Diet Design and Food Processing for Bioregenerative Life Support Systems

The food processing and preparation subsystem for bioregenerative lifesupport must combine food produced in-situ with resupplied food ingredients to provide a nutritionally balanced, palatable and varied diet for the station crew. We have approached these goals by developing a database of individual foods including recipe and processing information, panel acceptance data, nutritional analyses and cost estimates. Subsequently a linear programming optimization is used to select from among these foods a low-cost diet subject to constraints on nutrient content, overall acceptability, variety, and crew labor input. The database design, preliminary sensory testing results, and an optimized 1-day food list are presented..