Crickets on the thousands can be reared in the size of a chicken coop. So even just land space that is being consumed by agricultural industries can be reduced significantly using the crickets.

Hunter Brzezinski: I think that's a great point, just the sustainability of it all. And I think I can speak for the entire team when I say that it's getting us to think one step beyond. We're not just thinking about bringing livestock or crickets to the Moon or the Mars. We're thinking about bringing the entire system up. How can we integrate this best with the parts that are already there? Like what we were discussing earlier on with the circular system and possibly feeding them on waste products. That's something that is very beautiful, and that's something that we could use here on Earth. So going one step past that and saying how can we use our resources? How can we use the tools at our disposal the best that we can?

Sarah Al-Ahmed: And feed our space travelers while we're at it. So you're in the process of gathering data on what happened here, putting it all together. What are you going to be doing with this dataset? Are you going to be keeping it internally for your own purposes, or are you going to be sharing this data set more broadly with people who might want to be getting into space bugs?

Hunter Brzezinski: I think the first approach would be keeping it internally at first just to process the data and to carry out the experiment, and then eventually make it public access so that other people can access the information and hopefully motivate someone who doesn't know anything about this to take up the cause.

Cassandra Stabile: We have a few more months. RNA sequencing takes a little while, but once we get that data analyzed, we're hoping to get it published out.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Man, how wild is it that we can even be in a day and age where we can actually RNA sequence crickets to see how space impacted them? This seems old hat at this point, but it still completely blows my mind that we have this ability at all. It's just amazing, startling.

Cassandra Stabile: Putting the weirdest sentences together with this project.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: I know.

Hunter Brzezinski: Let me tell you, the whole proposal really shocked everyone hats at NRC and the CSA. It came across their desk and they're like, "What? Crickets." So it was surprising for a lot of people, but it worked out great. What can I say?

Sarah Al-Ahmed: That is an interesting point in that many cultures use bugs as a food source, but not all cultures. When I was a child, I was exposed to people from many different cultures. I ate a whole lot of bugs, including crickets, spiced crickets, when I was a kid. And I had no idea that my friends at that age thought that was super gross until one of my friends told me and thought it was very weird. But this is a common thing and something we're going to be thinking about a lot more as we deal with the effects of climate change on our agriculture. Have people responded to this in one of those, "Ew, bugs," kind of ways, or are they amenable to this idea?

Hunter Brzezinski: That's a great point of how to integrate crickets into the food that we're eating now. And one of our commercial partners, Entomo Farms, is working with the possibility of or making Cheeto puffs for instance, and making different varieties, different flavors of the oven-baked crickets. So you had Doritos, you had cool ranch, you had honey mustard. And I think if you're looking at something like that, then it will be a lot better for using people into it. And we also hosted a cafeteria event at Carlton University a little while ago, and the chefs did a great job of enthusing people into it. They had cricket flower pancakes. They had cricket-themed cake pops. And when it came from that idea, people were more than willing to try some.

Cassandra Stabile: The easiest way to integrate, I think, the cricket into the Western diet, because Eastern cultures are a lot more amenable to whole insects and it's a cultural thing, people in the West are learning a little bit more. There's a really big edible insects' industry boom in Europe right now, and we're starting that in North America as well. But these crickets can be ground down into a protein powder and they can be supplemented just like a whey powder into we had cricket cookies, like chocolate chip cookies, and they were just a high protein cookie at that point. You're not tasting cricket. You don't have the visual that a lot of people are a little bit worrisome from, and that way you could just integrate it as a protein supplement into your diet like any other protein supplement. And I think that's the easiest way for people to learn and step their feet into the waters of edible insects.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Are there any food organizations or any bug organizations that you've worked with during this research?

Hunter Brzezinski: Not as much, no. It's mainly been collaborating with our industry partners to spread word of mouth that crickets would be a great sustainable food option for deep space.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Because I know that they're beginning to start having these competitions for space food or having these collectives that more broadly are trying to think about how to do this sustainably. It's really beautiful seeing this blossoming industry, and who even knows? One of these days we might have a whole subculture or a whole sub-industry of just cricket-based foods that we can send to space. I think that would be really interesting, but we're not there yet. Has anyone expressed any interest in trying to use your data so far?

