FOOD FROM THE HEAVENS

NASA Space Food

"The same intelligence is required to marshal an army in battle and to order a good dinner. The first must be as formidable as possible, the second as pleasant as possible, to the participants".
Roman General AEmilius Paulus

Does smelly, fermented cabbage sound tasty to you? Better get used to it, because in a few years we could all be chowing down on South Korea’s national dish, kimchee.

The food, eaten by South Koreans with virtually every meal, made its debut on the International Space Station in 2008, much to the delight of the country’s first astronaut, Ko San. “When you’re working in space-like conditions and aren’t feeling too well, you miss Korean food,” he said.2 No kidding. To South Koreans, kimchee is comfort food and a cultural touchstone akin to pasta for Italians, apple pie for Americans or Spam for Pacific Islanders. Many South Koreans attribute their country’s dramatic economic rise over the past few decades to the invigorating powers of the cabbage dish. And while Westerners say “cheese” when posing for photos, South Koreans smile and shout, “kimcheeee!”3 Even we Canadians don’t get that excited about our poutine.

Traditionally, kimchee was prepared in early winter, when large clay pots filled with cabbage, seasonings and other vegetables were buried underground to ferment. Today the process is more advanced and kimchee can simply be bought at the grocery store, then kept in a special refrigerator that regulates fermentation. South Koreans eat it by the truckload, about 1.6 million tonnes a year, or more than eighty kilograms per household.4 Few non-Asians have even heard of kimchee, let alone tried it, because it doesn’t travel well. The cabbage dish is full of microbes that help in the fermentation process, which means it has a short shelf life and is difficult to export. South Koreans abroad often find themselves missing their favourite food.

That looks to change with the work done by the Korea Aerospace Research Institute. Scientists there found they could expand kimchee’s shelf life by blasting it with radiation, which kills the bacteria after fermentation. The process also neutralizes some of the smell, which non-Koreans often find revolting. The result is “space kimchee,” a safer, longer-lasting and less-pungent version of the earthly dish, ideal for consumption up in orbit. More importantly, the new creation will also have terrestrial uses, food scientists say. “During our research, we found a way to slow down the fermentation of kimchee for a month so that it can be shipped around the world at less cost,” said Lee Ju-woon at the Korean Atomic Energy Research Institute, which began working on the food for the space agency in 2003. “This will help globalize kimchee.”5

Eating Humble Pie

New-and-improved kimchee is the latest in a long line of food innovations to come out of various space programs. Exploring worlds beyond this one has meant overcoming a whole new set of technological obstacles, starting with launching humans out of the Earth’s atmosphere. As we’ve ventured deeper, and as we’ve asked our spacefarers to leave their home planet for longer, the challenges of keeping them fed and healthy have become more complex. Space agencies have spent decades and millions of dollars in meeting these challenges, not just to keep astronauts and cosmonauts nourished, but also to provide them with a level of comfort so that they can concentrate on performing their scientific missions.

These investments, as is the hope with kimchee, have also paid dividends many times over back on Earth. In many instances, space agencies, particularly NASA, have transferred their technologies — whether new forms of packaging, processes or food chemistry — directly to consumer food companies, which in turn have used the advances to improve products. In some situations, food makers have developed their own intellectual property by working with the agencies, while in others whole new categories — such as, blech, camping food—have come straight out of space research. For much of the past fifty years, NASA and its kin have done as much to change the quality, cost and safety of food as the biggest terrestrial processors.

The whole notion of space travel traces its origins back to the military. While today we think of space exploration as a purely scientific endeavour and the ultimate example of international co-operation, that was definitely not the case in the early days of the Cold War.

At the end of the Second World War, the Soviet Union was at a big military disadvantage to the United States. Not only did the Americans have the atomic bomb, they had also recruited the best German scientists and engineers and a good number of the V-2 rockets the Germans had built during the war. Through the late forties, the U.S. Army quickly transformed the Nazi V-2 program, which was responsible for more than 2,500 deaths in Allied countries and a further 20,000 in German concentration camps, into its own space and missile programs.6 As the fifties dawned, Americans were brimming with confidence — their country’s clear technological superiority meant a safe and prosperous future lay ahead. A journey into space was merely a matter of when, not if.

On October 4, 1957, however, Americans had to eat a generous helping of humble pie (it was probably apple-flavoured) when the Soviet Union, using its own German-captured technology and know-how, launched the first-ever man-made satellite, Sputnik I, into space. Despite its head start, the United States had got caught with its figurative pants down because of internal squabbles over funding and which branch of the military should have control over the space program. The surprise sent the American government and public into a tizzy.

In the fifties, launching rockets into space wasn’t about who could venture farthest from Earth, but rather who could land nuclear weapons closest to their enemy. The Soviet Union had developed its own atomic bomb in 1949, but until Sputnik, the American government wasn’t terribly worried. Bomb-laden Soviet planes, while potentially deadly, could be detected and shot down well before they reached American territory. V-2 rockets, meanwhile, were only capable of making short flights, like from East Germany to the United Kingdom. No one knew yet how to fire a nuclear missile from one continent to another.

