A hybrid inorganic–biological artificial photosynthesis system for energy-efficient food production

plants grown with electrolyser-produced effluent ... added to reach a final media concentration of 1.0 mM acetate did not show additional growth inhibition in plant weight or leaf number from secondary electrolysis products Plant tolerance and consumption of acetate as a heterotrophic energy source will need to be increased to fully decouple plants from biological photosynthesis." So, to make this work, it's necessary to bioengineer new food plants that will grow usefully on acetate-enriched water. That's a big project. It's a whole new food chain. Or you can grow algae and make various products of fermentation, and ultraprocess those into something edible. The Impossible Burger's bloody meat "heme" is a product of fermentation of a genetically engineered organism. That's just a flavoring. The product is mostly made from peas and soy. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-022-00530-x

suggesting is, roughly, to replace the base starch and maybe (some amount of) base fat in a diet (think a typical Asian diet's rice, or wheat in (historic) European bread+beer[0] diets), so that the overwhelming amount of calories won't need to be supplied in advance. Yeah, that'd likely involve feeding some algae or so with the e.g. synthesized acetate, due to yielding nicer nutrition molecules than e.g. simple glucose, which would be comparatively feasible to synthesize without having to use a bio reactor. Worst case you'd have more sleep in place of productive work for energy conservation reasons, if you need to partially fall back on shipped food due to the food synthesis machines breaking. Recent space fairing history has shown that we can make machines very reliable, especially if they're pretty self-contained, not exposed to/operated in vacuum, and straight-forward to test on earth and in low earth orbit. The ISS crew is just too small to warrant as much of a kitchen facility as needed for incorporating something like "algae-based rice-substitute" or "mushrooms" into their meals, but if Starship works well enough to deploy an unmanned algae production machine for a few months (with solar panels and thermal radiators), before transferring the produce to the ISS to test zero-G food preparation... [0]: that beer was really low %ABV, and more comparable to eating bread with 1:1 watered-down beer to wash it down.