Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary UniverseDaniel and Kelly discuss the often less-than-delicious history of food in space.
Food is really really important to humans, and not just as a way to keep these squishy machines of ours running. Our religions have rules about the kinds of foods we can eat and when we can eat them. We use comfort foods to relax, and we break bread with the people that we hold deer. But bringing food with us when we travel far from home to explore remote environments is really hard. Before we were sending astronauts to space, humans were sailing the open seas and exploring Earth's frozen poles, and initially we didn't have the whole food thing figured out really well. During the Age of Sale, which ran from like fifteen seventy to eighteen sixty ish, a disease called scurvy was a huge problem. We didn't really understand at the time that our bodies needed vitamin C and that vitamin C came from fresh stuff like fruits and vegetables. I've seen reports that two million sailors died of scurvy during this time, and that number seems kind of hard to believe, but I guess it's over three hundred years and there were loads of people sailing at the time. But this is a horrible way to die without vitamin C. Your connective tissues degenerate, your gums start to bleed, Your teeth wobble and fall out. Wounds that it healed a long time ago, like magically reopen and start bleeding again. You get lethargic, you get weakness, and it's a slow, miserable death. But eventually we figured out that humans need vitamin C, and vitamin C comes from fresh stuff. But even when you have the right foods, it can be hard to pack the foods right. During the Franklin Expedition, which was a British expedition that left in eighteen forty five to explore the Arctic, there was lead lining in the cans that stored their food and that appears to have given some of the crew lead poisoning. And even when you do figure out how to pack the food in a way that doesn't kill the crew, often the food is not super tasty because shelf stable food is just not always super delicious. So a common staple on polar expeditions was called pemmican, and this super shelf stable food was made out of animal fat mixed with dried meat and dried berries. And yes, it's exceptionally shelf stable, so nice to pack on long expeditions far from the grocery store, but it is not exceptionally delicious. Complaints about Pemmican include that it stops you up, which sounds rather unpleasant, It tastes awful, and it generally leaves the consumer greasy. So like that animal fat gets on your clothes, it gets in your hair, and like in an environment where it's really hard to take a good shower, that grease kind of builds up over time and is a very unpleasant. But tasty food is so important on difficult journeys on polar expeditions, they see special foods like holidays as a morale boost and has ways to keep people going. The best stuff was saved for like Christmas dinners, so that they could all look forward to that and celebrate, And if morale was getting low, they would make up a holiday and pull out the chocolate that they had stored for special occasions to try to perk everybody up and keep them going. So, as you may know, I'm really interested in what life is going to be like as we set out to settle Mars, and so I've thought a fair bit about what food has been like so far in space, and what food might be like when we finally moved to Mars. You know, how are we going to grow it, how are we going to make it, How are we going to make sure we have enough and that it's delicious. But Mars is going to have its own challenges that are unique to human history that we haven't really experienced yet. So, for example, on polar expeditions, when food ran low, there was often a chance that you could kill a polar bear or a penguin or some fish or a turtle and you know, extend your food supply in that way. And sadly, it was also pretty common to kill the dogs that were pulling the sleighs when you ran out of food, so that you could eat them as well. But unless there are some massive surprises on Mars, there's not going to be Martian polar bears that we can use as back up when we get up there. So this is the first of a two part series on food in space. First, we're going to explore the history of food in space and some of the challenges that had to be overcome to get shelf stable food to be safe and delicious for our astronauts, and then in episode two, we're going to take a look at the future of food in space and what farmers might be up to when we finally settle Mars. Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe.
Hi. I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I'm pretty persnickety about what I eat.
I'm Kelly Wainer Smith. I study parasites, and I I love food, and if you ask me ahead of time, I will try to not talk about the parasites that are in your food. If you take me out to dinner.
All right, Kelly, We'll have a really important question for you that might shape the entire future of our friendship.
Oh oh, high steaks.
All right, it's high steaks. Yes. How do you feel about dark chocolate versus white chocolate? Think carefully?
So.
When I was a kid, I hated white chocolate, but as an adult my tastes of matured. I still prefer dark chocolate, but I like white chocolate too. All right, are we still good? Or is it over for our friendship?
Now? Borderline? Borderline, you threw a bone too dark chocolate there, But I will not even admit white chocolate into the category of chocolate. I will admit it can be tasty in moments, but to me it doesn't belong in the same sentence as actual chocolate.
Is it made from cocal beans or is there something about white chocolate that I don't know?
It's only the butter. It has no actual cocoa in it.
M I mean, I don't get too worked up about terminology and jargon. I just know what delicious and what's not. But sure, I'll go with it, white chocolate. I'm kicking you to the curb. It's just okay.
And Welcome to the podcast Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe, in which we talk about everything that's tasty and amazing and wonderful in this universe. We take a big bite out of it and try to make it all digestible to you. Everything from the tiniest little particles to the biggest planets and the swirling galaxies of this incredible, extraordinary universe delicious.
Well. On today's show, we are talking about food in space, which I spent so much time reading about when we were working on a city on Mars. And there are so many fun stories about food that's gone to space that some people love and some people hate that. I was like, Daniel, let's start doing two part episodes because I have so much to say about food. And you're like, fine, I'll let you talk about food, but we like to hear what other people have to say about food too. So you went out to the campus of uc IRVA and accosted people with your microphone and ask them questions about food and space.
That's right, I asked folks, what were the big challenges to keeping astronauts fed. If you would like to contribute to answers for the podcast, please write to us to questions at danieland Kelly dot org. We'd love to hear your voice and include your answers in this segment of the podcast.
