by Kate Greene
And now, here I was, dropped inside a project that married my interest and quite possibly genetically bestowed talent for space exploration with my historic ambivalence to food. The six of us wandered around the habitat not knowing what exactly to do because there was so much to do—food inventory, setting up a lab and computers and all other equipment for experiments, figuring out our schedule for meals, chores, exercise, work, free time, correspondences, filling out surveys. The actual science. Eventually, we made our beds, said our good nights, and tried to sleep.
* * *
Food is never just food. Consider the Ironman triathlete. She’s done the calculations and knows she’ll burn 10,000 calories traversing the 140.6 miles over some twelve to fourteen hours, and she needs to eat on schedule so that her body can continue the course she set for it at the beginning of the race or, more accurately, the year before when she signed up for the race, paid the fee, and started in earnest to train. She calls her food “fuel,” and it’s made of calories and molecules that look like rings and sticks that rearrange themselves in the gut and the bloodstream to spell performance and success.
When I was in my early twenties, I visited a friend who’d moved to Brooklyn right after college. For breakfast one morning, my friend and her roommate, a young woman who worked in the fashion industry, decided we should go to a diner, an authentic, adorable diner nearby that had been around forever. As we looked over our menus, the roommate asked what kind of cheese we had eaten on our grilled cheese sandwiches as kids. Without hesitation or shame, I said Velveeta. It was perhaps one of the most wrong things I could have said in front of my friend who, little did I know, was working to shed indicators that she might have grown up anything less than middle class. My friend instantly covered her mouth in horror and half laughed in disbelief. There was no coming back from my admission. The conversation was over within seconds, yet I’m still struck by how oblivious I was to the true meaning of Velveeta, how quickly I learned my place, and how often I retrieve this memory.
After months ensnared in ice, it finally became clear to Ernest Shackleton, British polar explorer, that his Endurance could not be saved. He ordered the crew to abandon ship and set up tent camps on the floes. Unfortunately, they did not have their main food stores, which were trapped below deck and inaccessible due to damage the ship had sustained. Frank Worsley, captain of the Endurance, wrote in his diary that despite the move to tents, the crew was in relatively good spirits, though their attitude toward food had significantly changed. “It is scandalous—all we seem to live for and think of now is food. I have never in my life taken half such a keen interest in food as I do now—and we are all alike … We are ready to eat anything, especially cooked blubber which none of us would tackle before.” Eventually, over the course of a week, the crew was able to break through the outside of the ship and retrieve 4.5 tons of food and supplies, an estimated three months of full rations. As time wore on—no one knew how long they’d be adrift on the ice—scarcity conditions revealed fundamental dispositions in the crew. The camp was divided into those who devoured their rations quickly and completely and those who hoarded. The ship’s motor expert, Thomas Hans Orde-Lees, had an abject fear of starvation and was the most prominent hoarder, rarely eating an entire ration for any meal. He’d squirrel away a piece of cheese in his clothes, only to rescue it days or even weeks later during leaner times. Food also was used as leverage—to trade out of doing a tedious task like hauling in ice for water or stoking the fire of penguin skins that burned all day. And then there was the sugar pool: each participant gave up one of his three lumps of sugar each day so that on the sixth or seventh day, he might enjoy many returns.
When the celebrated food writer M. F. K. Fisher was asked why she wrote about food rather than about power and security or love, the way other writers do, her short answer was, “like most humans, I am hungry.”
My father and I weren’t close when I was young. In my early teens, I lamented this fact to my mother, who suggested we make a regular date. Though he had studied Latin and French at Boston College and was trained as a teacher, his job during my formative years was newspaper carrier for The Kansas City Star. He owned his own route and bought papers from the Star, delivering them with the help of two workers he’d hired to customers in Overland Park, Kansas. Then he’d bill those customers for their subscriptions. It seemed like he was either always billing or sleeping, but our waking schedules overlapped in the early mornings when he came home and before I went to school. We agreed on donuts, then he’d drop me off. I remember sitting on the hard plastic seat at Winchell’s Donut House, eating a chocolate-covered long john and drinking milk from the carton, as the strength of the early-morning sun through the windows waned in the first half of the school year and gained in the spring. This is how my father and I began to talk.
