Kristen Hartke
molecule that makes sour foods taste sweet, are used in several recipes, notably the Astronaut Reviver cocktail.
Art you can eat
And this is where the Menu for Mars collaboration becomes an examination of how the culture of food changes when familiar ingredients and tools are no longer available.
“In a sense, we’re doing citizen science research for Nasa and other space agencies,” says Neilson, noting that the pair see their project providing valuable lessons about sustainable food practices on our own planet.
That research involves having visitors use ingredients from the Menu for Mars pantry to cook dishes on the spot that are documented then vacuum-sealed and labelled, becoming abstract edible art.
It was that cooking-turnedart-exhibit concept that caught the eye of curator Jeffry Cudlin, who brought a scaled-down version of the Menu for Mars Kitchen to the Washington Project for the Arts ( WPA) in February as part of a larger exhibition, entitled Other Worlds, Other Stories.
“DC was an interesting environment for the exhibit,” says Paulson. “We really hadn’t considered how many people there actually work for Nasa, for instance.”
WPA executive director Peter Nesbett says “the gallery was packed to capacity on the day of the Test Kitchen. All the cooking stations were buzzing, and people were avidly sharing the dishes they had invented from the packets of dry foodstuffs made available to them.”
Sian Proctor, a geology professor at South Mountain Community College in Phoenix, knows what it takes to be inventive with limited food supplies in an alien environment. She spent four months in 2013 living in the Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation habitat, a series of missions funded by the Nasa Human Research Programme and designed to study the daily activities of a crew living on Mars. Proctor’s specific mission was to cook with only shelf-stable ingredients – such as freeze-dried chicken and tsampa, a Tibetan staple made from roasted barley flour – and no fresh food at all.
“Astronauts tend to have food apathy over time,” says Proctor, “so there’s interest in understanding what happens to our food palate and our desire to eat during long-duration space flight.
“But Mars has gravity, which makes it easier to cook.”
When Proctor was invited to visit the Menu for Mars Kitchen on its one-year anniversary last summer, she found a space very similar to the one where she had lived in Hawaii, but with far more enthusiasm for cooking.
“I really like the creativity of cooking,” she says, “so that part of the mission was fun for me, but there were other members of the crew who would much rather be doing something else. You learn that some people simply eat to survive. Food is not about flavour for them, it’s about sustenance.”
For her, it was all about the flavour, and she found that heavy emphasis on spices helped perk up what could otherwise be drab meals.
“We went through a lot of hot sauce,” she says.
And after four months without fresh produce, lettuce became a common craving.
Neilson’s not surprised. “When you start cooking this way, with so many restrictions, you learn something pretty important,” she says. “Earth is awesome.” – Washington Post