When you send us an email, just say hey, I want to give you my opinion on stuff, and we'll send you the question that we're working on at the moment, and you'll just send us an audio file with your answer.
Easy, pasy, and then you can impressed all of your friends by having your voice on our podcast.
Whop.
All right, let's hear what we came up with this week.
Probably getting the food up there, I would imagine, I think every pound of material that you bring up costs an enormous amount of money. Well, I was supposed that under different gravitational circumstances you need to take care of your muscles and tub bones in such a way that when you get back to Earth things might feel heavier and you're used to them feeling likely in most pay station, for instance. Yeah, I think we can probably engineer our way through it, but we just need that. I mean, you have sunlight, fiber, fiber Okay, Oh.
That's a good line.
I think I agree with fiber. Well, all right, keeping the food from not perishing like bacteria. It's world. You need a lot of it and it can't go bad.
Well, can you have a fridge and space? Oh?
What helps?
I mean, our society has gotten so good at processed food that we've got tons of stuff that's like shelf stable for decades.
So that's not the issue.
I'm sure we'll have plenty of ways to make food. We'll have to really make sure that there's good vitamins in there and fiber and so forth. But I guess the real problem will be.
Just the boredom.
Like it will be hard for the astronauts to live that way for so long, and man just what they would do for a well Daniel, These were some good answers. What do you think is the major challenge for keeping astronauts fed?
I agree with the answers that are concerned about boredom, because you know, food is important, so I look forward to dinner. You know. Maybe that's because I only eat one meal a day, But when I sit down to eat that meal, I'm like, hmmm, I'm gonna enjoy this. And so if you're working hard, you're out there in space, and space is like not always that comfortable or forgiving, then you got to make sure your meals are something you can enjoy.
Well, I think our friendship's on the line again. You eat one meal a day? Are you like my husband who's like, oh, I forgot to have breakfast? And I'm like, people write you and tell you how smart you are. How did you forget to have breakfast? You only eat at dinner?
No, I don't know if this makes me dumber or smarter than your husband, but I only eat when the sun goes down. I'm on the vampire diet.
Why I don't understand. I love the act of chewing on food so much I couldn't only do it after the sun goes down. Why only after the sun goes down.
It's not because I'm actually a Vampire's good, don't worry about it.
Your curtain's open behind you. You'd be a guy.
But breakfast and lunch, I feel like the interfere with the flow of the day. You know, this way, I have a whole day. The rest of humanity has to like pack food and take it with them. It's a hassle. Everybody's like spending hours in the morning preparing their lunch and bring it with them. Oh, it's spilled in my backpack, and now I got to take a break. I just have like a nice whole day, and then at the end of it, I get a meal. It's wonderful. You look totally dumbfound it over there.
I don't know how to process this, but you know, I went through a similar thought process when I was younger, trying to decide if I was going to learn how to do makeup and then spend time putting it on every day. And I was like, well, by the time I'm like ninety, that would have taken like one and a half years of my life, and I just don't think it's worth it. So I'm not going to do it, but I just can't imagine making that same decision about food.
Well, you know, eating at home is the best because then you get to prepare the food the way you like it, you have all of your ingredients. This is one reason that like airplane food has always been terrible, right, because it's got to be stored and transported. Eating lunch, when you're bringing your food with you or you got to find some restaurant or something, it's a big hassle and it's never as good is something you could have at home. So I try to save that up and enjoy it at home. That's similar to the challenge of today's episode, right, how do you prepare food, bring it to space, keep it healthy, keep it fresh, keep it good for the astronauts.
Yeah, so actually, when we first started going to space, it was moderately easy, so the missions were short. The very first trip to space, when Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin went up in nineteen sixty one, most of the cosmonauts were already fighter pilots and there was already food figured out for fighter pilots. So just like cosmonauts, they go up there in these like pressureized suits with these awkward helmets, and there's all this stuff they need to pay attention to. So you can't be like opening up something complicated and applying catch up. It needs to be something that you get the calories in there as fast as you can. And so for fighter pilots, they had already figured out these like toothpaste shaped tubes.
Uh, so it was bad. You're telling me the first space food was as bad as fighter pilot food, which sounds terrible.
Yeah, it was bad. The first foods eaten in space were a tube of meat, maybe two tubes of meat, followed by a tube of chocolate for dessert, So pretty gross.
Was that the first food eaten by humans? Or did they send up any food with a monkey or with the dog that they sent into space?
Yeah, Soleika and Bilka and Stroka, those were dogs that were sent up to space. They were sent up with food. I think the food was in a jelly sort of thing to kind of hold everything together so that it wouldn't float apart. So also kibbles and gelatin.
I guarantee those dogs ate that thing up before the thing even got off the ground.
Yeah, because dogs are gross. I don't think they had any trouble getting them to eat their food. But yeah, so you're right. First food that humans ate in space Eureka Garon. He seemed like he was a pretty like chill, easygoing guy. He was happy with the food, he was happy with the flight. Life was great. The next guy who went up, GERMANTITV, he threw up, and you know, he was also great, but he puked. That is the first case of a human getting space adaptation sickness.
Oh wait, what is space adaptation sickness? Is that just like, hey, tube of food is not really food or is it something to do with actually being out in space.