Cassandra Stabile: We've had a lot of interest about seeing what's going to come from the data, but I think right now it's still early steps. If we're getting positive results from the data, I think people are going to be more open to the idea and there'll be further studies that can be conducted. But right now we'll see how it goes.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: What's next for Team Insecta other than piecing together all of this data? Now that you've had this exposure to these micro G experiments? Is this changing the way you're thinking about the future of your careers?

Cassandra Stabile: I do know one of our members was pretty set on being a-

Hunter Brzezinski: She wants to be a space doctor, space doctor.

Cassandra Stabile: Yeah. But she's always been interested in space medicine, and I think this very much solidified it for her.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: It's always one of those experiences. You think your career is going one way and then suddenly you have exposure to something like this, and it just changes everything.

Cassandra Stabile: Just we were able to walk around the CSA and get to see some of the things that they were up to. And as a biology student who has never had interest in engineering for an entire career, for a minute there I was like, "I'm going to make a Mars rover."

Sarah Al-Ahmed: How did the people at the CSA react?

Cassandra Stabile: Positively. Everybody was super nice. We've had such a great reception to the project upon meeting the NRC and the CSA members at the tarmac when we all got there that week. It was amazing.

Hunter Brzezinski: I have to say that our team was a bit of a black sheep going into the competition because the competition-

Cassandra Stabile: In our own minds.

Hunter Brzezinski: ... is in our own minds, exactly. And the reason why is because most of the other teams, they're engineering. There's very few life sciences or group specializing in life sciences that go on and win the competition. So as soon as we stepped into the room, we were asked so many questions, especially by the CSA, like how do crickets orient themselves? Do they have catlike reflexes in microgravity? And these are all questions that we had to answer in that week. And even now, people from the other teams are still reaching out to us and asking us how the project went, asking us what are the next steps. And so it's been a great time overall.

Cassandra Stabile: Yeah, I was surprised by the amount of people who met us on the first day and said, "Can I hold a cricket?"

Sarah Al-Ahmed: That is the one thing that comes to mind for me because when I was a child, we had a lot of animals around our home. We raised emus and goats and chickens and many reptiles. And of course that meant that we had crickets around in order to feed our reptiles. But as a kid, I'd knock over the cricket bin. We'd end up with crickets all over the house. And now I'm imagining just the terror of having crickets all over your spacecraft. How would you deal that?

Hunter Brzezinski: Exactly. So we had a specialized, our payload was a 0350 Pelican case, and so it kept all of our crickets inside. And we had to, for the last year, we've been constructing this almost like pill-like container specimen holder that held all our crickets together. And that's something that we had to run by the NRC and the CSA to make sure that it met all the required guidelines and that too weren't going to escape on the plane because for a while there, that was a concern. It's no longer though.

Cassandra Stabile: Yeah, they all stayed where they were supposed to be.

Hunter Brzezinski: They all stayed where they were supposed to be.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Well, the CSA is one of the partners in NASA's Artemis program going to the Moon. Who even knows how this kind of research could impact future bases on the Moon. If we can get a sustainable water source, if we've got teams already thinking about trying to pursue sustainable agriculture on the Moon, I think adding this element of sustainable protein production through crickets is a good avenue, because we don't want to take all of the waste and the complication of livestock to the Moon. They won't survive, and that would be cruel to do to them. But crickets, I think we can make them a part of our human sustainable movement on the Moon and make them our friends and our food source.

Cassandra Stabile: Yeah, I hope so.

Hunter Brzezinski: Absolutely.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: It's going to be a really complicated thing to create sustainable places for people in space, whether or not it's keeping them alive, getting the water we need, anything like that, we're not always going to be tethered to Earth as much as we love this planet. If we want to make ourselves a multi-planetary species, we're going to have to ask ourselves some really complex questions about how we interact with our environments and how we keep that sustainable and ethical as we go into the future, not just the way that we treat ourselves and each other, but also the way we treat our food sources. And I think this is a really good starting point, and I'm so glad to have you on to talk about it because I don't think many people think about these things.

Cassandra Stabile: Yeah, we're glad to come and talk about it. We're always excited to share.

Hunter Brzezinski: Absolutely.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Well, thanks so much, Hunter and Cassandra.

Cassandra Stabile: Thanks for having us.

Hunter Brzezinski: Thank you.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: If you're a Canadian University student with a good idea for a low gravity experiment, I'll leave a link to the page for the CAN-RGX program on the website for this episode of Planetary Radio. The next round of proposals opens up in September 2024, just next month. So you're going to want to get working on that. With more on the challenges of growing crops off of Earth, we turn to Dr. Bruce Betts, our chief scientist for What's up? He's one of the driving forces behind The Planetary Society's STEP Grant program, Science and Technology Empowered by the Public. Hey, Bruce.