All of a sudden, the Soviet Union possessed that ability —  and could wipe out the United States with the push of a button. The same, however, was not true in reverse. For the first time in their country’s history, the American people were faced with the very real possibility of annihilation by a technological superior. The doomsday clock neared midnight and the Cold War shifted to a new level of urgency.

President Eisenhower ordered the formation of two agencies, the Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, to ensure that the United States would never again be surprised on a technological level. We’ll take a look at ARPA, which soon added “Defense” to its name to become DARPA, in chapter seven. NASA, meanwhile, was to be a civilian-run agency in charge of all aspects of space exploration and long-term aerospace defence research. The civilian veneer was designed to give the United States a sense of moral high ground over the secretive Soviet program, but there was little doubt that for much of the Cold War, the main motive behind any country’s space program was to establish military superiority and hang the threat of nuclear annihilation over one’s enemies, whether through rocket technology or espionage capability. That’s why seven of the nine countries that have so far developed nuclear weapons (eight out of ten if you count Iran) have also launched rockets into space. It also explains why there is so much current concern over North Korea’s attempts to shoot rockets into orbit.7

In 1961, before NASA and DARPA could get up to functional speed, the Soviet Union again beat the United States to the punch by making cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin the first man in space. NASA countered the following year by launching John Glenn who, during his five-hour-and-fifteen-minute flight, became the first human to eat in space while he was in orbit halfway between Australia and Hawaii. “I lifted the visor of my helmet and ate for the first time, squeezing some applesauce from a toothpaste-like tube into my mouth to see if weightlessness interfered with swallowing,” Glenn wrote in his biography. “It didn’t.”8 And so began the era of space food.

And the Bland Played On

Aside from the two T-38 Talon jets on display outside its main gate, there is little to distinguish the Johnson Space Center from any other American government research facility. The complex, consisting of a hundred or so buildings sprawled out over 650 hectares south of Houston, looks very much like a college campus. The rectangular low-rise buildings, linked by a grid of narrow, tree-lined roads, could conceivably house students learning socio-political theory or business administration. Instead, they’re occupied by some of the sharpest brains around —  scientists devoted to preparing humans for leaving Earth.

The only way for non-genius scientists to get past the guards at the front gate is to take a tour from Space Center Houston, the public visitors’ building across the street, appropriately named Saturn Lane. After checking out garish, Disney-like displays of shuttle cockpits and moon rocks, visitors can ride a tram into NASA’s facility to catch a glimpse of the agency’s inner workings. Highlights of the tour include a visit to the sixties-era main control room, which was used during the Apollo program and now — with its push-button consoles, vacuum tubes and monochrome projector screens — looks like a kitschy set from the original Star Trek series. Visitors also get to see the cavernous training centre, where astronauts prepare for missions by working inside full-scale replicas of the shuttle and space station modules.

Not on the tour, likely because it’s nowhere near as sexy, is Building Seventeen: NASA’s food lab. Here a dozen scientists dissect, formulate, test and create foods for consumption by astronauts on shuttle missions, the International Space Station and, perhaps soon, journeys to the moon and Mars. The main testing area looks like a cross between a cafeteria and a bachelor pad, with a large dining table set a few feet away from a kitchen counter. Various packaged foods are chaotically strewn across the room. A box-shaped contraption, like the automated detergent dispensers found in coin laundries, sits at the end of the table. Dr. Michele Perchonok, NASA’s food system manager, greeted me with a smile when I visited and revealed that the box was indeed an oven used on the space shuttle. My previous experiences with so-called space food amounted to eating the tasteless freeze-dried strawberries and ice-cream sandwiches sold at museum gift shops. I just couldn’t believe that was what astronauts really ate, so I had to find out for myself.9

Perchonok served up a plate of beef brisket, accompanied by baked beans, cauliflower and cheese, mixed berries, cookies and, to wash it all down, a pineapple drink. I’d heard from talking to astronauts that the brisket was good, and it was indeed fantastic — the beef strips, flavoured with tasty Texas barbecue sauce, were so tender that they seemed to melt in my mouth. The beans also had a nice smoky flavour while the cauliflower with cheese, despite looking like an unappetizing yellow blob, was savoury too. I wasn’t so thrilled with the berries, which were tart and lumpy, and the pineapple drink was the sort of run-ofthe-mill powdered stuff you get at the grocery store. Still, the meal far exceeded my expectations. I was ready for total chemical blandness, the kind you get with pouched camping foods, but instead I got a meal that would pass muster in a decent restaurant. (NASA’s brisket was actually on par with a plate I had later that night at the Goode Company Barbeque, a renowned Houston eatery.)10 None of this was news to Perchonok, of course. “Mmm hmm,” was all she said as I praised her cooking. Space food, which today is a mix of freeze-dried, dehydrated and irradiated products, has come a long way from applesauce in a tube.

