Kinko sneakily glances at the food-laden tables. She isn’t supposed to be there, but she couldn’t resist. Alongside the fresh vegetables, there are vegetable pastries, insect burgers, mealworm chips, and lab-grown meat. But that’s not what caught her attention. There is meat from a mammal! She has never seen, let alone eaten, anything like that before. Kinko catches the scent of the meat and feels almost nauseous; she has never smelled anything like it. Years of education come into play; she has always been taught that this kind of meat is very bad for the environment and takes up a lot of space. A cow needs a lot of food to produce a small amount of meat, which means less space for growing delicious vegetables and meat substitutes, as they are still called on Earth.
The mammal meat is a gift from Earth, brought with the last shipment to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Mars colony. Kinko finds it incomprehensible that Earth still consumes so much inefficient meat. Her godfather, who was born on Earth, talked about it at school. Even after the years of extreme drought, about 20 Mars years ago (which is over 40 Earth years ago), disaster followed disaster on Earth. First came the dry years, as the desert expanded northward and southward. Even Paris was buried under drifting sand. The dry years were a result of climate change, partly caused by unsustainable agriculture with heavy nitrogen deposition and greenhouse gas emissions. Earth had already transitioned to a sustainable agricultural system, producing food in a much more circular and land-based manner. However, it was too late to stop the effects on the climate in time. After the climate disaster, a disease spread that jumped from pigs to humans. In five years, almost two billion people died. To Kinko, that’s an incomprehensible number. The Mars colony currently only counted just over 50,000 people. Martians had set up a fully circular agriculture system without the inefficient meat production from mammals. However, mealworms, grasshoppers, other insects, and even fish were an important part of their agricultural system. Kinko especially loved mealworm chips, crunchy and delicious. Mealworms were crucial because they consumed plant remains that humans couldn’t eat. Kinko aspired to become a mealworm farmer in the future, but she also wanted to do other things, like searching for past life on Mars and working for a water factory. There was plenty of time for that since she hoped to live to be one hundred and fifty years old, equivalent to three hundred Earth years. It remained a mystery why people lived much longer on Mars, possibly due to the lower gravity. But the sustainable and balanced diet, mainly consisting of vegetables, insects, and supplemented with a small amount of lab-grown meat, likely played a role too. These were excellent ingredients to create the most delicious meals. Any leftovers, if any, were fed to the mealworms and earthworms. Both creatures turned them into compost for the plants. The mealworms were Kinko’s favourite snack, especially when fried. Kinko slips away quickly, deciding not to eat any of the mammal meat after all.
By Wieger Wamelink