Yeah, it's something to do with actually being out in space. So part of how we have our sense of balance is that our ears have like some fluid in them and some hairs. Based on what the fluids are doing to those hairs, that kind of tells us how our body is oriented. And you know, we just have various ways that our body uses to figure out like where we are and what we're doing that depend on gravity. And so we don't actually understand space adaptation sickness super well, but we know that when you go up in space sometimes it turns your stomach. Some people are fine. Some people are very much not fine, and they puke, and some people get over it fast. Some people take a few days. On Skylab, they didn't want to admit that one of the guys puked, and so he puked and then he threw it away, and they tried to pretend it didn't happen, and then they got caught. They recorded their conversation because everything in space is recorded. But anyway, so it's a bit of a point of pride if you go to space and you don't yack. But I think a lot of people do yack that in on the parabolic flat.
Well, I feel bad for Cosmo on Titav because he is a first in human history. Right, he's the first person to yack in space, but nobody knows his name.
It's hard being second. I think buzz Aldrin was really mad that Neil Armstrong was going to go out first, because he knew that the first person to go out, you're gonna remember that person's name before you remember the second person's name.
Yeah, but Titov was the first to do something, at least right the first space. He act like that's a thing, right, that should be in the book.
Yeah, but you know, not all firsts need to go down in history, like I'm the first wienersmith because my paperwork got processed first, but no one cares. Not all first needs to be celebrated. But so that things got better pretty quick. So like those tubes, as you noted, it's kind of gross and not like satisfying and fun to eat pastes from a tube. And so during Gemini and Apollo, they were going to be on there for longer, so they were trying to figure out some options that would be more exciting. But there's a lot of problems to solve. So like, okay, if you're gonna send astronauts to the Moon, they've got enough stuff to worry about without getting like food sickness, and so you need to make sure that the fo to sterile and it's not going to give them food poisoning. Is they already worried about space adaptation sickness? You don't refrigerators or freezers or stoves, at least not on Apollo or Gemini. Iss now has a freezer, they got one in twenty twenty, but those things are energetically expensive and heavy. You also need to make the food light, so on Apollo, they freeze dried a bunch of stuff, so essentially, you like you freeze it and then you heat it up in a vacuum to try to get all the water out, and now it weighs less. And the fuel cells on Apollo produced water as sort of a byproduct of the process where they were making power, and you'd use that water to rehydrate your food. Apparently it had a little bit of a funky taste, which is an ideal, but it saved on mass.
But is it a challenge to make shelf sable food that's going to be good for days or weeks. One of our listener comments was noting that we are pretty good at making processed food these days.
Yeah, we're pretty good at making processed food, but a lot of that processed food isn't lasgna that's good for nine months, two weeks, so like the longest trip to the Moon, it was like two or three weeks or something. So we're pretty good. And actually they worked with Pillsbury because Pillsbury makes shelf stable foods, and so they created some shelf stable foods for the Apollo program. So yeah, it's not too hard to make it for a couple of weeks. When you get to the iss era and when you start to think about Mars, it gets way more complicated. But during the Apollo era it was pretty straightforward. So they did a lot of this freeze drying, or they do like what's called intermediate moisture foods, which are essentially like Eminem's. They've got some moisture in them, but there's shelf stable. So we're gonna send those man.
Food chemists have the grossest names for things, you know, intermediate moisture foods. That does not sound like something I want to eat at all.
No, you feel like you should match them up with like chefs or something, and like everything should be named something that could go on a menu. Well, and since I'm a biologist and we managed to make it almost fifteen minutes into the episode, it's time to talk about poop, all right. So the Apollo and the Gemini capsules were really small, Like imagine being in a van with like two or three people and there's no cordoned off spaces where you can get privacy, right, Yeah, And so when you need toop, you need to just be like, turn around, guys, here it comes. And I'm sure they can smell it into small space. And so the foods they tried to make the foods quote low residue, which essentially means not a lot of fiber. And there were actually some astronauts who would try to go their whole mission without pooping. Pooping was not just embarrassing, but like unpleasant. So they had these little baggies with an adhesive at the top that you would use the adhesive to stick to your heinie. Sorry about all the hand motions that you can see that no one else can save.
Because it sounds like you're implying that gravity is an important part of this human process. Yeah, yep, and so that it's substantially different when you're out there floating. The stuff doesn't just get squeezed out. You're saying like it's got to get pulled out, Like every time I'm sitting on the toilet. You're saying, the Earth is doing a significant amount of work on me.
Yes, you should thank the Earth every morning or whenever, I know, we're all very regular, whatever, you should say, thank you Earth for assisting me in this process to partnership. That's right, right, So, because things don't go in the direction, it's supposed to. There's a finger cut in the bag to help you push things in the right direction.
Okay, Oh, nobody wants to see that hand gesture of the I'm so.
Sorry, Daniel, I can't help it. So anyway, it's gross. So Frank Borman, he was supposed to spend two weeks orbiting the Earth with Jim Level, and he made it eight days. Maybe it was nine days. He was going to try to not poop at all, and at one point, I guess he turned to Jim Level and said, well, this is it, Jim, And Jim was like, you got five days left. But anyway, he couldn't make it.
Well, let me ask you, as a biologist, how long can the human go without producing number two and still be healthy? I mean, eight days does not sound healthy.
No, it does not sound healthy. I don't know. There aren't consequences like I've heard of people passing out. I've visited the Motor Museum in Philadelphia and got my picture taken next to the mega colon, which was the colon from someone who just was not regular enough. But anyway, I don't know the answer exactly, but you should not eat too many low residue foods.
Well, according to my rapid googling, the record is forty five days, but you don't get a trophy.
They now that's another first that history is not going to remember apparently. H So we've talked a bit about the kinds of foods that they came up with, so you'd freeze dry. For the Gemini missions, all they had to rehydrate the food was cold water, and it was considered this like huge upgrade in the Apollo mission when you could rehydrate your food and it was a little bit warm, and so like imagine eating rehydrated sort of lukewarm food for two weeks. Not fun.
