Food in the Air and Space

by Richard Foss

  It is interesting to consider the ways in which airline meals have gone through a cycle: no food at all on the earliest flights, luxurious repasts in the late 1930s through mid-1950s for the elite that could afford to fly, democratized meals in the 1960s and early 1970s, a return to no food in the 1990s, and now abundance in one cabin while peanuts, pretzels, or nothing is served in the other. It is tempting to think that some future change in society might bring a return to abundance, if not luxury, for all passengers aboard aircraft, but it is hard to see how that might happen.

  Rather than end this book on that depressing note, I’ll turn to examining a related field in which even greater challenges were overcome: the journeys of humans into space.

  chapter 19

  Tubes and Cubes

  Food in Space (1961–1965)

  Unlike the first meal in flight, it’s very easy to know precisely when the first meal was eaten in space. Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s food on April 12, 1961, was simple—beef and liver paste, followed by liquefied chocolate, both squeezed from metal tubes. The occasion might have merited something more festive, perhaps even popping a few Champagne corks as was done by the balloonists of a previous era, but this meal was practical rather than celebratory. It was a cautious start, using well-tested technologies in an environment that was unlike any other humans had ever experienced.

  The challenges of providing food for humans traveling in space were fundamentally different from those for providing meals in flight, and accomplished by different entities. Though the first meals eaten in the air were aboard military transports in World War I, all the major advances in food in flight were made by civilian companies whose primary concern was the preferences of passengers. Those consumers were picky and could take another airline if they didn’t enjoy the experience, which obviously wasn’t the case for the race to travel beyond the atmosphere. Though the American space program always made use of private contractors, and the former Soviet program has been partially privatized, both began as military programs and remained that way for a long time.

  The first thing the scientists at both programs had to figure out was whether it was even possible to eat and drink in space at all. There were concerns that food might be hard to swallow while in weightless conditions, and one of the tasks for John Glenn during his first orbit of Earth in 1962 was to drink water and see if he had trouble swallowing.1 If America had finally gotten a man into space only to have him drown on a swallow of water, the reaction of the American public could only be guessed at, but Glenn disproved those who thought that a physiology evolved for gravity might not work without it. There was legitimate concern about this even though the Soviet cosmonaut German Titov had eaten twice during his twenty-five-hour mission the year before, because Titov had vomited it all back up after a bout of space sickness.

  Glenn had no such problem. After that swallow of water, he ate applesauce that had been packaged in a tube similar to those used for toothpaste, then followed it with a pureed beef and vegetable mixture. (He had a tube of spaghetti available too, but apparently chose not to open it.)2 It was not a gourmet delight, more like eating baby food sucked through a tube, but it was nutritious and convenient.

  The tubes of food were not new inventions—they had originally been developed by the American Can Company in the late 1940s for fighter pilots who couldn’t remove their gloves or helmets.3 Both the Soviets and the Americans used this system for their early space flights, principally because of concerns that any solid food might produce crumbs that could float around the capsule, clog air vents, or gum up delicate instruments. The tubes were a well-tested technology, but they had several disadvantages, starting with the fact that the astronauts who used them all disliked both the flavor and the experience of squeezing food into their mouths.

  Surprisingly, given the relative affluence of the two countries, the Soviets were much more concerned with giving their intrepid explorers a varied diet. They quickly diversified the number of items available in tubes to over thirty and provided bite-size bread rolls so their cosmonauts could enjoy a familiar pleasure without scattering crumbs.4 (One might speculate that the heavy and moist dark bread favored by Russians might have been a better starting point for space food than the lighter white bread that was favored by Americans, since the lighter white bread would tend to crumble more easily.) Other earth-like foods enjoyed by the Vostok cosmonauts in 1961 were pieces of salami and fruit jelly. The Russians also gave their spacemen berry juices and beet juice, both beverages with a tangy, fruity bite that would be refreshing even under very dry conditions. These were already favorite nonalcoholic beverages of many Russians and helped replicate the taste of home even in space.

