Gastronomy meets astronomy
The challenges faced in space travel not only include the absence of gravity and the luxury of space inside the spacecraft, but also the deprivation of eating tasty food. We tend to conjure thoughts of eating food in space as an exercise in necessity - to provide the energy the body needs to function properly. Space travel is not a culinary journey. So does one stop complaining about the bland and boring food? Not any longer it seems.
Phnam Bagley, founding partner and creative director of Nonfiction, a design firm that turns science fiction into reality for a better future, explains, “You can have the best, most functional food in the world, but if people don’t want to eat it, they won’t eat it”. Unless driven by hunger… very true!
“When you go to a restaurant a lot of it is presentation. When we process food, the presentation is gone and so you are very dependent on the quality of the product and the flavor and the smell and the taste,” said Grace Douglas, a lead advanced food technology scientist at NASA.
Hence the Deep Space Food Challenge; which draws on innovators in the food production industry to come up with solutions to one of spaceflight’s most pressing concerns: feeding the astronauts. NASA wants to send its astronauts farther than they’ve ever gone before, potentially setting up future habitats on the Moon and perhaps even on Mars.
The food that astronauts rely on today, however, begins to degrade after around a year and a half. Just getting to Mars would take about seven months, according to NASA. So everything needs to have a shelf life of at least a year-and-a-half to two to three years because by the time it is produced, packed, stowed and shipped, it might be a year old before it even gets to space station. That’s why one really needs a five year for a Mars mission at a minimum.
As part of the Deep Space Food Challenge competition hosted by NASA, the Canadian Space Agency, and the Methuselah Foundation to imagine cuisine for long space missions – the firm Nonfiction built a Space Culinary lab.
The space culinary lab is the size of a large fridge and it has four compartments that include:-
Most people don’t imagine that gravity has an effect on our sense of taste. Turns out it does, indirectly. When floating in a microgravity environment, the tissues in our bodies become more evenly dispersed instead of being pulled down to our legs and feet. This causes astronauts to experience puffy, or more rounded faces.
When we have a stuffy nose or sinuses, gravity is what causes our nose to run out our nostrils or down the back of our throats. In addition to a puffy face, the absence of gravity leads to congestion, even in perfectly healthy astronauts. If you’ve ever eaten with a head cold, or pinched your nose shut when you had to eat something you didn’t like, you know that smell is an essential to taste. This congestion makes it difficult to smell acutely and causes food to taste different or rather bland. Because of this, astronauts often prefer foods with intense flavors, particularly sweet, salty, bitter, and particularly spicy.
Astronauts face radiation, isolation, and muscle mass and bone density loss, among other challenges. The first astronauts to reach Mars must remain mentally and physically fit while conserving resources and bringing everything they’ll need with them. That’s why the importance of eating regularly and eating well is so vital to the success of the mission.
Source: External
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