And so we're back in the sixties still, right, What kind of technology do we have now that they didn't have then, Like they had microwaves in the sixties.
I don't know if they had microwaves in the sixties, but I don't think they have microwaves on the ISS now even I think they use like a little convection oven that heats things up, but not even that much. And then they also have another hot water nozzle to rehydrate their food. Because these freeze dried foods are still going to space.
Well, I guess that makes sense. If you're pulling most of the water out of this, then a microwave is not going to work on it, because a microwave mostly heats the water in the food because the resonance of those electromagnetic waves excites the water molecules. So if you put something dry into a microwave, it doesn't really get heated up very effectively. Microwaves were invented in the sixties. I think they were commercially available in the mid sixties. But then it doesn't make sense to include them in space anyway.
Good time for humanity. I like microwaves. One of the other things that they had were these cubes that were like covered in like an oil. So you don't want crumbs in space. You know, everything floats when you're in space, and so if you've got crumbs, they can like get into the electrical equipment and they can cause shorts. And John Young got into a ton of trouble because he snuck a corn beef sandwich onto one of his flights.
How do you sneak a corn beef sandwich? Like, do I want to ask where he was hiding it.
I don't know where he snuck his in particular, but I do know that a board mirror. The cosmouts have a tradition where when they're on their way out for launch, they get out of the van that's bringing them to bike a ore where the rockets are going to take off, and they pee on the tire. Because that's what ury Gagaron did because it was like his last chance to like take off the spacesuit. And so that is supposed to be a time when people sort of squirrel away items that they're maybe not supposed to have, but they want to take on anyway. So little bottles of liquor have been brought on to the International Space Station by storing them in your spacesuit when you like go out to take your pee.
Somebody slip to a corny I don't understand how this works.
I don't know either. He got in a lot of trouble, Like literally there was a congressional hearing because if the crumbs from his sandwich had messed up that mission. Can you imagine how much taxpayer money would have been flushed down the toilet.
The most expensive corn beef sandwich in.
History exactly, yes, right right, And this was part of the Cold War. Can you imagine if we had lost the Cold War over a corn beef sandwich. Anyway, Steaks were high.
Steaks were high.
Now, Oh, I did all that was so great and I didn't even know I was doing it.
Literally, corn beef sandwich in space is stas or high. That pun works in so many levels.
I'm so clever and I don't even know it. All right, But you know what, So I think we should leave the audience on tender hooks for a second. We are going to do a little bit of myth busting about food and space when we get back from the commercials.
So finish that corn beef sandwich, everybody. You are going to launch into a new era of understanding.
Amazing, all right, So, Daniel, how many times do you think that freeze dried astronaut ice cream that gets sold at all of the air and space museums. How many times has that gone to space?
Oh? Man? I mean, I imagine you want to send something yummy with the astronauts, and you want to send something light. I don't know why you wouldn't send it every single time. I'm gonna guess every single time they go to space they get ice cream. They deserve it.
I think you're probably playing along with me. But that's great. I love it. It's never gone to space. No, I'm in one. It's awful, like only not smart children, but it Have you ever opened up those bags? Like it's all little particles that sort of go floating out and make a giant mess. I mean, like even in gravity, those things make a gigantic mess.
I loved astronaut ice cream. I can't believe you're down on it. Every time we went to the planetarium or whatever, I got astronaut ice cream. It was such a treat and like, okay, it's not as good as real ice cream, but it made me feel like an astronaut.
I did not realize how much conflicts this food episode was going to cause between the two of us. I hate that stuff, but fine, good for you. A dairy based food cube has flown. Oh but not this freeze dried ice cream.
So what's the origin of it? Is it just all marketing?
Yeah? Worked on you.
It actually did work. I mean not only did I buy it, but I enjoyed it more because I believed it had been in space. So yeah, it absolutely worked.
All right, Well, great, there's a market for everything, all right?
All right, Well, what about tang. Are you gonna tell me the tang was never enjoyed by astronauts?
Well, I mean maybe it was enjoyed by astronauts, but it wasn't made for astronauts. Often when I'm giving talks about space and I go into my like negative Nelly speech about you know, people say we should go to space for this reason, but that's a bad reason. People will always say, but like, oh, but what about all the spinoff technologies, like we wouldn't have tang if it wasn't for space. I can't tell you how many times I've heard this.
That's their go to, not like velcro, tephlin, no minaturization or anything teflon.
He I think, has you know, captured the popular.
Consciousness the power of marketing?
Yes? Amen. So Tang was made by a food scientist named William Mitchell. Everybody should know this guy's name if you grew up in the nineties. So he also came up with cool whip, which was like a staple in my house in the nineties, which like instant nostalgia there they still exist somehow, and instant jello.
Wow, this guy should get the Nobel Prize.
For Food Science, or he should get punished in some way because like adult Kelly dislikes all of those food items. But anyway, I mentioned that they get their water from those fuel cells and they have a kind of like, uh, not great taste. So tang was a like easy way you could get the packets and sort of hook them up to the waterline or whatever and then mix it up and then it would kind of cover up the taste from the fuel cells. And some of the astronauts loved it, some of them hated it. In fact, buzz Aldron, in a nineteen eighty eight interview on NPR said tang sucks. If you go to some bars, you can get a drink called the buzz Aldron that has tang in it. And I don't know if that was meant as like an insult to buzz or what.
So you're saying tang was popular among astronauts because it tasted better than like machine water.
Yes, and even then not all of them liked it. But again, I loved tang when I was a kid too.
