One of my items on the bucket list is to try foodies. Not that freeze-dried astronaut ice cream (which I still really like), but real food designed for astronauts to eat in space. I specifically hope to get my hands on some shrimp cocktail, but beggars can not be voters as they say. I’ll take anything.
But how is astronaut food designed? In space, astronauts deal with many different environmental, physical, and spiritual situations that we do not have to worry about on earth. Astronomy shares how food is chosen and what aspects of it are the key to becoming space food.
“We have crews that have to perform at these extremely high levels and be healthy for extremely high-voltage situations,” said Grace Douglas, chief scientist at NASA’s Advanced Food Technology research group at the Johnson Space Center. “Food affects every aspect of physiology, and food can make you very healthy, or you can get very sick.” So it sounds like they’m taking an astronaut’s diet very, very, very seriously. Probably no meals in a lane.
Proper nutrition is the key to ensuring that astronauts stay healthy and to prevent bone and muscle loss during deployment. In order not to lose body mass, astronauts need to eat between 2,700 and 3,700 calories a day. If the diet plan does not completely cover all bases, the astronauts take nutritional supplements to boost needs such as B12, omega 3 fatty acids and iron. In short, if the food here is healthy for you, it’s still healthy up there.
After decades of refining their knowledge of nutrition and food technology, NASA dietitians have begun to move away from supplements and nutrition planning and more toward a diet where the astronauts get those nutrients directly from fruits and vegetables. Dietary supplements may not contain phytochemicals, which are biologically active compounds that you get from fresh produce. But then there is still the issue of the cargo hold. All fruits and vegetables take up space.
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The solution? Freeze-drying and rhetorical thermal sterilization, a process used in the canning industry to sterilize food after it has been packaged by heating it. Not only does this reduce the bulk, it also keeps the food rack stable for long periods of time. The packaging looks like that of the small packets of tuna that you can find in the canned fish section in the grocery store. Some of these foods take up to five years for long-distance orbital missions.
Then of course there is the issue of taste. The food should taste at least decent. Astronauts can not eat strangely monotonous food, day in, day out. Textures are very important: no one wants to eat pasta all day. One new freeze-dried item that was a big hit is a freeze-dried mango salad that contains a crunchy nut.
Sending products in the flights with an offer is good and all, but the end goal is to try to create a self-sustaining food source. So NASA experimented with it leafy vegetables grown in space, which resembles natural progress. There is success with vegetables and even flowers, so adding fresh things as a supplement to their nutrient-dense diet can not only be healthy for our favorite space travelers, but also delicious. And it’s a a brilliant strategy to fight homesickness through fresh foods that can get you down.