Cost and Quality of a Bioregenerative Diet

The crew diet in a bioregenerative lifesupport system will be a combination of foods grown and processed in’situ with resupplied prepackaged foods and ingredients. The ideal diet should be palatable, nutritionally adequate, varied and low in cost. This diet can be obtained by adopting an optimization strategy combining panel acceptance data, nutritional analyses and mission specific ESM (equivalent system mass) cost estimates for a large selection of foods and ingredients. A linear programming routine selects the lowest cost diet from the foods surveyed, subject to constraints on nutrient content, food acceptability, and variety. The rigor of these constraints is a key factor in determining the cost of the diet (s) they define. By varying individual constraints over several optimizations, we can estimate sensitivity of overall costs to a particular nutrient, or even an intangible quality such as acceptability, while controlling other aspects of the diet. Several scenarios of a 2’week menu cycle diet are presented.