NASA began developing its own food with the start of the Apollo program in 1961. With the goal of landing on the moon, Apollo missions would obviously be longer than the short Mercury and Gemini jaunts, so astronauts would need to eat. (Apollo 7, the first manned mission in the program, orbited the Earth for eleven days, while Apollo 15, the longest of the Apollo missions, clocked in at twelve and a half.) The problem was, no one really knew what to expect when it came to putting food in space. Microbes might mutate and become harmful, new kinds of bacteria might sprout up or the food might simply rot faster. There was also limited data on the long-term effects of zero gravity on astronauts’ bodies. NASA played it safe and went with the most sterile and bland food it could find. In other words, army food.

The military had learned a valuable lesson during the Second World War: fighting an industrial-sized battle tends to work up an industrial-sized appetite. Fortunately, companies such as Hormel had stepped up to meet the military’s food needs, even if it was with Spam. Though the post-war processing revolution resulted in longer-lasting and more portable foods, the military couldn’t rely on private industry to put in the research and resources needed to meet its specialized requirements, which were likely to change with each new conflict. So Congress gave the Pentagon the green light to set up its own food science lab, and in 1952 the Quartermaster Research Facility opened for business in Natick, Massachusetts, a small town near Boston. The facility has added functions over the years and changed its name several times. Today it is known as the Army Soldier Systems Center, or more colloquially as the Natick Army Labs, and it supplies the military with food, clothing, portable shelters, parachutes and other support items.

At first, the lab developed standard canned rations that could be eaten in any battle scenario, but the tins ended up being too heavy and bogged troops down. One historian found that a special operations team could become “virtually immobile due to the weight of needed supplies ... Mobility and stealth are decreased when loads become too heavy, and the soldier is too often worn down by midday.”11

In the sixties, just as the space race was getting under way in earnest, Natick’s focus shifted toward making lighter and more portable food packages, with a heavy reliance on dehydration and freeze-drying. Early versions of the Meal, Ready to Eat (MRE) became available to troops, to mixed reviews. The new rations contained a range of rehydratable foods, including beef hash, chili, spaghetti with meat sauce and chicken with rice. Soldiers complained about the taste, but were thankful for the reduced weight and simplicity, which validated the lab’s approach. As the food-processing industry had learned in the fifties, making food that wouldn’t spoil was easy—the hard part was getting it to taste good.

NASA scientists worked closely with their Natick counterparts to develop foods for the Apollo program, with the two labs refining freeze-drying and irradiation processes. Aside from weight and space considerations, the organizations discovered that they had much in common. NASA found that astronauts lost mass after spending time in space because there was no gravity resistance on their muscles. (Imagine not walking at all for a week; your leg muscles would become feeble from the lack of use.) The solution was regular exercise while in space. Today, astronauts on the International Space Station spend two hours a day on treadmills and other muscle-building machines to counter the effects of weightlessness. All that exercise requires extra calories, which makes astronauts similar to soldiers. Running around shooting at bad guys is tough work, so soldiers need about 3,600 calories, versus 2,000 for a regular (non G.I.) Joe.12 That requirement contrasts significantly with the consumer industry, which has been under pressure for several decades to lower the caloric content of its foods.

Then, of course, there’s the issue of longevity. “Our requirements fit more with the military’s than the food industry’s,” Perchonok says. “We’re both looking for longer shelf-life foods, shelf-stable food, which means they don’t require refrigeration,” since there are no refrigerators on the space shuttle or station. Dr. Patrick Dunne, Natick’s senior advisor in nutritional biochemistry and advanced processing, says soldiers also need to be able to heft food around without refrigeration, so the military and NASA are both looking for foods with shelf lives of more than a year, compared with the industry’s need of only a few months. “That makes our research environment a little unique compared to a commercial food producer,” he says.

Although the two food labs have evolved in virtual lockstep, NASA has diverged from Natick in several ways. In zero gravity, astronauts generate fewer red blood cells, which absorb iron. Space foods must therefore be low in iron to prevent the mineral from being stored in other parts of the body, which can cause health problems. Weightlessness also causes bones to weaken, which means astronauts have to watch out for two imbalances: too little vitamin D and too much sodium. Even though they’re considerably closer to the sun than we Earthlings, astronauts receive much less vitamin D because of all the heavy shielding on the spacecraft, so their diets must compensate. As for sodium, if you’ve ever looked at the nutritional information on a can of soup or a frozen entrée and the potential salt overdose they offer, it’s easy to understand why NASA has avoided using commercially available products. With health consciousness growing among the public, food producers are starting to look to the space agency for help in decreasing sodium levels. “I have a feeling we’re going to be working together in that,” Perchonok says.