All right, but this is not really food for space, right, this is food connected to space through the genius of marketing. Let's get back to talking about how we actually feed astronauts in space. You took us through the sixties and seventies when it was basically like an extended version of fighter pilot goo. What about like in the seventies and eighties, when we started spending more time in space, what did the food industry wizards whip up for those astronauts.
Well, so the seventies and the eighties is when we started sending up space stations and people were staying up there for weeks and then months, and now we're up to years or I think the longest day was four hundred and thirty seven days. They don't have to bring all of the food with them at once. There's resupply ships that can come, and when those resupply ships come, they bring fresh food, and it's like hugely popular. But we're still doing freeze dried foods. We're still doing intermediate moisture foods. But there's just like a lot more options now. So on the International Space Station, and this is jumping ahead in time a bit. There's over two hundred options now and so a lot of them, Like on the cosmonaut side, it's like cans of jelly fish. On the US side, Oh, there's a shrimp cocktail I think is very popular. I'm not personally a shrimp person myself. Any animal that you need to deepoop before you eat it is not on my plate personally.
Also, I try it to eat shrimp and others shell foods if some very far from the shore. And I feel like up in space definitely qualifies as like really not near.
Yeah, not near it at all. Agreed. Agreed. So when the US sent up Skylub in nineteen seventy three, that was like maybe the height of dining in space. So they sent up a freezer and a fridge, and I think that we have a fridge, but not a freezer on the ISS, although maybe we have a fridge for like scientific supplies. And I've heard that every once in a while food ends up in the science freezers on the ISS, which is a big no no on Earth. But you know, you do what you got to do in space.
You know. In my house, like at home, my wife is a biologist, so of course we have science stuff in our freezer, including unmentionables from various members to the family. So she's like, don't open those brown paper bags unless you really want to see something you don't want to see.
Oh, man, I know I.
Keep objecting to that. I'm like, look at in your lab. You have a food freezer and a science freezer. Why can't we just make this a food freezer.
Oh I cannot wait to tell that to my husband because he's always like, you have infected fish brains in our freezer? Or what is this dead bird doing in the freezer? But we've never had bags of feces in our freezer. And I feel like Zach doesn't appreciate me as much as he should. But you know what I thought was fun on the cosmonauts of boards Salute one, which was the first base station to ever go up. Apparently they had first breakfast, second breakfast, lunch, and dinner. So you would say, they're wasting three meals worth of time, guys, Whereas I like them even more knowing this, Although it didn't the Lord of the Rings. Didn't the Hobbits have first breakfast and second breakfast anyway?
Yeah, very likely, And Hommits are not famous Lord of the Rings for being like very effective or getting stuff done. You know, they spent most of their time cooking meals and cleaning up after meals. It was a whole day, you know, first breakfast, second breakfast eleven z's like two z's.
I mean, that was kind of the point they save the world, you monster, Ah, a lot.
Of people died before they saved the world. If they just skipped breakfast, you know, they could have saved a whole lot of people from the agony.
Maybe they wouldn't have had enough energy, Daniel, I'm getting choked up just thinking about it. My voice caught. So I was reading, you know a lot of stories about what cosmonauts in space have been eating over the years, and one of the things they really love for fresh food that I read over and over again is onions. And in fact, the first birthday in space, it was Victor Pitsev's thirty eighth birthday aboard Salute one. They celebrated with an onion and a lemon that had been smuggled on board for that particular occasion, and they all like bit into it and we're particularly excited about it, like.
A raw, fresh onion.
As far as I can tell, that's what happened.
Man, Your standards must really plummet if you spend a little bit of time in space, if you're like an onion is a.
Delicacy, or if you live in the Soviet Union, and things were I think it was even worse in the nineties. But I don't think things were great then, but I guess then it was Russia.
But it sounds like there's a big step up from the sixties to the seventies when we have like space stations and now we have options and different kinds of food and all sorts of stuff. What exactly was it that enabled that? Was it the freezers and the heaters on board, or is just having more time and space meant people had to devote more energy to making the food actually good for the astronauts.
Yeah. I think if you're going to have a program where people are going to be up there for months, then you're just kind of forced to do better and you're forced to make sure that your foods last longer. And they experimented with refrigerators and the trade offs between how much energy and space they take, and so yeah, I think it was just the need to make things last longer. So, like we start using the Space Shuttle in nineteen eighty one, it sticks around for like twenty thirty something years, but those missions like two to three weeks, and so they sometimes used military meals that were called MREs or meals ready to eat, and so it's like, well, why reinvent the wheel if we've got something that can already work. So if you're only going up for a couple weeks, you don't have to be fancy. Although those MRIs were apparently awful. I talked to someone who said that they're known as meals rarely edible or meals requiring enemas because of their low fiber content. So here we are again.
But if you're going to be up there in space for a long time, can't you grow some food? I mean, if we have like a basically a permanent space colony, we have a space station, it's up there all the time, is it feasible to have a little bit of a garden and grow some fresh food?
Yeah, And there have been some experiments. I think there's an experiment called veggie, and I can't remember if that's like a tortured acronym of some sort or they just decided to call it veggie. But so, like, one of the problems with growing food in space is that, like water tends to form like bubbles, and because of surface tension, it kind of sticks together, and so when you're trying to get roots that grow out to like have a lot of surface area connections between the waters and the nutrients and stuff, it can be hard because the water tends to sort of like ball up in one spot and it's not necessarily interacting with the roots the way you want it to. And so they've had to figure out some various ways to like you know, get the lighting, get the water, get the nutrients. But they have been able to grow food in space. To go back to the onions on Solute six, there was an experiment with onions that they were supposed to do, and the cosmonauts pretended the onions got lost so that they could eat them themselves, so they ate them. But we've grown I think, like mustard greens, maybe kale mazuka. There have been greens that have been grown in space and consumed in space, and apparently the act of growing these plants is like a huge mental health improvement for the people who tend them, like I guess they you know, being near living things. As a biologist, this isn't surprising to me, but being near living things is just like really great for mental health. But the shuttle is when we got some pretty cool food advances. So the Shuttle is the first time. So, like I love carbs, you probably don't even eat carbs for whatever.
