Ten

Today’s lesson, finally, was about farming on Rabbah. We have limited space, so it will be difficult, but we went back over the settlement’s ground plan and there is in fact some space set aside for food. There’s a bay area, where the original inhabitants kept underwater vehicles, tiny pods that were mostly camera and memory bank to explore the Europan ocean. We talked about how to use the decompression area to release the animals we’re bringing – fish and octopuses – and allow for some water to flood in to help grow food.

It looks like we’ll start out mostly with algae, which we can convert into almost anything. Seaweed is also a good source of nutrients, so we’re bringing red seaweed and kelp. We’ll use mussels, scallops, and tube worms around the outside of the habitat to help naturally insulate the colony, because it will be very cold outside and we don’t want to waste power – both electrical systems’ power and our bodies’ own heat – on merely staying warm. As I mentioned before, we’ll also grow and train octopuses to help us with the cargo. We’ll bring some fish eggs with us to grow shrimp and vertebrate fish for our octopuses to eat, which will hopefully keep them away from the mollusks lining Rabbah. Our instructor today told us that we can eat these creatures, but that strikes me as a waste. Vivien and Natsuki didn’t seem to like the suggestion too much, either, so we’ll stick to kelp and mussels, I think.

Once we get a good nutrient balance with the help of these water-based animals and plants, we should be able to start growing more complicated food, after we’ve had time to make our own compost to create soil beds. We’ll bring the first wave of seeds – tomatoes and lettuces, mostly – and the second wave will come as we send water to Earth. We’ll get strawberries, vine beans, soy beans, grapes. We won’t be able to grow cereals, fruit trees or squashes, because they need too much space that we just can’t spare.

I asked if we could potentially use areas of the base like around the edges of the walls for foods that require less root structure – mushrooms or asparagus, something like that. The instructor looked at me with puzzlement, and I didn’t get a satisfactory answer so I think I might try it anyway. Moon Base has been so successful growing plants for air and filtration along their shallow, ancient walls.

I am very impressed with Ghadir. She asked many pertinent questions about food storage and cooking, which can also require a lot of time and energy that we may not otherwise have. The instructor tried to calm her by insisting that we can eat almost all of what we grow fresh, minimal processing, and we shouldn’t need to store anything. However, I stand with her line of reasoning. Algae need to be processed to be edible, for example, and while some people like raw seafood, I’ve never been a fan. Granted, I’ve lived far away from oceans my entire life, so maybe home-grown seafood will be better. I can hope.

Ghadir kept looking skeptically at the instructor, and when we broke for lunch – rice gruel with some kind of salty protein that I couldn’t identify – she shuffled all of us close together at the same table to lay out her plan.

“We need to find a way to either make or bring containers,” she said. “The chances of a crop failure are higher than we’ve been told, and I don’t want us to starve.”

“We’ll have nutrient loaves with us, enough for a full year they said,” Samira quietly suggested, her large eyes wider than usual. She has a way of looking like an adorable young deer, and my heart always goes out to her at those times.

“Yes, that’s true,” Ghadir said, “but that’s assuming we only eat one of those per day, and if we don’t, we could run out more quickly. We also don’t want to suffer depression from food boredom. That’s something we’re taught in restaurants, that when the menu changes, we have to make sure it is always exciting enough that patrons will come back for more.”

“I agree, we need to store our yield,” Durada chimed in. “I’ve seen crops fail, and I’ve seen how hard lean times can be.”

“I had to live on nutrient loaf for months when I was on the chain gang,” Zariah said. “It doesn’t taste like anything, and after awhile you forget you have a sense of taste and smell. Things around you stop seeming real, because you’re missing these sensations. I saw miners practically turn into zombies, stop conversing with each other, because they couldn’t sense anything on that most basic level. Compared to that, this slop,” she held up a spoonful of gruel to emphasize her point, “is delicious. We definitely want to be careful about what we eat. We should consider how to supplement the nutrient loaves with other foods at first, so our taste buds don’t atrophy.”

I nodded and said, “I’ve heard about that phenomenon. When miners return to Earth, they’re hedons, gluttons.”

“So we need to figure out how to make storage containers when we’re there,” Ghadir said. “We’ll have to make preservatives from scratch, too.”

Natsuki delicately raised her calloused hand. “My parents made wine and vinegar from all kinds of things that we grew on the farm, so I think we could use algae for that. Usually we used algae for fuel, but it ferments well enough. We could pickle much of what we have with briny water and then, when vinegar is ready, preserve it for longer that way.”

Ghadir grinned. “Vinegar, you know, that reminds me of a dish we made in the restaurant most summers, called ceviche. You put a bunch of fish in a bowl and cover it with vinegar or lemon juice, and the acid will cook the food for you. It’s a different texture from heat-cooked fish, of course, but it tastes rather nice if you spice it well.”

Yuda and Zariah looked at each other, and Yuda stuck out her tongue. “Bainbridge has a huge pickled fish factory,” she said, “and it always smells rotten.”

“Well, parts of the colony are going to smell funny,” Haven interrupted. “We’re going to deal with our own waste, and fermentation is never pretty. Besides, maybe Europa itself just smells awful. We’ll have to get used to it.”

Budur wrinkled her nose at Haven, but Ghadir smiled. “I’ve learned a lot about food preservation, so we should be able to work something out. I’m glad all of you agree with me about this, though. We have to make provisions for ourselves if we’re going to keep the colony going, and eventually feed more people.”

Zariah said, “We might be able to use resin to make food containers. If we can convince this business that it’s worth sending extra printer material to us, of course.”

We all furrowed our brows together and thought about the engineering aspects of food containers. “It would have to be a durable material, to withstand brine and acid,” Ghadir finally said. Zariah nodded, but before she could reply, we were called back into class.

The second half of the instruction focused on the architecture of building the actual space for our plants, and how to release pressure at a slower rate by bringing in some of Europa’s seawater to the compartment. Like everything, it will be a multistage process involving a printer and disassembling bits and pieces of our landing craft. I hope we can get the garden up and running quickly, and although it is not our first official priority, it is our first survival priority.

We tried to get a little further in our knitting circle tonight as well, but Breathe Easy’s lessons have been so long and thorough for the past several days that it was difficult for us to concentrate. Budur got us as far as casting yarn onto our needles and one basic stitch, but none of us are on our way to making sweaters yet.