Poppin’ Fresh Space Food

When Congress passed the 1958 National Aeronautics and Space Act, it insisted that NASA “provide for the widest practicable and appropriate dissemination of information concerning its activities and the results thereof” and “seek and encourage, to the maximum extent possible, the fullest commercial use of space.”13 In other words, the space agency was required to enrich American businesses by allowing them to profit from the technologies it invented. The specifics were outlined in the follow-up Technology Utilization Act of 1962. Taken together, the legislation served as President Eisenhower’s not-so-secret weapon to make sure that the United States would never again be Sputnikked.

The amount of technology NASA has transferred to American industry has been, if you’ll pardon the pun, astronomical. Never mind solar power and all the aerospace improvements, such as lighter-weight building materials, more efficient fuels and better sensor systems. There has also been a surfeit of medical gadgetry, including monitors for operating rooms that gauge patient oxygen, carbon dioxide and nitrogen concentrations, invented during the Gemini missions; bioreactors for developing new drugs and antibodies, from the space shuttle program; and micro-invasive arthroscopic surgery, made possible with technology from the Hubble telescope. The shuttle program has also improved roadways by introducing the idea of safety grooving, the cutting of tiny notches into concrete to increase traction; the process was first used on NASA runways. The Mars probe missions developed a new rubberized material five times stronger than steel for landers, which has since been used to add 16,000 kilometres to the tread life of commercial radial tires. On the consumer side, there’s memory foam — used in everything from seats on amusement park rides to mattresses and pillows—Dustbusters, UV coating for sunglasses, frictionless swimsuits and even the Super Soaker squirt gun, invented at the Jet Propulsion Lab in California.14 These examples are only the tip of the iceberg. Heck, Wernher von Braun, the former Nazi SS officer turned head of the early American space program, even made a contribution to consumer life by helping Walt Disney design his theme park.

The agency’s technology transfer to the food industry has also been huge. One of the first fields singled out to benefit from space food research was health care. In the mid-seventies hospitals and nursing homes were suffering from a condition known as “tired food.” Major medical institutions have to serve hundreds or thousands of meals a day, and there were often lapses between when the food was prepared in a central kitchen and when it was actually delivered. By the time the patient got his or her meal, it was often cold, tasted terrible and had lost many of its nutrients. NASA’s solution was the “dish-oven,” a hot plate-like contraption developed for the Apollo moon lander in partnership with Minnesota-based conglomerate 3M. The oven, which looked like an oversized soap dish, warmed food from beneath by zapping it with electricity. It was also highly energy efficient, as it needed to be for space missions, and used 60 percent less power than a regular oven. Moreover, it was small, lightweight and portable and could be set up in a patient’s room, which decentralized food production by allowing meals to be warmed up on the spot.15

In 1991 3M refined the idea into the Food Service System 2, which stacked full meals on trays in carts that were then refrigerated. At mealtime, the carts were removed from their refrigeration units, wheeled to their respective floors and plugged in for heating.16 NASA also piloted a project during the seventies called the Meal System for the Elderly in which it supplied freeze-dried food for homebound, handicapped and temporarily ill seniors. Oregon Freeze Dry, one of the agency’s major suppliers, delivered its Mountain House meals such as spaghetti with meat sauce and “tuna a la Neptune,” which were prepared by adding water, to 3.5 million people. The poor seniors — they turned out to be guinea pigs for what is now one of the most successful brands of camping food.17

It didn’t take long for other major food companies to see the benefits of space technology. In 1972, with help from NASA, Chicago-based meat packer Armour turned a lunar lander strain gauge into the “Tenderometer,” a device that could predict the tenderness of meat. The company developed a ten-pronged fork that, when stuck into a side of meat, could measure the degree to which it resisted penetration. The device helped Armour market a successful premium line of beef known as TesTender.18 Tip Top Poultry, meanwhile, used soundproof panels designed with NASA funding at one of its plants in Georgia, where high noise levels were degrading worker morale and safety. Conventional, plastic sound-absorbing panels weren’t strong enough to stand up to the high-pressure water cleaning required by poultry plants, so the tougher fibre-reinforced polyester film developed for NASA to protect against vapours was a godsend.19

Other food makers were attracted to the actual fuel used to launch rockets into space. Liquid hydrogen, used by NASA because of its light weight and high energy output, turned out to be perfect for making margarine and for keeping cooking oils fresh; it was also handy for pharmaceutical manufacturing and removing sulphur in gasoline production. In 1981 Pennsylvania-based Air Products and Chemicals, riding high off NASA contracts, opened a new plant in Sarnia, Ontario, to cater to this consumer market. “These applications would not exist today had it not been for our government experience,” said the company chairman. “Our work on government contracts gave us the technological know-how for large-scale production of liquid hydrogen, enabling the cost reductions through economies of scale. That paved the way for expanded private-sector use.”20

But NASA’s biggest hit in the food-processing industry was HACCP, or the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point system. In 1959 the agency contracted Pillsbury, the giggling doughboy people, to create foods for the early Mercury and Gemini programs (and thus supply John Glenn with his applesauce).21 Throughout the projects, the company discovered that its own food-testing methods were woefully inadequate compared to NASA’s exacting needs. “By using standard methods of quality control there was absolutely no way we could be assured there wouldn’t be a problem,” a Pillsbury executive said. “This brought into serious question the then prevailing system of quality control in our plants.... If we had to do a great deal of destructive testing to come to a reasonable conclusion that the product was safe to eat, how much were we missing in the way of safety issues by principally testing only the end product and raw materials?”22