No, No, I love carbs. I'm pro carb, one hundred percent pro.
Cos I'm glad we're finding some common ground we can agree on. Bread has a bunch of crumbs, and crumbs are a problem.
Crumbs are not a problem for me.
I love crumbs, but you wouldn't want them in your equipment.
No. This is one reason why I'm not a fighter pilot or an astronaut, because I'm pro crumb.
Okay, So there was a shuttle flight where we had the first Mexican astronaut. This was payload specialist Rudolpha Vella, and he was up there with astronaut Mary Cleeve, and they had suggested, what if you bring tortillas up because tortillas are like edible plates that don't have a lot of crumbs. And after that point, tortillas are like a staple in space now like almost everything is eaten on top of a tortilla in space. And for a while they were using Taco Bell tortillas because Tago Bell makes tortillas that are shelf stable for nine months knowing it's shelf stable that long, you're like, oh, it's not food, is it? What is that? Actually?
No, the food science is probably a name for it. You know, it's like a flattened circular food product or whatever.
Yeah. Yeah, But the Russians they're not so into tortillas. Instead, they've made these tiny, little bite sized breads that don't shed a lot of crumbs. And I guess they're so tiny that they're called Barbie breads because you can imagine like a little Barbie using one in her little dream house. But you know, one of the interesting things about space is that, like, okay, so we've talked about all these freeze dried foods and foods in cans that frankly don't sound particularly delicious to me. But it seems, for reasons we don't totally understand, to be hard to actually taste things in space. And there's a couple different explanations for this, but astronauts regularly complain that like food is way less flavorful. One of the ideas is that you're up in space, you're in free fall, your fluids are sort of moving up towards your head, and if you've ever been congested or had like a sinus infection, and that it's all congested, maybe you notice that food tastes less flavorful at that point. So, like a lot of flavor isn't just about our taste buds. It's about the act of like smelling the food that we're eating also, So if you're all like congested, you're losing the smell parts that brings us such joy when we eat. But then another idea is that like a lot of that food is like in a bag that you added water to, so you can't really smell it anyway, right, because you're just like drinking it through a straw at the beginning. So they don't really know why food tastes less flavorful, but many astronauts report.
This seems like they should invent something where there's like a tube that goes to your mouth and another one that goes to your nose so you can like simultaneously smell it and eat. It seems like the kind of thing NASA would come up with, right, come on, engineers, get with the programs.
Yeah, they're not working on the important questions, are they. No. I was at a restaurant once and I was watching a woman she was like talking to someone, and she went to bring her cup with a straw in it up to her mouth, but she wasn't paying attention to the straw went up her nose and like shoved her head back, and then she looked around to see if anyone had seen, and then she saw I was kind of chuckling, and I was like.
Maybe it's okay, You're like, don't worry. I'm a biologist. I'm just observing you.
That's right, that's right. So I'm not sure that I would want a straw in my nose, I guess, is what I'm saying. It's a weird, awkward, embarrassing situation.
Well, I wouldn't want to eat cardboard for every single meal. I mean, I think if you're not tasting your food, then like why are you even eating it?
So they try to get around this, like they've had celebrity chefs create extra flavorful meals, and then things like taco sauce packets are so popular that on one flight they were actually like used as currency. So you'd be like, all right, I don't want to clean the toilets today, so I will pay you three taco sauce packets if you clean the toilet.
This like a prison economy. Just see what life is like up there. You know, it's like I'm trading like two packets of cigarettes and a minute on the fatone. You know this is crazy.
Well, and the bar is so low. Like Shannon Lucid, so she was on Mirror, which was a Soviet Russian space station. She lost a shoe once and she couldn't find it, like space stations are notoriously cluttered and hard to find things, So she offered the guy on the mission that she was on. There were two guys, and she said, all right, whoever finds my shoe, you get your own bag of green jello. And immediately both of the guys were like, we gotta find it. One of them found it. He got his own bag of green jello, and they had a fridge on Mirror so that he was able to like have it for himself. But apparently, like the jello was a big bonding experience and so like they would make jello, like every Friday, they'd all get spoons. They'd share it together. So Jello's like a good space food because it sticks and stays in the bag, so you can just like spoon it out, and a lot of astronauts will report that actually having meals together and sharing food is like one of the most impactful experiences they had. Like Leland Melvin has a book about being an astronaut, and he talks about how, you know, all these people from all these different countries were like sitting around a table. Some were floating above it, some were floating below, but they were all sharing a meal together looking down at Earth, and it was just like profound experience. So, yeah, food is so much more than just a way to keep these wishy meat bags moving on.
It must really be an ancient thing sharing food, because frankly, I find it biologically weird that we sit around and have conversation at the same time as we're using our mouths for something else. Right, It's awkward. I'm sitting there, I'm eating, I'm also supposed to be talking, you know, Like the whole thing is kind of weird. It's some like bizarre ancient primal memory of like, you know, sharing food on the savannah or something.
I think, you know, someone, I don't understand any of these opinions. You're sharing anal if.