  The Americans were obsessed with developing food as modern and groundbreaking as the program itself and deployed an arsenal of techniques to transform food so that it would be suitable for consumption in weightless conditions. They had a perfect example of what not to do during the flight that followed John Glenn’s in 1962, when astronaut Scott Carpenter tried eating a cookie. As the Los Angeles Times reported it, “ . . . the crumbs stayed behind to float in front of his face like so many large particles of dust.”5

  The next voyage, by astronaut Gordon Cooper, set the standard for the next several US space flights. Cooper’s meal was powdered roast beef rehydrated into mush in a plastic bag of cold water, with water as the only beverage. After the sleep period in the middle of his thirty-four-hour flight he also had a dextroamphetamine pill, which would have both kept him alert and acted as an appetite suppressant, as if the prospect of eating more beef mush wasn’t enough of one.6

  That was the last American flight for three years, as the United States transitioned from the Mercury program to the Gemini flights, and during that time scientists experimented with ideas about how to create palatable meals in space. Their ideas ranged from conservative to zany; among the weirder ones was a concept that involved making parts of the capsule itself edible. According to Newsweek magazine, Sidney A. Schwartz, a psychologist who worked for Grumman Aircraft,

  worked out a recipe on paper and shopped in a Bethpage, N.Y. supermart for $5 worth of groceries—flour, corn starch, powdered milk, banana flakes, and hominy grits. After mixing the ingredients he baked them in a hydraulic press at 400 degrees Fahrenheit under 3,000-pound pressure. The result: a grainy brown slab as tough as tempered Masonite that could be cut on a bandsaw without splintering or drilled for bolts and screws. Aboard a spaceship, he says, it could be used as lightweight, inexpensive (10 cents a pound) cabinets, shelves, and panels. But how does it taste? Too hard to be eaten as is, the food has to be pulverized with a tiny grinder. After it is soaked for a few hours in water, says Schwartz, “it tastes like breakfast cereal topped with bananas. I rather like it.”7

  The idea of astronauts sawing pieces out of their spacecraft in order to pulverize, soak, and eat them was apparently not appealing to NASA, because there is no evidence that this was ever tried. Another idea that was conceived at this time would be revisited much later: growing food from leftovers. As a Washington Post article from 1963 reported it,

  A suburban research firm is working on tissue-culture techniques which it hopes might enable space travelers to grow one meal from the scraps of a preceding one, and so on and on. The ultimate result of the experiments conceivably could be production of food such as tomatoes without leaves, stems or roots and steaks of controlled weight, shape and tenderness without growing an animal. Melpar, Inc., an aerospace firm in Falls Church, has been carrying on company-sponsored research for two years. The firm’s president, Paul Ritt, said some ‘very modest results’ have been obtained in Melpar laboratories, but estimated it might be three or four years before the experiments succeed on a significant scale. The process requires a solution of nutrients containing the more than 90 substances that nature provides to growing organisms. A sample of the tissue—a piece of steak for example—is placed in this cultu
re. Under strict conditions of light, temperature and sterility control, the tissue grows. The tissue culture first became known publicly in the late 1940s, when a Nobel Prize was awarded to a team growing monkey tissue culture for polio vaccine applications. Melpar scientists hope the equipment they are developing will make large scale production possible. They said the automatic culture of tissue could be applied to. . . . Space feeding—a never-ending compact supply of vegetables, fruit and meat. The space traveler would leave a small portion of his meal in the culture equipment so that it could grow back.8

  As alluring as these technologies might be, NASA decided to stay with techniques they knew worked: dehydrating, freeze-drying, pureeing, and making food into gels. Dehydration and pureeing are ancient technologies that are practiced almost everywhere in the world, but freeze-drying is much more complex. As the European Union’s Food Information Council defines it, this requires a special tool—the freeze-dryer.9

  This machine consists of a large chamber for freezing and a vacuum pump for removing moisture. The treatment consists of four steps: 1) Freezing to provide conditions for low temperature drying, 2) Vacuum application to allow frozen water/solvent in the product to vaporize without passing through the liquid phase, i.e. sublimation, 3) Heat application to accelerate sublimation, and 4) Condensation to remove the vaporized solvent from the vacuum chamber by converting it back to a solid.