Bruce Betts: Hello, Sarah.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Talking about space food this week, that's exciting for me because I'm a little bit of a chef so I love the idea of having more options for what to cook in space someday when I'm living up there with my cat.

Bruce Betts: You're going to need special cat food for... I guess you need-

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Didn't even occur to me. I'm going to have to feed the cat too.

Bruce Betts: Yeah. Who's doing research on that?

Sarah Al-Ahmed: I hope someone someday. Oh, man. If anyone out there is studying that, please reach out to us. I want to know more. This isn't a new subject clearly. We have some students that are doing some beginning projects on studying crickets in space and things like that. Obviously people are considering the diversity of heritages that we're representing in our foods in space, which is also great. But the main issue is how do you just grow the food right out the gate? We've got a major issue, but thankfully people are studying that too, including one of our previous STEP Grant winners. The STEP Grant program has been around for about two years at this point, so we've only awarded two rounds of STEP Grants. And in the 2023 group, we actually had a group that was specifically studying growing food in space. Would you like to tell us a little bit about that one?

Bruce Betts: And they still are. They're in the midst of their study. Yes, it's led by Andrew Palmer at Florida Institute of Technology, and they are doing a study where they grow things in hydroponics using water plus nutrients, and they grow things in a lunar regolith simulant, so regolith is the upper broken up part of the Moon that's been beaten on by meteorite impacts. And we have lunar dirt and people have grown in it, but it's not something that people are really excited to have you mess up, mess up the lunar dirt. So they're using a lunar simulant, which has been chosen from Earth to match fairly closely the properties. And basically, people have grown plants in space. They've grown plants in lunar stimulant. They've done hydroponics. But no one's taken a real systematic look at this is looking off in the farther future where you have long term food needs. What's the most efficient way to grow things? Is it hydroponics? Is it using the, assuming you haven't brought a bunch of soil from Earth, is it can you use lunar regolith? And how do the two compare? And how does it compare for different plants? So they've got ones that have very little extra leaves and then things like tomatoes that have a bunch extra leaves that you fold back into your next generations, I believe in this case, meaning ones you don't eat, as well as they're growing romaine lettuce and other things. So they've got a whole group collection of them doing this and we're excited. They were, as you said, earned one of the recent STEP Grants, Science and Technology Empowered by the Public, which is funded by our members and donors where we try to make a difference and push it ahead. So this gives them a chance to show what they've got and then they can move on to bigger sources of money and funding and hopefully learn stuff about feeding people in the future on the best way to do it.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: From my knowledge of Sci-Fi, it seems to suggest that hydroponics is the way that a lot of people think we're going to go with this. Are there any major downsides to taking that approach? Other than the fact that you clearly need a lot of water, but you're going to need water if you're going to be planting in regolith as well.

Bruce Betts: Yeah, and possibly for other things on board, I'm guessing. Hydroponics, you have water and what you add to it, but some plants want, they want that nice dirt feel, rolling around in the dirt, feeling good, getting muddy. Okay, maybe not muddy. That's actually one reason the regolith on the Moon is different because it doesn't play with liquid water over billions of years.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: That is a big thing though. If they want dirt, the regolith on the Moon and on Mars are clearly not dirt. So how are they fundamentally different from the soil that we have on our planet?