We're talking about eating and poop and wouldn't it make more biological sense for people to eat in private and then poop together, because then you're using your mouth for just one thing. You give me the weirdest look.
You are supposed to come visit me in March, and I am thinking of rescinding the invitation.
When a biologist thinks your poop comments are weird, then I guess you're over the line.
Yeah, you've gone too far this. Let's back things up.
Tell me more about this taco sauce in space, because are you telling me they used taco sauce so much it became like a condiment you could put on anything.
Yeah, and mayonnaise is also very popular, although I don't think of mayonnaise as being super flavorful, but like, condiments are big in space for whatever reason. So we were talking about, you know, the cultural aspects of food. So throughout the different space eras, there have been different programs where folks from different cultures have come up and a lot of them try to bring some of their own food from home with them, and this is really exciting for the astronauts because they get a chance to try something new. And you know, things get pretty monotonous in space. But there is also like some cofflic so for example, they're supposed to send up fifty percent Russian food and fifty percent American food. And there was this experiment where diaries were taken from astronauts like every day that have to write this is what my day was like, this is how I felt, blah blah blah. And one of the people their diary entry was I have had many programmatic flights with the Russians about the inequality of Russians slash US foods supposed to be fifty to fifty. They have always had more Russian on board, using the rationale that people like Russian food better. That is bull.
Cold war in space, Cold war in space.
Oh all right, we're about to stop for a break, but folks should wonder while during the break, what was Swedish issa astronaut Christopher Fugla sang. Don't send me emails about that, sorry, guys, discouraged from bringing with him in space in two thousand and six that he really wanted to bring with him. We'll get back to it after the break.
I'm guessing some stinky fish thing.
So the question is Swedish astronaut he was coming to space in two thousand and six. What did he want to bring with him that he was discouraged from bringing Daniel guest stinky fish thing. So I think all fish stink. I hate the smaller fish, which is why that job where I had to jump into a dump truck full of dead fish for my master's degree was just so miserable. But actually, when the Japanese bring fish, the Russians bring fish, these are very popular meals. Maybe because they're more flavorful, Maybe it comes back to that. But no, this Swedish astronaut wanted to bring reindeer jerky, and there was concern that this would upset American children because.
He's eating Rudolph.
Exactly, He's eating Santa's reindeer. I'm not going to get Christmas presents for sure, And so instead he brought moose jerky. Anyway, international disaster averted. So what South Korean food do you think they had to bring?
Kimchi?
Of course, kim g of course, I can't say that I'm a kimchi fan personally. And your face says you like kimchi? Is that right?
Is great? On everything? Oh my gosh, we're a big fan of pickle foods.
In my life.
You know, Zach really likes pickled food. So you two will have a great time when you visit. I'll stay somewhere else. But so, the South Koreans wanted to bring kimchi, and one of the food scientists in Korea who was working on the kimchi said, without kimchi, Koreans feel flabby. Not wanting a flabby astronaut.
I think it's a big part of being Korean having kimchi. Yeah, you got to have it or you're not really eating.
But I don't think I would have connected it with flabbiness.
Yeah, that's interesting.
I wonder if that was like a lost in translation sort of thing. But so, one of the problems with kimchi is that kimchi uses bacteria in the fermentation process, and when NASA sends stuff up to space, they don't want any bacteria in there because food poisoning, comput tape blah blah blah, and so they had to try to find a way to like get kimchi part way through the fermentation process and then kill all the bacteria and still try to make it flavorful, and apparently it didn't really work. The Korean astronauts soyyan Yi said after radiation, because they had to radiate it to kill the bacteria. After radiation, the kimchi became so saggy it looked like it was one hundred years old. I cannot say it's really tasteful kimchi, but still I like it because I can feel my home, so you know.
But they're not really making it sterile, right, I mean, if you were radiate foods, my microbiologist's wife would just tell me that you're enhancing the extremophiles, right, she.
Should be a food scientist. Yeah, no, I don't know the answer. Yeah, maybe they killed it some other way. Also, maybe they irradiated it and then like ultra heat processed it.
But is the concern that you're going to bring up some bacteria that's going to get people sick, that's the idea?
Yeah, I think so. Well, we've pretty much gone over the history of food and space, Like, we figured a lot of stuff out. We've got ways to make food shelf stable, we've got some ways to make it not taste so bad. But everybody still definitely super excited when the fresh stuff comes up. But what party would be complete in space or otherwise without alcohol? So, first of all, I want to pitch this great book called Alcohol in Space by Chris Carberry. It's a super fun read about the past and future of alcohol in space. So, Daniels, when the first American drank in space? Do you know who or when it was?
I have no idea who had the first drink in space. Was it connected to the person who first the acted in space?
No? No, So actually I don't know if any of the Russians had drinks in space, quick tangent Here, In general, the Soviet space program is like way more okay with alcohol in space. In the US program, I think they like totally accept that the end of a stressful day is not a problem to have like a shot of something. Yeah, as far as I could tell, there have been no instances of drinking getting out of control, where like at the end of the day somebody had like the bottle instead of a shot. And in fact, there was an incident on Mirror where one of the oxygen canisters caught fire, and so there was like a fire in space that they were trying to put out. There was some concern that they were going to have to abandon the space station. Afterwards, the psychologists for the crew called up and they were like, we think you should all drink a little and so like relax. So like the Russians and the Soviets have always been way more comfortable. And I was talking to someone who works on life support systems for the ISS, and even though NASA is like, no, no alcohol, You're not supposed to have alcohol in space. The air quality is monitored to an incredible degree on the International Space Station because you know, like carbon dioxide needs to get removed by the system. And I guess every once in a while they pick up ethanol from the Russian side of the space station that they're not expecting, and so they think that's instances where like alcohol has been kind of snuck up into space even though NASA doesn't want it, because the Russians just don't care about it as much. First astronaut to have a drink in space, though, was buzz Aldrin.