Pillsbury decided to completely overhaul its quality-control processes and reorient testing so that problems were detected before they happened, rather than after the fact. The company became the first American food processor to begin testing ingredients, the product, the conditions of processing, handling, storing, packaging, distribution and consumer use of directions to identify any possible problem areas. Pillsbury had its HACCP system in place for space food production by the time the Apollo program began and extended it to consumer plants shortly after the 1969 moon landing. The company then taught a course in HACCP to personnel at the Food and Drug Administration, leading to the publication of the Low Acid Canned Foods Regulations in the mid-seventies. The endorsements kept coming, with the National Academy of Sciences giving HACCP a thumbs-up in 1985, followed by the National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria for Foods and the World Health Organization later in the eighties. In 1991 the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service said HACCP was “the most intensive food inspection system in the world,” while the company bragged that none of the 130 safety-related recalls between 1983 and 1991 were Pillsbury products.23 The system was adopted as law in the United States during the nineties and in 1994, the International HACCP Alliance was formed to spread the standards worldwide. By the turn of the century, most major food growers, harvesters, transporters and processors in the developed world were working off some variation of Pillsbury’s NASA-developed standard.

Judging a Food by Its Cover

NASA’s technological contributions also spread directly to consumer food products. In the eighties, the agency discovered that a micro-algae it was testing as an oxygen source and waste disposal aid was actually a decent nutritional supplement. Scientists at Maryland-based Martek Biosciences found the algae produced docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) and arachidonic acid (ARA), rare fatty acids that play key roles in infant development and adult health. DHA is particularly hard to come by, as it is only found in breast milk. Martek came up with two nutritional supplements, life’sDHA and life’sARA, and marketed them to food companies. The supplements are now used by major food companies, including General Mills, Yoplait, Odwalla and Kellogg, and are found in products in sixty-five countries. An estimated 90 percent of all infant formulas in the United States use them, and about twenty-four million babies worldwide have consumed the algae.24

Space research has also helped speed up pizza and submarine sandwich preparation. In the nineties NASA contracted Dallas-based Enersyst Development Center to help design a compact and energy-efficient oven for the International Space Station. The company came up with a new cooking technique called microwave-assisted air impingement, which blasts food directly with jets of hot air rather than warming the entire oven cavity. The technique cooks food faster—up to four times quicker than a conventional oven—and more consistently, so it retains more of its flavour and texture. Enersyst licensed the technology to food processors and commercial restaurants in the late nineties and by 2002 had more than a hundred thousand customers around the world, including the Domino’s and Pizza Hut chains, where it cut cooking times from twenty-seven minutes to six.25 The company also teamed up with home appliance maker Thermador in 1997 to offer the JetDirect, but this home oven never took off because its high price tag  —  more than $5,000 —  couldn’t compete with the falling cost of microwave ovens. In 2004 Enersyst was acquired by Dallas-based TurboChef Technologies, which supplies Subway, Dunkin’ Donuts and Starbucks with their high-speed ovens.

The consumer product that NASA and Natick scientists are most eager to discuss is one they jointly designed: the flexible “retort” pouch, which is finally starting to take off in grocery stores. The pouch, which is simply heated and cut open (or vice versa), is made from a plastic-aluminum blend and offers several advantages over canned goods. Like a can, it keeps out food’s two biggest enemies, air and moisture, but because it’s much thinner the food inside doesn’t need to be cooked as long, which retains more natural flavours, textures and nutrients. This also means that fewer additives and chemicals need to be added to the food to keep it stable. And since shipping costs on food are calculated according to mass and volume, the pouch’s lighter weight and more compactable form saves money for producers, which they can either pocket as profit or pass on to consumers through lower prices.

The metallized, foil-like material was originally developed by NASA to help bounce signals off communications satellites, but was then repurposed to insulate spacecraft from radiation and extreme temperatures. It’s since been used in tents, rafts, blankets, medical bags and those reflective cardboard things you stick in your windshield in the summer to stop your parked car from turning into a sauna.

Natick found the substance very handy, and after winning FDA approval for it in 1980, used it to create flexible pouches for MREs (Meals, Ready to Eat). NASA followed suit and now both labs use the pouches for most meals. North American food companies tried to sell products in pouches in fits and starts during the eighties and nineties, but none really took off, according to Natick’s Patrick Dunne, because they adopted the same sort of drab packaging used by NASA and the military. The pouches did better in Europe and Asia because food producers there remembered that consumers actually care what packaging looks like —colourful and shiny sells, olive green with block letters does not.