M. F. K. Fisher’s long response to the question of food writing: “It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it … and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied … and it is all one.”
In San Francisco, there’s a Chinese restaurant called Eric’s near the apartment where my wife Jill and I lived for more than a decade. It was our take-out place, it’s where we’d bring out-of-town guests, and it’s where we’d go when neither of us wanted to cook or the kitchen was still a wreck from previous meals. An order of crab Rangoon, an order of mango chicken, and an order of Eric’s spicy eggplant that was not in fact spicy and included shrimp and chicken in a brown sauce, the dish that finally convinced me to appreciate that breed of nightshade. Rice. Fortune cookies. Water and hot tea. Jill and I would talk about our work, what we were reading, what we were thinking about, any of it, all of it. Once, either she or I mentioned our frequency at Eric’s to a neighbor who told us about another restaurant a couple blocks over with an identical menu and similar décor. It’s called Alice’s, she said. Alice and Eric used to be married, the story goes, but they split up. People are usually loyal to one or the other. Jill and I were intrigued. Our next Chinese food outing was to Alice’s, about three minutes farther from our apartment and up a slight hill. Walking in, I felt all mixed up. Both restaurants are on a corner, but Alice’s faces south and west, while Eric’s faces north and east. The space and table layout were nearly identical, but the wall art and the flowers seemed softer somehow. More pink and purple? More irises? Alice’s menu also offered our usual dishes (Alice’s spicy eggplant, etc.). We tried them. They were similar and good, but ever-so-slightly not the same. We very much wanted to support Alice’s, a woman-owned business, and went a few more times, but it was harder than either of us thought to change our habit, to pick up and move to a different place. We ultimately ended up back at Eric’s. It’s a restaurant special in my spatiotemporal geography, like a you-are-here arrow on a map. It will never not be our place, I think, the way any frequented spot with another person on this planet somehow becomes weightier, holding something that’s both of yours forever.
* * *
On all of Mars, the place heaviest with memory for me is the dining room table. It’s where we ate nearly all of our meals, using nondescript flatware, plain white plates, and bowls on orange plastic place mats, where we drank from our mugs of tea or coffee, where we set up and put away the every-meal line of condiments: mayonnaise, ketchup, soy sauce, mustard, and, absolutely, Tabasco. Each meal included a “hunger and satiety” survey, which we dutifully filled out before and after. To the right of my plate always a notepad and pen.
As a group we had decided before the mission that we’d gather for three daily meals together. As individuals, we were habitual creatures and perhaps somewhat territorial, so we sat in the same seats every day. I think about my seat at the table now, what it meant for me, a
nd what our seats meant for all of us. On the United States’ first and only independent space station, Skylab, which orbited the Earth between 1973 and 1979, designers gave the dining table special consideration. They wanted to avoid reinforcing hierarchies. It was the ’70s after all, so the table, a small one built for a maximum crew of three, was triangular with equal spacing between seats so no one would automatically, inadvertently or otherwise, preside.
Such was not the case on our mission. At one end of our rectangular table was Angelo Vermeulen, a Belgian artist in his early forties who also held a Ph.D. in biology. Angelo was a Senior TED Fellow recognized for his community art in collaboration with hacker collectives and maker spaces around the world, building sculptures that melded social, biological, and technical elements. He was also our crew commander, leading meetings and acting as the main point of contact between us, the media, and, in some cases, mission support.
To Angelo’s right along the long edge of the table, Yajaira Sierra-Sastre, midthirties, chief scientist with a Ph.D. in nanotechnology and material science. She lived in Ithaca, New York, and had grown up in Puerto Rico, where she was becoming something of a celebrity, having done television interviews about her selection as a HI-SEAS crewmember and space education outreach. She managed HI-SEAS’s main experiments, which included, among others, testing our noses for NASA’s record of how well we could breathe and identify odors over time. She also conducted her own studies of the bacteria in our habitat: bathroom, kitchen, food leftovers, our socks, our sheets, our feet, all of it swabbed and cultured.
