I love that she mentions the Cornell food study in this article. One of Scott and my first dates was attending a talk at Cornell given by a professor there who was working with NASA to figure out what would be the best foods to take on a Mars mission, and he talked about the "food fatigue" that the commander mentions. NASA, Cornell, and Disney's hydroponic labs at Epcot have been working on this for years.
I'm impressed that they chose a 34 year old to be the commander of the mission, because that is a high position, but I would imagine that they are thinking towards the future, and you simply HAVE to have young men and women on this mission due to the amount of time.