Of course, should have guessed good old Buzz.
I am always hesitant to joke about buzz Aldrin and drinking because he admitted in one of his books that he has a problem with alcoholism. But he is also Catholic and he wanted to take communion when he landed on the moon, and so they landed on the moon, and before they got out of the lander, he had a little sip of wine. So wine was the first and I think only alcoholic beverage consumed on the moon. And then he had when I was a Catholic kid growing up, I called them christ crackers, but like the communion wafers. He took communion on the moon, and that was the first time anyone had alcohol on.
The wh And was that the first communion off the surface of the earth.
Well, that's a good question. That's the first communion that I read about. There was a passage from the Bible that was read during Apollo eight, which happened over Christmas. But for a long time buzz Aldrin didn't talk about taking communion because there was like a bit of a brew haha about like whether religious things should be happening in space when its taxpayer dollars in our country as separation of church and state, and so I think a lot of that stuff was hushed up and then not mentioned until later. So maybe something happened but it wasn't reported. But buzz Aldrin is the first instance that I know about. Wow, So here's another important question. This conversation has been kind of all over the place, but I'm having a lot of fun. Would you drink beer in space? And if so, why are why not? Do you drink beer at all?
I'm a fan of beer, absolutely, I think beer is delicious, and in our house again, we're big fans of all kinds of fermented foods where ilied with the microbes and make our bread and our beer and our pickles and all sorts of stuff. I think I would like to enjoy beer in space, but I'd be worried a little bit about the burping. Do you burp in space? The same way? Now? I'm thinking about how the Earth plays a role in all of my biological functions, moving stuff up and down and all the round, And so I'd be worried about like a large gas bubble forming inside of me.
Exactly. Yeah, so burping in space is apparently very unpleasant. Those air bubbles often like bring food up with them also, So like Pepsi and Coke during the Cola Wars or whatever, they both sent their beverages up to space and space particular containers. I can't remember if they sent them up flat because they knew this was a proud or if it was really unpleasant for people, because but anyway, carbonated beverages not appreciated in space because burping in space is a very unpleasant experience.
Well that's too bad, because burping on the surface of the Earth is really pretty great. And I'm a big fan of sparkling water and all sorts of other carbonated beverages. So what a big bum about going at I know.
I totally agree. Like Zach is not in your camp at all. He thinks all bodily sounds should be kept to oneself. I don't know why he married a biologist. We all make mistakes, but like one of the nice things about Mars might be that if you did beer on Mars, that gravity might be enough to sort of make the problem of belching go away or at least be less unpleasant. So yeah, or rotating space stations, you know, So we have to solve these problems quickly so that we can start bringing beer to space.
Yes, absolutely, because if humans are going to live in space or on other planets, we've got to figure out how to keep people happy. It's not just about survival, it's about living life and quality of life. We don't just want to eke out some primitive like existence where we're squeezing food tubes into each other's mouths. We want to actually have joy and fun out in space or on other planets.
Yeah, right, so biosphere. We're going to talk about Biosphere two in the next episode. But to sort of cut to the chase on that story, they lost a bunch of weight because they couldn't produce enough food in this facility where they were trying to like close every same thing, so the plants would make the oxygen and they would remove the carbon dioxide and that would also be what they ate. And the men lost eighteen percent of their body weight and the women lost ten percent. Oh but even though they were having trouble getting enough calories for dinner and they were like literally like licking their bowls to try to get the last of everything, they took some of their precious bananas to make banana wine, because, like you said, it's not just about eking out in existence. Like, plenty of people have great lives without alcohol, but some of us really like to have a glass of wine at the end of the day or something. And they were willing to give up some of their calories, so that they could make this wine to bring them a little bit of joy at the end of a hard day. I think they were doing like eight to ten hours of labor tending their crops five and a half days a week, so it was like intense. And Andy Weir, so he's the guy who wrote The Martian, and in The Martian his main character Mark Wattney. I think the guy's name is he eats a bunch of potatoes, and those potatoes the fertilizer is like human poo. And people have asked Andy Weir a lot, why didn't he use any of those potatoes to make liquor, And Andy Weer answered that, like, it would have taken so many potatoes to make the liquor that he just he probably would have died, he wouldn't have gotten enough calories. And I think that's a totally reasonable conclusion to come to. But when you actually have humans who are starving, we will make banana wine because we need to be happy too. So yeah, I think the trick for space. Like so, as we mentioned, a lot of these missions are short. They're like weeks, months, maybe a year or something, so you can handle eating food that's not super flavorful. But when we're finally settling somewhere and staying there for years at a time, there's a lot that we need to learn so that we can get better about this kind of stuff, because like rehydrated potatoes are not going to cut it for a lifetime. So in the next episode, we'll talk more about the future of food and space.
I mean, even on airplane flights. The first approach, which is just like, get some food up there which is edible and not going to kill people. People are not cool with it, right, And this is why we now have pretty good food on airplanes because companies realize, like humans will always want good food, they will pay a little bit more to have good food. Even if you're just any air for a few hours. It's not okay to just squeeze something into your mouth to survive. It's part of living and it's part of enjoying this extraordinary universe.
Humans also want more leg room. Airlines take note, work on that two planes. Even I'm that tall, all.
Right, Airplane engineers work on more legroom. In the meantime, stay tuned for our next episode about food in space.
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