Sci-Fi Stories - #5 Lunar Potluck Palooza

Signal #5 Signal: “People will always use food as a means to reveal their identity.” Writer: Damien Lutz

Earth’s coppery-hued crescent rose over the jagged lunar horizon, timing nicely with the base’s morning—while the earth rose once a month, the base ran circadian lighting rhythms to help the lunar crew regulate our activities and sleep patterns. 

I yawned, stretched, and salivated at what Earth Rise meant—it was the Lunar Potluck Palooza day. 

Recent mealtimes on the lunar base were having another geometric phase—the auto-kitchen was printing out meals in cubes, spheres, pyramids, cones, cylinders, cuboids, buckyballs, and all the hedrons.

We ate vegetable dodecahedron dice last nice, with DNA-shaped lab-grown wagyu that arched over the plate like pork ribs, and mini-pyramids of nutrient rich algae that grouped on the dish in a miniature forest. I always cringed a little at eating geometric food.

(A photograph taken of the vegetable dodecahedron)

Creating food, its shape, and taste on demand was so convenient it had become a chore, so we let the AI randomise the meals based on our personal taste preferences, and it would experiment with shape and colour. By the end of the month, it looped back over the same shapes.

Today, though, with the Lunar Potluck Palooza, everyone had to create a dish themselves based on their Earthly cultural heritage.

As an Australian, this was tricky, as our food had become very much a fusion of other cultures, mainly Asian and Western European. 

I always reverted back to my childhood when my grandpa always baked a roast at Christmas, even when the summer heat became scorching.

“It’s tradition,” he would say.

This tradition was actually originally from Britain, but then so were my ancestors. But for me, roasts were about comfort, security from the land, it was about me helping grandpa at the oven and stove, and the rich, earthy smells of the roasted vegetables and sizzling, juicy meat.

So, there I was, tweaking the 3D food printer settings on the Moon in the name of tradition.

The real trick was making the dish look, taste, and smell like the original when we only had the base’s limited food recourses—lettuces, radishes, and wheat from the hydro greenhouses, nutrient rich algae, and some lab-grown meats. The printers could take cells from each and print whatever we programmed, but it wasn’t like magic, it was technology that needed to be told what to do.

“How’s the roast, going?” Kirra asked next to me. “Try to get those potatoes a little less watery, this time.”

I laughed because she was right.

“You just worry about the texture of yours, Kirra.”
It was even trickier for Kirra, who was always determined to replicate the bush food of her First Nations Australian heritage.

She would spend hours iterating prints to get the right colours, shapes, and textures of the flora, fauna, or fungi growing thousands of kilometres away in Earth’s soil, so that she always served up a plate of realistic plants and fruits. Kirra had led the way to the inclusion of native Australian food tomatoes in the greenhouse, like Warrigal greens and bush tomatoes, so her Potluck always consisted of food from more shrubby plants that we couldn’t yet get growing on the moon, like Wattle Seed and Anise Myrtle.

One thing she always got perfect was creating the smell of the Australian bush that transported me back in time and across space to school trips when I was a kid back on Earth.

Together with the rest of the crew, we choreographed ourselves around each other in the auto-kitchen as we printed and tasted and iterated, flushing the east hall with a tapestry of aromatic scents, a mix of liquorice and refreshing clean citrus aromas, some chocolate and fruity smells, and spices of all kinds. The base would stink for days, we knew, but it felt warm and earthly, and we all missed it a little when it dissipated.

(Earth view from a zoom glass window on the lunar base)

Against the backdrop of Earth, hanging in the inky sky like a suspended jewel, we laid our dishes on the tables, a mesmerizing mosaic of colours and textures. Dressed in our lunar-adapted versions of our cultural clothing, we sat around the tables with a shared anticipation. Laughter and camaraderie filled the hall as we munched on our creations, listening to each other’s stories, some often repeated from the previous month, but we didn’t care. We had developed a real appreciation for our sustenance, how precious it was on the moon. Day to day eating had been reduced to a necessity, on schedule, so the Potluck Palooza always brought us back to the ritual of eating and the ability of food to connect us and allow us to taste the memories and histories that shaped al our Earthly heritage.

But while every dish represented a different person and culture, it was the culmination of the ritual that represented us as a group of one kind—human Earthlings—reminding us of our united home, that we were all visitors to the Moon, and we relied on each other. 

As the lunar day gave way to night, the Earth's luminous orb slipped out of the window’s view.

It was just always in the back of my mind how ironic it was this group of humans could have a bonding moment like this monthly tradition that transcended time zones, nationalities, and even the barriers of space itself, so far from where a lot of our differences, both beautiful and dangerous, had begun.

“You got those potatoes right, finally,” Kirra jibed, sitting beside me and offering a bowl of finger-shaped lime fruit. I took one and split it open to spill out small tangy, sour beads of lime flavour into my mouth.

“Wow, you really nailed that texture this time, too,” I said, wiping juice from my chin.

It was incredible to think about the journey of food itself, from these 3D printed replicas of Earth food sitting on our plates on the Moon, evolved from the freeze-dried meals and powdered beverages of the early space missions, and from experiments with edible plants in the space gardens on the first space station, different species and evolutions all originating from life on Earth and surviving together in space.