Bruce Betts: Yeah, I don't know. I think they technically might be dirt, but we call them regolith because what they're not is soil. And then often we refer to them as soils. But once in a while you'll get one of those soil scientists and you're meeting and they will give you a little lecture on what soil is. And soil on Earth is mostly broken down critter matter, plants and animals and microbes and gross stuff that, well, I'm sorry, that was the non-biologist talking, that form over time this upper layer of dirt of soil. And in lunar regolith, you have a very different condition where it's basically been without an atmosphere, without liquid water. The major process over billions of years is impact. So it crashes and shatters, the volcanic rocks that are there, and you end up lacking the nutrients that Earth organisms, plants have learned to love. And Mars, you get something different, but you presumably don't have, unless we find something different, whole piles of dirt soil on the surface from life. But you do have a little more processes. Back in Mars history, things got modified by liquid water. You do have wind processes blowing stuff around, but you also we think have these nasty oxidizers in there, including perchlorate. So it's got that, that's extra nasty. The lunar regolith, because it hasn't been blown around, it's been whacked over and over and it hasn't been rolled in, the water has very sharp little tiny fragments. And so they're all three different beasts. But definitely, oddly enough, Earth plants evolve to work nicely in Earth soil. And so that's part of the challenge. On a different animal scale, that's part of what Palmer's group is looking at with the STEP Grant because they're looking at the microbiome, the microbiology in both that gets set up and affect these things, as well as how you might use what isn't eaten to help re-enrich the... Re-enrich? Enrich? Re-enrich the soil.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Nitrogen fixing. But that means ultimately they can do all these experiments, but one of these days they're going to have to do either what these Canadian students have done or take it one step further to the ISS and keep these experiments in low gravity permanently or in the bombardment of all the different cosmic rays and stuff from space to see how that in long term is going to affect these plants. But man, what a start.

Bruce Betts: So I of course haven't heard the interview. Did you ask them about whether they're going to make noise at night and whether the astronauts are going to think that's soothing or it's just going to keep them awake?

Sarah Al-Ahmed: See, I didn't ask about that. My concern was that the crickets would get loose on the ISS and you'd have Cricket Palooza.

Bruce Betts: Wow. Cricket Fire Festival.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Yeah, that's definitely probably more on brand.

Bruce Betts: So you're thinking of the important things that no one else is thinking of.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: We'll figure it out, man. We'll figure it out.

Bruce Betts: All right, cool.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: All right.

Bruce Betts: Shall we go on?

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Yeah. What is our random space fact this week?

Bruce Betts: Well, first of all, let's say random space fact. I don't know if you discussed eating in space, but let's go over that, shall we? The first Swede in space was indeed the first person in space, Yuri Gagarin. He had some tasty meat tubes and a little bit of what actually might have been tasty chocolate sauce squeezed out of tubes. The second person in space, Gherman Titov, and he is, unfortunately for him, famous for being the first to vomit in space. And then John Glenn was First American to orbit Earth, was the first to eat as well and they were afraid in zero G wouldn't be able to swallow and things like that. But hey, they can, so cool.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: That's interesting. Why would they think you couldn't swallow?

Bruce Betts: They're all straight to that-

Sarah Al-Ahmed: How would they know they?

Bruce Betts: ... about everything?

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Yeah. Question everything when it's something you've never done before, I guess.

Bruce Betts: And it was a little unclear on when the first time, maybe people can educate me, I was looking around, certainly the first time American astronauts ate what they grew in space was 2015 on ISS when they grew some tasty, tasty lettuce, which I think, by the way is cruel. You take people to space, say you're going to grow your own food and then you eat lettuce. I don't know. Anyway.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Yeah, I'm glad we've transcended beyond meat Go-Gurts as our standard way of feeding people in space.

Bruce Betts: God, that makes me hungry. We're about done? Meat Go-Gurt.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: I'll go with the crickets please, and thank you.

Bruce Betts: All right. Are we tasty? Are we done?

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Yep. I think we're good.

Bruce Betts: Are we fed? All right. Everybody, go out there. Look up in the night sky. And for your sake, don't think about meat Go-Gurts, but do think about what would you eat in space and what your pet would want eat in space. Thank you and good night.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: We've reached the end of this week's episode of Planetary Radio, but we'll be back next week with more space science and exploration. Love the show? You can get Planetary Radio t-shirts at planetary.org/shop, along with lots of other cool spacey merchandise. Help others discover the passion, beauty, and joy of space science and exploration by leaving a review or a rating on platforms like Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Your feedback not only brightens our day, but helps other curious minds find their place in space through Planetary Radio. You can also send us your space, thoughts, questions, and poetry at our email at [email protected]. Or if you're a Planetary Society member, you can leave a comment in the Planetary Radio space in our member community app. Let us know what foods from your culture you hope that we take on our way to Mars. And if you have any good cricket recipes you'd like me to pass along, let me know. Planetary Radio is produced by The Planetary Society in Pasadena, California and is made possible by our members from all over our beautiful planet. You can join us as we continue to support the research and the discussions that will take us to other worlds at planetary.org/join. Mark Hilverda and Rae Paoletta are our associate producers. Andrew Lucas is our audio editor. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which is arranged and performed by Pieter Schlosser. And until next week, ad astra.