North American producers have now remembered that key tenet, and a flood of retort-pouched foods, from tuna and salmon to soups and rice dishes to fruits and vegetables — even Spam “singles” — has hit grocery stores over the past few years. With the American market for pouches growing at about 15 percent a year, it looks like they may yet replace cans.26 “The graphics have really sold the product,” Dunne says. “They did a nice marketing job.” More importantly, Perchonok says, NASA and Natick made the pouches economical for food companies by performing all of the expensive research and development. “We’ve made that process a lot less expensive and got the packaging materials available at a price they can afford, so they are moving in that direction.”

Nyet, Nyet, No Space Food Yet

What about the Russians? They’ve been launching into space for just as long as the Americans, so surely they must have come up with some pretty impressive food technology too, right? Like irradiated caviar or freeze-dried vodka?

Well, no. The Russian space program has taken a very different tack to NASA. The Soviets/Russians have generally used off-the-shelf canned goods, which has saved them millions on research and development of newfangled space foods. The extra weight incurred by the cans hasn’t been a problem, because Soviet/ Russian rockets have typically been bigger and more powerful than NASA’s. The downside is that those bigger, more powerful rockets have required more fuel to launch, which costs more. On a pure cost-analysis basis, there’s no telling whether Russia has ultimately come out ahead by not spending on food research.

As for the food itself, there have been few complaints from those who have actually had to eat it. Canadian astronaut Dave Williams, who went into orbit aboard Space Shuttle Columbia in 1998 and then up to the International Space Station for twelve days in 2007, was a big fan of canned Russian space foods such as caviar and borscht. “There are certainly downsides to using a can because once you take the food out you’re left with it. Unless you have a trash compactor, the volume of your trash builds up correspondingly,” he says. “But a number of the foods are spicy, which makes them quite palatable. I was impressed with the juices they had. Instead of being a crystal that gets water added to it, these were real fruit juices. It was remarkable to get to have those.”27

Where Russia definitely lost out, though, is in the benefits of repurposing technology. Russian space historians say that during the Soviet era, the nation’s space program was the least commercialized in the world. The Soviet Union didn’t readily share its technology with industry, and industry didn’t exactly beat a path to the space agency. One beaming example of this was the poor state of Soviet communications satellites, or “comsats,” which had considerably shorter lifespans than their American counterparts — as little as two years, compared to the typical seven to ten for an American satellite. “For the USSR, the commercial imperatives were weaker and the competition non-existent: there were few incentives to build longer-lasting comsats,” one historian explains.28

The situation wasn’t helped by dramatic funding cuts after the fall of communism, with the space program losing about 80 percent of its budget between 1989 and 1999, making it one of the worst-funded in the world.29 Russia’s 2006 space budget — estimated at two billion euros — was, for example, a drop in the bucket compared to the 29 billion euros spent by the United States.30 The country has also been late to the game in developing ties between its space program and private industry, only opening its Russian Technology Transfer Center in 2000, forty years after NASA did the same. “Such activities have never been organized in Russia before ... the creation of RTTC will considerably facilitate export of technologies from the Russian Federation by making this process more organized,” the centre’s director said in 2000. “RTTC specialists have studied very thoroughly the U.S. experience and legislation in the field of technology transfer. In fact, RTTC has been modelled after U.S. regional technology-transfer centres, particularly after the Office of Technology Transfer and Commercialization of the Johnson Space Center.”31

Indeed, it took the arrival of Western fast-food companies to begin the process of modernizing Russia’s food supply. McDonald’s, which led the way, found the country’s food system deplorable. “In Moscow, we had explored all sorts of meat plants and dairies and bakeries and had found that they weren’t up to our standards,” said McDonald’s Canada president George Cohon, who spearheaded the company’s move into Russia. “Nothing was easy. In the USSR of the late 1980s, the simplest things became logistical headaches. Could we get our bags from the Soviet Union? Could we get our napkins? Could we get our drinking straws? Even—could we get enough sand and gravel for construction? Could we get enough electric power?”32

McDonald’s executives found that Russia and other parts of Europe were “light years” behind the United States in terms of food production. “The U.S. was twenty-five years ahead of many of our foreign markets in every aspect of food production — growing, production, distribution,” one said.33 (Energy, at least, didn’t turn out to be a problem as McDonald’s managed to get the Red Army to lay power cables for its new $40 million “McComplex” food processing plant.)34

Even after McDonald’s laid down its roots in the early nineties and began overhauling Russia’s food system
— which included investing in farmers’ equipment, irrigation, soil, transportation and distribution networks, not to mention the famous importation of potato seeds from the Netherlands — the country’s agricultural system was still in a shambles. In the mid- nineties, officials estimated that about 70 percent of the nation’s farms were on the verge of collapse. Analysts say change has been slow over the past decade and it’ll be many years before the effects of technology — be it imported by foreign firms or developed internally through projects like the space program — will be felt.

