This column was set to continue the series on food in space. It's been shown that even without replicators to recycle the crew's food (or raw elements thereof), the complete amount to be stowed outright would only be a few percent of ship's volume and mass. A combination of reprocessing and storage could lower that percentage even more. At one extreme of the feeding spectrum this option has many advantages among them simplicity, not among them however is sustainability. Once measured in many meals or many mouths the advantages of nature's plan to sustain sustenance become clear as I hope to explore, soon. But along the way I got sidetracked by a related and seemingly innocent question.

How did Khan feed his people on Ceti Alpha V? The problem of course isn't the initial exile, not the down-under type wild growth suitable for taming. Rather the challenge comes from supporting his population however meager in the nasty sandy windblown desert "garden spot" shown in the film. Scans from Reliant and Chekov's comments make it clear they're not just there for the tan, there is no better place to survive. (Though Reliant was probably chosen to escort the Genesis Device for protection, not for scientific inspection better left to away teams.)

Carol Marcus's insistence that "can't be so much as a microbe" lead us to conclude that the planet is, for all but an insignificant Terran occupation, lifeless. So using only the "contents of these cargo bays" the exiled supermen quickly adapted to the catastrophe that laid waste their new home, converting it from arable to arid in what may be assumed to be a relatively quick time. (Research revealed "To Reign in Hell," a novel covering Khan's activity after "Space Seed." I'll update this if reading that renders my assumptions senseless.)

An orbital shift might lead to instabilities of extreme heat followed by years of bitter cold that could explain an overwhelming extinction of indigenous life. It figures that the supermen would have stowed whatever emergency rations they could against the coming calamity, but the only apparent answer seems to be subterranean gardens. (We can reason, outside his brief explanation before dropping Ceti eel-slugs onto his enemies, that Khan keeps his "pets" safe from lethal conditions on the exposed surface.). The large-scale destruction of larger lifeforms excludes any significant diet of animal protein, but vegetable, fungus and monocellular clusters could suffice on a scale computed to provide for a few dozen at most. Not only the math would be messy.