In space, comfort is atop the menu
Technology for feeding astronauts has made giant leap since Apollo
“Taste is hard to get right. We’ve learned a lot about how to flavor the food.”
— Jennifer Levasseur, curator at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum
When visitors at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum ask questions about space travel, one question regularly makes the top of the list: What do astronauts eat?
While astronaut ice cream sold at museum gift shops, toy stores and amusement parks may be marketed as space food, Jennifer Levasseur, curator at the air and space museum in Washington, D.C., is quick to point out that for the real deal, you’re better off freeze-drying bacon bits like those eaten on the moon in 1969.
Food eaten in space isn’t particularly out of this world. Some of the meals aboard NASA’s Apollo missions included
chicken stew, shrimp cocktail and pork and scalloped potatoes.
Yet of all the ways space travel — and the Apollo 11 moon landing in particular — influenced American culture, its impact on food packaging is one that shouldn’t be overlooked, Levasseur said.
Food preservation in the 1960s was a research focus not only for NASA but commercial food producers and packagers as well. In cases where small commercial food items came readily prepared by private companies, NASA would use those products for spaceflight and share preservation insights, Levasseur said. In exchange, the companies were asked not to market themselves as NASA partners.
For instance, Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes were listed as sugar coated corn flakes on later Apollo mission menus including Apollo 11. The Tang powdered drink name doesn’t appear in Apollo mission menus either, instead taking the moniker of orange-grapefruit drinks or some similar variation.
That, however, didn’t stop the makers of Tang from running ads such as one featured in the book “Marketing the Moon: The Selling of the Apollo Lunar Program,” where a graphic detailing the parts of an Apollo spacesuit is followed by a tagline that reads “Tang. For spacemen and earth families.”
“It was kind of an awkward situation,” Levasseur said of Tang’s marketing.
Taste-testing
Advertising aside, there were plenty of returns on investment for companies working with NASA. Modern packaging products coming out of the work include ketchup packets found at fast-food restaurants and tuna packets found in the local grocery store aisle, Levasseur added.
Since Apollo 11, technology for consuming food in space has also yielded significant advances. Chief among them, better ways to season astronaut’s meals. Astronauts would complain about feeling like they were eating with a cold, not being able to taste their food.
A NASA report on the biomedical results of Apollo missions stated that “the overall objective of the Apollo food system development program was to provide adequate and safe nutrition for man during the most ambitious space explorations ever attempted.”
Comfort food in space
Yet when taking into consideration astronaut’s comfort levels, the ability to get food to taste right was also a key factor.
“Taste is hard to get right,” Levasseur said. “We’ve learned a lot about how to flavor the food.”
More recent astronaut menus include options such as jambalaya and other meals with Cajun flavors.
Even back in the 1960s for missions such as Apollo 11, astronauts’ food preferences were taken seriously in preparing their meals. And given its popularity at the time, fruit cake was a common dessert option, Levasseur said. Decisions were driven by what was feasible to take into space and what would help the astronauts take a bit of home, routine and culture with them.
“It all boils down to creating a comforting experience,” Levasseur said.
As for astronaut ice cream, while the popular comfort food did appear as a listed menu item in the Apollo 7 mission press materials, astronaut Walter Cunningham of the crew confirmed in an interview with Vox that it was not in fact aboard their flight.