The International Buffet Opens

Other countries are also lagging considerably behind the United States in their space food programs, although that’s hardly their fault given the virtual American-Russian duopoly on manned space missions for most of the past fifty years. Space exploration only became a truly global endeavour in 1998, when work began on the construction of the International Space Station, which sixteen countries agreed to take part in. With long-duration missions now a possibility for much of the rest of the world, space agencies such as South Korea’s are putting effort and resources into developing their own space food. Before long, they too will reap the sort of technology transfer benefits the United States has seen.

Japan, for example, only began researching space food technology in 2001. By 2007 the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) had twenty-eight items, including ramen noodles, green tea and teriyaki mackerel, approved for consumption aboard the ISS. Having Japanese foods aboard the station wasn’t just a point of national pride, it also kept its crew comfortable and happy. “Our Japanese astronauts were concerned about American and Russian foods for the long-duration missions because most of these items contain meat and oils. The taste is too strong for us Japanese,” says Shoichi Tachibana, chief of JAXA’s health management team. “They were hoping we’d make some light-tasting foods. These light-tasting foods are good for the stomach.”35 Japanese scientists are now working on some more traditional national foods, including tofu and fermented beans, in the hopes of making them more shelf-stable and suitable for export, much like space kimchee.

India has perhaps the biggest head start, having launched air force pilot Rakesh Sharma into orbit through a joint Indo-Soviet mission in 1984. The Defence Food Research Laboratory, India’s answer to Natick, used its expertise in developing military foods to supply Sharma with a variety of items, including curries, fruit juices, chapatis and chicken biryani. DFRL then offered its menu to NASA, which chose thirteen items for the Space Shuttle Challenger launch in 1986. Like NASA and Natick, India’s military food lab transferred its technology, including its own version of the retort pouch, to local food producers, who have used it to export Indian products around the world. Western supermarkets today are full of Indian curries and rice dishes in retort pouches under brands such as Ashoka and Tasty Bite. Some of the packages even have labels that read, “Technology developed by Defence Food Research Laboratory, Ministry of Defence, Mysore, India.”

With India now eyeing a manned moon mission, it is quickly ramping up food technology research, which is also becoming a national priority because of the country’s bewildering economic growth. With more and more Indians finding work every day, the country is mirroring what happened in the United States in the fifties, when ordinary people found less and less time to prepare fresh meals. “That necessitates the use of processed foods,” says DFRL director Dr. Amrinder Singh Bawa. “They don’t have much time to spend in the kitchen.”36

China, which in 2003 became only the third country to launch its own manned space mission, is also devoting resources to space food technology. In 2007 the Scientific Research and Training Center for Chinese Astronauts made several items from its menu of sixty space-worthy foods, including chocolates and other desserts, available through grocery stores. Chinese experiments with fruit and vegetable seeds in zero gravity, meanwhile, have also returned some surprising results. When returned to Earth, the cultivated seeds have turned into giant fruits and vegetables with higher than normal vitamin content, a phenomenon that researchers say could solve the world’s food problems. “Conventional agricultural development has taken us as far as we can go and demand for food from a growing population is endless,” Chinese scientists say. “Space seeds offer the opportunity to grow fruit and vegetables bigger and faster.”37

With food processing taking off in both countries, India and China are seeing a rapid influx of Western fast-food restaurants. Chains including McDonald’s and KFC are seeing the same sort of growth in these new markets as they did in North America during the fifties and sixties. In 2004 there were fifty McDonald’s restaurants in India and 600 in China; five years later there were 160 and 1,050, respectively. KFC had only thirty-four restaurants in India by 2009, but it dwarfs McDonald’s in China with 1,900 restaurants, nearly doubling from 1,000 five years earlier.38

Pioneer Life in Space

If the current direction being taken by Natick and NASA is any indication, the future of food may ironically lie in less processing, not more. A technique Natick developed in the nineties using highly pressurized water and microwaves to cook and stabilize foods is now starting to catch on. The process involves sticking retort-pouched foods into a big drum, then adding water until the pressure inside builds to more than eighty thousand pounds per square inch. That kills off the micro-organisms in the food in about five minutes, whereas previous steam methods took over an hour. Again, shorter processing times means the food retains more of its natural taste, texture and nutrients, so fewer additives are needed afterward. Major food processors got their education on the technology through contracts with the military and are now starting to implement it. Texas-based Fresherized Foods was the first to have a hit with the process, using it to create its successful line of Wholly Guacamole dips. Even Spam maker Hormel is using the so-called “TrueTaste” technology in its preservative-free Natural Choice line of meats.

NASA, meanwhile, is now thinking about how to feed astronauts on a Mars mission. Such a trip will require food that has a shelf life of five years, significantly longer than most existing products (with the possible exception of the indestructible Spam). Then there’s the problem of all that weight and waste: NASA’s Perchonok estimates that sending six people on a thousand-day mission will require nearly ten thousand kilograms of food, with more than 10 percent of that coming back as waste. “That may not be the most efficient way of doing things,” she says. One likely solution is to send processing back in time and have crews grow the majority of their food in space. “It would be a gourmet kitchen, but with an 1800s look and feel because you wouldn’t be able to go to the grocery store and get your grated carrots. You’d have to grate them by hand or by food processor.” There you have it: the future of food processing is a cheese grater.

Notes

2. Annual total comes from The New York Times, “Starship Kimchi: A Bold Taste Goes Where It Has Never Gone Before,” Feb. 24, 2008, www. nytimes.com/2008/02/24/world/asia/24kimchi.html. I’ve divided that consumption by the number of households in 2008, about 16.7 million, from The Hankyoreh, “Household debt soars to record high of 660 trillion won,” Sept. 5, 2008, http://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_ edition/e_business/308655.html.

3. The New York Times, “Starship Kimchi.”

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.

6. Allied casualties come from Cooksley, Peter G, Flying Bomb, New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1979, p. 175. Concentration camp numbers are from Global Security’s history of weapons of mass destruction, www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/ops/peenemunde.htm.

7. Nine countries have developed nuclear weapons: the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea. Iran is a possible tenth. Twelve countries have launched rockets into space: all of the nuclear powers except Pakistan and North Korea, but including Iran, plus Canada, Australia, Japan and Ukraine.

8. Glenn, John, John Glenn: A Memoir, New York, Bantam Books, 1999, p. 264.

9. My visit took place on April 1, 2009.

10. I have to admit the beans were better at Goode Company.

11. White, Terry, The SAS Fighting Techniques Handbook, Guilford, Connecticut, Globe Pequot Press, 2007, p. 28.

12. According to Natick’s senior advisor in nutritional biochemistry, Dr. Patrick Dunne, interviewed in March 2009.

13. NASA website, www.nasa.gov/offices/ogc/about/space_act1.html# FUNCTIONS.

14. Examples taken from NASA’s Spinoff, 2008.

15. NASA, “Thought for Food,” Spinoff, 1977, p. 85.

16. NASA, “Food Service System,” Spinoff, 1992, pp. 78-79.

17. I love camping, but I have yet to find decent-tasting camping food.

18. NASA, “Tenderness Tester,” Spinoff, 1977, p. 86.

19. NASA, “Poultry Plant Noise Control,” Spinoff, 1982, pp. 94-95.

20. NASA, “Spinoff from Space Fuel,” Spinoff, 1982, pp. 46-49.

21. Officially known as “Poppin’ Fresh,” the doughboy wasn’t actually conceived until 1965.

22. NASA, “A Dividend in Food Safety,” Spinoff, 1991, pp. 52-53.

23. Ibid., pp. 53-54.

24. NASA, “Space Research Fortifies Nutrition Worldwide,” Spinoff, 2008, pp.106-7.

25. NASA, “Eating on Demand,” Spinoff, 1998, p. 73, and an Enersyst report at http://ift.confex.com/ift/2002/techprogram/paper_10060. htm. Cooking times taken from “Enersyst’s Speed Cooling, Thawing Technology Available for Home Use,” Appliance Design, Aug. 22, 2001, www.appliancedesign.com/Articles/Breaking_News/ 8731be2d0b938010VgnVCM100000f932a8c0____.

26. The National Provisioner, “Retort pouches heating up,” May 1, 2005, www. allbusiness.com/manufacturing/food-manufacturing/460996-1.html.

27. Author’s interview with Dave Williams, March 2009.

28. Harvey, Brian, The Rebirth of the Russian Space Program: 50 Years After Sputnik, New Frontiers, Chichester, UK, Praxis Publishing, 2007, p. 80.

29. Ibid., p. 284.

30. Ibid., p. 283.

31. Space.com, “Russia opens space tech transfer office,” July 6, 2000, www.space.com/businesstechnology/technology/russian_technology_ 000706.html.

32. Cohon, George, with Macfarlane, David, To Russia with Fries, Toronto, McClelland & Stewart Inc., 1997, p. 176.

33. Love, Behind the Golden Arches, p. 439.

34.  Cohon and Macfarlane, To Russia with Fries, p. 178.

35.  Author’s interview with Shoichi Tachibana, April 2009.

36.  Author’s interview with Amrinder Singh Bawa, April 2009.

37. The Daily Telegraph, “Giant space vegetables ‘could feed the world,’” May 12, 2008, www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1949129/Giant-space-vegetables-12, 2008.

38. The Hindu Business LineThe Hindu Business Line, “McDonald’s growth in India hit by poor , “McDonald’s growth in India hit by poor infrastructure,” Aug. 15, 2004, www.thehindubusinessline.com/ infrastructure,” Aug. 15, 2004, www.thehindubusinessline.com/ bline/2004/08/16/stories/2004081600510500.htm. The 2009 bline/2004/08/16/stories/2004081600510500.htm. The 2009 figures were taken from the respective corporate websites.

By Peter Nowak in "Sex, Bombs and Burgers", Allen & Unwin, Australia, 2010, excerpts chapter 5. Adapted and ilustrated to be post by Leopoldo Costa. 

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