Best hydroponic crops to support an underground society?

Question

So, in my world, after WW3, a contingent of American government officials, military officials, scientists, and engineers hid out in a specially constructed bunker, where they'd remain for nearly 200 years, giving birth to successive generations of bunker dwellers. As of the time of my story, they have about 5,000 population.

One question I had was food. I planned on them using hydroponic methods to grow food, mainly vegetables and fruit, but I wanted to know: Which foods would be the best for the underground humans to grow?

Answer 1

All kinds.

They grow an enormous array of different plants from all over the world. All the food plants the founders could get, and also loads of medicinal and culinary herbs. And flowers which are grown just because they are beautiful and the founders worried beauty would go out of the world.

Your bunkers are not some grimy burrow with people scraping by on starvation rations. These bunkers are amazing and roomy, which is why people are content to stay for generations. The endless, bright spaces are full of growing things. People sleep among the plants, singing and talking to them. The temperature never changes down there and so no-one needs clothes. They wear flowers and garlands.

Now I want to live there.

Answer 2

You have limited space and energy to grow food. This means, in turn, that you need to choose for nutrition and total required space.

Based on this, your first stop should be looking at staple crops from real life. These are things that are grown as the primary means of feeding the population due to the combination of being relatively easy to grow on large scales and being rather nutritious. Wikipedia has a nice page about staple crops that includes nutritional info on the ten most widely grown staple crops. Out of those, I'd probably say a mix of quinoa and soybeans is your best bet as a set of staple crops. Both are not too hard to grow with hydroponics, and their nutritional values complement each other pretty well.

From there, you need to look at what crops will shore up your nutritional requirements. Provided you have people eat the quinoa raw (it makes a great snack, and it loses a lot of nutritional value if cooked), you've only got two big things you're missing out on significantly:

• Carotenoids (vitamin A, β-carotene, and xanthophylls): Easily covered by adding carrots, sweet potato, kale, or spinach.
• Sodium: Beetroot, celery, and carrot all help cover this well.

From there, it comes down to a bit of variety. Onions and garlic come to mind as they're both easy to grow, really versatile, and onions provide a natural source of fluoride, as do almonds (not as easy for hydroponics, but they're really nutritious and provide good variety. Fruit would be good too for variety, but you can probably pick this mostly for taste and presentation instead of nutritional value (brambles might be decent, they're so easy to grow that people have trouble getting rid of them), as would some spices. I'd probably also throw in a true cereal crop so you can do things like make bread and noodles (personally I'd probably go with wheat, but barley, rye, or millet would also work).

Now, you can get a reasonably balanced vegan diet this way if you pick carefully, but you are almost certainly going to be better off if you also grow some livestock. Chickens would be my choice for this, because they give you both meat and eggs (and eggs are insanely useful from a culinary perspective), don't need much space, and can be fed with the same crops that you're using for the humans.