Next to Yajaira, Oleg Abramov, a planetary scientist with the United States Geological Survey, in his early thirties, who studied the Late Heavy Bombardment—the early days of the solar system, when asteroids pummeled the inner rocky planets like the gnarliest game of dodgeball. Oleg, who immigrated to the U.S. from Russia when he was eleven, was the chief geologist and IT specialist who set up and maintained our internet, radios, and computers. Hobbies included backpacking and flying planes, and he was training to be a flight instructor. As such, he was well versed in wilderness first response, which made him a solid choice as our crew’s medical officer.
To Oleg’s right, opposite Angelo at the other end of the table, was Simon Engler, midthirties, from Calgary, a former combat engineer in the Canadian Army who served in Afghanistan. A driver in a large escort moving VIPs through the Kandahar Province along some of the most dangerous roads in the world, Simon spent his free time while deployed building bomb-sniffing robots and high-altitude balloon drones. On our mission, he was the chief engineer, managing the generator, solar panels, water and waste systems, and 3-D printer, which printed, among other objects, a replacement part for the dishwasher and a hair clip for my bangs. He also conducted a study on robot pets as potential companions for the crew.
To Simon’s right was Sian Proctor, a geology professor at South Mountain Community College in Phoenix, Arizona. Sian, in her early forties, was our chief outreach officer, photographer, and producer of a video series during the mission called Meals for Mars, in which she prepared recipes submitted by the public for a contest where we, the crew, were the judges. She was also a veteran of the reality survival show called The Colony and, in 2009, she made it to the final round of NASA’s astronaut selection process, just barely missing the cut but with no hard feelings.
I sat to Sian’s right and Angelo’s left and with my back to the wall. It was a good spot for me for a couple of reasons. One, I’m rarely comfortable with my back to open spaces, least of which the tall and wide expanse of a geodesic dome. Two, I liked my proximity to Angelo. In addition to running a sleep study and blogging about the mission, I was second-in-command, which was a kind of support role for the commander, though I was still trying to figure out exactly what that meant.
* * *
The table was where we ate, and where we had our daily morning meetings, after which Simon would push off dramatically, rolling his chair with Fred Flintstone feet back to his computer. It was where we learned that Sian was highly skilled at making soups or cooking anything, actually, and where Oleg shared his cinematic dreams. Where Angelo, after each meal, happily performed the minor chore of wiping it down with a sponge, no matter who was on dish duty. Where Yajaira’s birthday was celebrated on a day when the food experiment allowed for “creative” meals, so we ate a layered Mexican casserole called “enchilasagna,” sides of black beans, sweet corn, pita chips, pico de gallo, and a made-from-scratch chocolate cake. It was where, a few days later, we celebrated my birthday on a “non-cooking” day, which meant a just-add-water-and-heat can of macaroni and cheese, leftover rehydrated vegetables, an instant blueberry cheesecake, and Jell-O chocolate mousse decorated with freeze-dried blueberries, cherries, and dehydrated mango, which wasn’t terrible, but Yajaira seemed to feel a little bit bad about the contrast.
The table was where, after dinner one night, Oleg asked Sian and me—we were the most familiar with the food inventory—if there was enough Nutella for him to have a spoonful for dessert, but where Angelo didn’t hear Oleg’s question or our response that there was plenty of Nutella and so loudly objected—Nutella was shared food, after all—just as the glob of hazelnut spread headed toward Oleg’s mouth, creating one of the most emotionally charged moments in the mission up to that point. It was where Sian and I recapped Oleg’s asking and our response, where Angelo understood his error and apologized, and where Oleg then ate the Nutella, the most bitter Nutella in the solar system, twisted the lid back on the jar, and excused himself, thus ending the conflict that inspired many of us in our mission exit interviews to mention as significant, a conflict that was eventually reported in an article in The New Yorker as “the Nutella Incident.”
It’s where Simon and Oleg played chess; where Sian made a chore chart; where Yajaira and I brainstormed an experiment for mapping the microbiomes of the habitat; where Angelo, Yajaira, and I would linger after meals to talk about our families and childhoods. Where we would sit with a walkie-talkie, and act as Capcom—roger that; over—for others when they put on the mock space suits and went outside for rock collecting or photography or mapping caves.
And it’s where I discovered one of my favorite Martian rituals: the simple pleasure of the French omelet. Let me tell you about it.
If a creative cooking day fell on a Sunday, our one day off from the regular schedule and the only day when we didn’t eat communally until dinner, I would dip into the can of surprisingly high-quality egg powder to make a modest omelet like the kind Julia Child demonstrated on The French Chef, season 9, episode 18: thin and quickly cooked, rolled out of the pan onto a plate, seasoned with salt and pepper, some rehydrated shredded cheddar, and parsley flakes. I’d eat it with Finn Crisp crackers spread with reconstituted powdered butter and blackberry jam, sipping Earl Grey from a mug. It was rare for anyone to join me on these mornings, a solitary pleasure.
* * *
It’s unlikely that there will be French omelets, Julia Child–style, on Mars anytime soon, that is, even assuming astronauts on Mars anytime soon. After the mission, I had a conversation with Grace Douglas, NASA’s lead scientist for advanced food study. While the concept of cooking on Mars is a good one, she said, practically speaking, early Mars expeditions will still most likely rely almost entirely on pouch food. Deep-space explorers might also be eating meal-replacement bars—a food item in development by Douglas’s team to supply adequate calories and nutrients for at least one meal a day, saving significant payload space and weight. Another type of food system that might ride on the first Mars missions could be a garden. Astronauts on the ISS have successfully grown lettuce, swiss chard, radishes, chinese cabbage, and peas. And while you can’t always count on gardens grown in low gravity, or even on Earth for that matter, Douglas said that astronauts seem to really enjoy eating a fresh, crunchy vegetable every once in a while. It’s something NASA takes seriously when considering the psychological effects of food in space.
On ou
r mission, we had sprouts at a few meals. As a general rule, fresh ingredients weren’t allowed since they would confound the main food study, but an exception was made for a short period of time. When the sprouts were ready, I did eat one, but just one because they tend to harbor bacteria and I wanted to avoid an upset stomach. Some of the prepackaged soups already disagreed with me, and I didn’t want more bad gut. It was nice to smell them, though. A real change of pace. They were sharp and earthy in contrast to the dull and blunted aromas of the rehydrated vegetables we were used to.
I don’t recall any particularly severe food cravings during the mission. But I couldn’t avoid the effect that the occasional unexpected odor had on me. For one of the nose-related studies, we would sit in front of a computer with a tray of small, covered plastic cups, opaque so you couldn’t see what was inside. There were holes in the lids, and when you squeezed the cups, odiferous volatile compounds would puff out. We were to identify the food or nonfood as best we could—it might be soy sauce, eggs, lemon juice, cardboard, or something else—many were often surprisingly hard to name without visual cues—and rate how strong the aroma was and how much we wanted to eat whatever was inside that cup. This was a routine test, conducted every few weeks throughout the mission. In a short time, I thought I knew all the odors the test had to offer. But in early June, only a month and a half in, sitting at the computer in the science lab sniffing cups, I was overcome. Test 9, sample 15: pineapple. Unmistakably fresh pineapple. Something inside me rearranged itself, and a tear slid down my cheek.
In an instant I was back at our pre-mission cookouts in the days before we entered the dome—barbecues with friends, members of the local and scientific community, people who had helped make Mars happen. Grilled pineapple kebobs. Pineapple rings. All the beer, ham sandwiches, burgers, seared ahi, green salads, pies, cakes, cookies. Meals al fresco where I was getting to know everyone and feeling the feelings of anticipation, of jumping into something new and exciting and uncertain. My last phone calls with Jill and my parents before the Mars comms moratorium. I longed for those meals and that time. How was such longing possible? How could food eaten only a month and half prior provoke such nostalgia? What were any of us even doing here? Why Mars? Why weren’t we back on Earth with everyone else?