  Surprisingly, freeze-drying is not a new technology; the Incas came up with a slow but effective way of freeze-drying potatoes in the cold and windy Andean highlands. It took thirty days rather than the few hours that can be achieved with a freeze-dryer, but produced the same effect. Though freeze-dried foods require more space for storage because they retain more of their original form, they are lighter than dehydrated foods and tend to bear a closer resemblance to their fresh state when rehydrated. They also tend to rehydrate more quickly and completely because the ice crystals that have sublimated out leave tiny pores, which makes meals easier and faster to prepare.

  Making the food light is important because the weight of provisions is even more important than aboard aircraft, and dehydrated foods weigh very little. Most foods, even those we think of as not terribly moist, are between 50 and 90 percent water, so removing that weight makes them very light. Fully dehydrated food also doesn’t spoil, because bacteria need moisture to thrive. It was the right solution for the problem, but at great cost in palatability, because when foods rehydrate, their texture tends to be mushy and unpleasant. This problem was increased by the fact that the early space capsules had no way of heating water, so everything was at the ambient temperature in the spacecraft.

  Another technology that was tried was to take moist foods, cut them into cubes, and coat them with a glue-like edible protein so that there would be few crumbs. This was described in a New York Times article that appeared in 1965.10

  Some of the foods, such as bacon-and-egg bites, red cubes, or cheese cubes, do not have to be reconstituted. But these have to be prevented from making crumbs that can float around the cockpit. The cubes are all bite-sized, so the astronaut can chew with his mouth closed. As a further safeguard against crumbs, which were a problem in some Project Mercury flights, all the cubes are coated with a starch called Amylomaize, which holds in the crumbs. The individual foods are packed in a four-ply plastic that performs a variety of functions. The innermost layer is a good-grade polyethylene that is compatible with food. The second layer is a nylon film to give the package burst and kneading strength. The third layer is a fluorocarbon film called Aclar, which prevents the passage of oxygen and water. And the outside layer is another polyethylene that gives heat-sealability to the envelope.

  The cubes may have been nutritious, but as Jane Levi pointed out in an excellent article about the aesthetics of food in space,11

  For the US Mercury missions in the early-1960s, bite-sized compressed foods were developed in flavours ranging from bacon, cheese and crackers, and toast, to peanut butter and fruitcake. Contrary to the Flavour Principle, which confirms that people not only respond to taste but also seek distinctions between the texture, appearance and sensations produced by different foods, they came in blocks of uniform size which rehydrated in the mouth as they were chewed. In contemporary photographs they are almost indistinguishable from one another: besides a slight variation in colour, the only real indication that they are, in fact, food with a choice of flavours comes from the label.

  Groundside scientists kept tinkering with the cubes, but tubes remained the default and were already available in a variety of flavors—when Glenn traveled in 1962, he had a choice of “beef-vegetables, chicken-noodle, veal, applesauce, peaches, and a fruit concentrate.” More flavors were added during the Gemini program, but the appeal was just as limited, partly because the way they were eaten totally bypasses the organs that transmit the sense of smell. Just as was the case in high-altitude aircraft with a dry atmosphere, food we can’t smell may be nutritious but is unlikely to be appetizing. The problem was further complicated by the fact that anyone in weightless conditions tends to have fluids collect in their head, giving them a constant stuffy nose. If you imagine having a head cold and eating leftovers straight from the refrigerator, you get a sense of the experience.

