Culturally familiar foods and mental resilience during long-duration space missions: a narrative review and conceptual framework

Long-duration space missions expose crews to isolation, confinement, operational workload, disrupted sleep and limited resupply, all of which may affect psychological health and mission performance. This narrative review examines whether, through which pathways and under what operational constraints culturally familiar foods could support astronauts’ mental resilience. Evidence was integrated from spaceflight and space-food research, isolated and confined environments, nutritional psychiatry, the microbiota-gut-brain axis and terrestrial studies of cultural food practices. The literature supports two complementary pathways: biological effects mediated by dietary composition and the microbiota-gut-brain axis, and psychosocial effects mediated by identity, nostalgia, familiarity, agency and social connection. Direct evidence in astronaut populations is currently insufficient; consequently, terrestrial and analogue findings should be interpreted as hypothesis-generating rather than confirmatory. We propose a conceptual framework in which cultural familiarity is treated as a design attribute of space food systems alongside safety, nutritional adequacy, stability, usability, resource efficiency, reliability, variety and palatability. Priority studies should test culturally matched foods in controlled analogues and spaceflight using predefined psychological, dietary, microbiome and team-level outcomes.