  The scientists and doctors who tried to figure out how human physiology would react to weightlessness had an immeasurably harder task than the ones who formulated food for high-altitude airline flights. A Los Angeles Times article in 1964 summarized the constraints as they were then understood:

  Rich desserts, spiced foods and many other “high residue” foods will be taboo because of the problems of getting rid of waste materials and the need to conserve storage space by use of the least bulky objects possible. Carbonated beverages and other gas producing foods and drinks will be left on earth. Gasses expand in the stomach at low pressure (and) high altitude, causing stomach pains. Instead, the astronaut’s diet will be low residue combination of 17% protein, 51% carbohydrate and 32% fat.

  The avoidance of spicy food must have contributed to the unpleasantness of meals, since things needed to be more highly seasoned in space to appeal to the traveler’s dulled senses. There had been some advances in packaging, starting with ditching the metal toothpaste-type tubes. As the same article explained,

  Sausage patties, grapefruit juice and apricot pudding are some of the things future spacemen will eat. The form of space foods will be anything but traditional, however. Packaging now is done in polyethylene bags which contain dehydrated or freeze-dried products. These can be stored at room temperature for months without damage and a package the size of a small envelope provides a meal. Dehydrated foods will be reconstituted with water before being eaten . . .

  The technical problems of preparing and serving food in an atmosphere where all objects float is compounded by the normal earthly need for a balanced diet with a certain amount of bulk. . . . Food in pill form was suggested, but soon rejected because of the need for bulk and the psychological need to eat. Experiments with food in stress situations show that eating alleviates stress and that not being able to eat or eating unfamiliar foods compounds stress.

  A squeeze tube apparatus inserted in the astronaut’s mouth was used on early flights but discarded because of its bulkiness. The tubes couldn’t be thrown out because they would travel right along with the ship, maintaining the same rate of speed. And garbage won’t be rocketed back to earth because of the great expense. When the less bulky polyethylene bags were developed, problems of storing them became evident. Now they are made with a Velcro tab on the side which will attach to a matching piece of Velcro on the walls of the space ship. . . . To eat, astronauts will sit strapped in chairs side by side with a water source between them. After inserting the nozzle in one end of a dehydrated food package, they’ll wait for the food to be reconstituted and then eat from the other end of the bag. Containers with only one opening were used on previous flights but astrona
uts had problems keeping the water in the bag after removing the nozzle.

  . . . On the two-week Gemini flight astronauts will have a 2,500 calorie a day diet in four meals. Although the crew hasn’t yet been chosen, astronauts know approximately what the crew will eat. The proposed menu for days 1, 5, 9, and 13 is:

  Meal A: Sugar frosted flakes, sausage patties, toast squares and orange-grapefruit juice

  Meal B: Tuna salad, cheese sandwiches, apricot pudding and grape juice

  Meal C: Beef pot roast, carrots in cream sauce, toasted bread cubes, pineapple cubes and tea

  Meal D: Potato soup, chicken bits, toast squares, applesauce, brownies and grapefruit juice.

  This Gemini menu is only the beginning. The field of space feeding is unlimited. When interplanetary travel is as pedestrian as freeway traffic, meals in space may be as common—and basic—as tonight’s family dinner.12

  A typical family dinner it might not be, but as these menus show, the Gemini astronauts did have foods with varied textures. In the case of the very first Gemini mission, Gemini 3, they had more variety than planned by Mission Control. A number of experimental foods had been packed for evaluation—the first solid food provided by the American program, including individually wrapped hot dogs and chicken legs, with brownies for dessert. This menu was augmented by astronaut John Young, who sneaked a corned beef sandwich aboard in a pocket of his spacesuit. Young, a notorious practical joker, offered the sandwich to fellow astronaut Gus Grissom in midflight, and when Grissom took a bite he inadvertently proved the wisdom of the groundside engineers. Crumbs flew everywhere, and the sandwich was quickly stowed in the spacesuit pocket as the two astronauts tried to deal with the mess. The dialogue between the two, as recorded by NASA, is as follows: