Chapter 1: What is astrobromatology and why is it important?
Oh, hey, it's the lady with her overcoat sticking out of the car door. Allie Ward, this is Ologies. I hope you have an appetite for airplane food like no other. Astrobermatology. And it's delicious. Is it?
Let's talk.
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Chapter 2: How does Maggie Coblentz's background influence her work in space food?
Onto astrobromatology. Astro means celestial body or star in ancient Greek and broma in Greek means food. So of course, space food. This ologist is an artist and designer turned scientist who got their master's in industrial design from RISD and They have researched space food at MIT. They worked in the science division at the Nat Geo Society.
They've sent miso to ferment on the International Space Station. They've studied solar ovens in Norway, looked at bread making in space, and attended the UN's meeting of the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space. They also founded an initiative called Fieldscape that connects artists and scientists to work creatively and collaboratively, which is great.
We'll talk about that intersection as well as powdered meats, orange breakfast beverages, Martian gardening, espresso in zero G, how eating without gravity is like having COVID.
canned stews, stinky roommates, contraband, corned beef, Velcro fatigue, wearing a space helmet on the roller coaster of a parabolic flight, and the future of food with artist, researcher, space food expert, and thus astro-bromatologist Maggie Koblenz. Maggie Koblenz, she, her. I talk to so many people, Maggie. I ask them about their jobs and you have one of the weirdest.
It's so cool.
It's so like space food. Like who does that? And the answer is Maggie. That's nuts. Does it come up at dinner parties? Does it come up at like, let me introduce you to Maggie. She wears a helmet on a vomit comet. to smell sizzling mirepoix. Does that come up?
It does. I have a lot of names from friends, Space Maggie. I have a friend who calls me Astro Gastronomer, Space Witch.
We have a friend who works at NASA who works in spectroscopy. We call her the Mistress of Space Rainbows. Oh, I love that.
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Chapter 3: What are the challenges of preparing food in zero gravity?
And I think that just means you're very well loved. I feel like the question you must get the most is like, how can I do this? Does that come up a lot?
Yeah. Or I think it's more just this maybe bewilderment. How did you come to do what you do? Yeah. Yeah, why do you do what you do? I'm not sure how many people are aspiring space food experts, but there's always a lot of questions.
When The Martian came out, did you feel like, that's it, I'm going to talk about potatoes to acquaintances for the rest of my life?
It's been 48 souls since I planted the potatoes, so now it's time to reap and resew. They grew even better than I expected. I now have 400 healthy potato plants.
I thought that was so cool. I was just so excited that The Martian was actually interviewing space food experts and bringing research into their process. So it felt like, okay, there's a lot of directions.
One could take this. Okay, quick aside. Andy Weir's 2011 book, The Martian, was made into a movie in 2015. And in it, Matt Damon tried to grow potatoes on Mars. Afterward, NASA consulted with the International Potato Center to see if this could be done because it would be helpful to have potatoes on Mars.
So they tried with this Mars-esque soil from Peru, but Mars dirt is toxic to human and plant life. So five years later in 2021, this astrophysics professor figured out that certain bacteria might gobble up the toxic compounds in Mars soil.
And as of a 2024 article titled, Detoxifying Mars, the Biocatalytic Elimination of Omnipresent Perchlorates, NASA announced that it'll try this method for cleaning the soil and the mostly subterranean ice on Mars. So perhaps... space taters might one day be on the menu when we bail on this planet. So science, it imitates art. Now, you also, you have a background in art and design too.
How did this all kind of come about? It's a really wide general question and I'm sorry, but I literally don't know even where to begin because it's so cool.
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Chapter 4: How do astronauts manage food cravings and preferences in space?
Sometimes I also don't know where to begin, but it's true. For me, it fits, but it also feels like a little bit of a jump. I think... Space is changing so much, the field of space. So it's not just scientists, engineers, technologists, but there's a lot of different disciplines who are contributing.
My goal in starting this research endeavor was not actually to get a job, although that's where I landed with space food. I was approaching it very much with the designers or industrial designers perspective. lens and looking at how do people live in space. I thought that was such a weird question and really stretched my imagination.
So investigating the design of the International Space Station and how it's built, what's inside, what kind of furniture do they have, what are the spacesuits like, what is the food like, how does this inform the way that they can conduct their work, how they bring culture up there, the systems in place, who's allowed to go, who's not allowed to go because of these different
designed objects in zero gravity and how everything flips on its head once you get to space. So as a designer and artist, someone who loves to make things, this entire process changes in zero G. So with food, it's fluid dynamics. Do you need to be strapped to the wall while you eat or while you conduct your work? This was my entry point as a designer.
Do they have models on the ground of the space station for you to kind of conceptualize? Or do you have to go based on renderings and CAD and photos?
For me, I was going off of photos when I started this investigation. So I was looking at things online and interviewing people and a lot of anecdotal insights from astronauts just to describe in their own words. what this space looked like. And then testing came later when I joined a new research lab and started to have access to things like zero G flights. There must be so much Velcro, right?
There's a lot of Velcro. Everything's strapped down. But one of my favorite stories about the ISS, it actually didn't even include a dining table at first. So it was just thought that these... Humans, almost treated like robots, were just going to go up there, float around, velcro their food to the walls, strap themselves to the walls while they ate.
And of course, naturally, human beings want to gather. They want to have a place to come together and enjoy this very limited break in their day. And so one day, an astronaut just found some scrap piece of material and strapped it to the wall.
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Chapter 5: What innovative food technologies are being developed for space missions?
to make a table, which really has no practical use in space. As you say, you need Velcro. You can't just have something sitting on a table. But still, it was this human nature to have some kind of design intervention for a meal and for socializing with their fellow crewmates.
As you can see, this is an open concept. I imagine that your work has to encompass anthropology, technology, physiology, gastroenterology, proctology. It must involve so many different disciplines. Coming from an artistic background, is that part of what is exciting about it? Is that kind of learning and tinkering? Yeah, indeed.
I borrow pieces from all of these different fields or ologies to create something new or What are they eating up there in general?
I always feel like if you grew up, you know, pre 2000, like you might have heard of astronauts drinking a lot of Tang.
Do some things you do in space. They drank Tang. They mixed it like this in a zero G pouch because with no gravity, it would fly all over.
You don't have that problem. So Tang was born in 1957. It was created by food daddy William Mitchell, who also made such frankenfoods as Cool Whip, Quick Set Jell-O, and the eternally baffling Pop Rocks. Now, the parent company, General Foods, had military contracts, no surprise, and in tests, shelf-stable Tang, with its sugar-free,
maltodextrin and vitamin C helped mask the taste of the space capsule water supply. So in the early 1960s, Tang was sent into space and John Glenn thus became an astro-influencer and Tang took off like a rocket. Now in 2013, NASA's Apollo 11 Buzz Aldrin astronaut publicly stated during an awards show, Tang sucks.
When you sort of started this and you started blogging, okay, like how are they eating? What are they eating now? What was the baseline? What were they eating?
The history of space food is so fascinating that the different space agencies have their own dining modules or their own cooking equipment. So NASA and the European Space Agency
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Chapter 6: What ethical considerations arise in space food preparation?
seem to share different systems for preparing food on the ground to go up to space. And then how do you actually prepare the food in space? So originally it was canned, which is extremely heavy and not the most practical, although it is a mode of preserving food, but this is heavy and costly to actually get to space. So at some point we're creating freeze-dried foods.
So this is just a dried food like Tang, but it's not always powdered form. It usually looks more like a sponge. I actually have some sitting in front of me right now. So it's a burger patty that's been snapped in half and packed into this plastic wrap with all of the liquid removed from it. So it weighs practically nothing, a tiny circle of Velcro on the side.
So an astronaut could attach it to a wall and there's a barcode on it because astronauts are, everything that they eat is monitored from the ground. So they would scan in what they eat so that their nutritionist could supervise this for them. And it tells you how much water to add.
So there's a little spout on the top of the package and they would attach it to something called the rehydration station, which is on the international space station. It's something almost like 90 or 99% of the water that's used is recycled from human urine, human perspiration.
And then that gets processed and you put that back into your food as a warm or hot water and then let it sit and cut the package open with scissors and eat it directly from the bag. So a lot of these foods are modeled after MREs, which are military rations.
So quick background, given the... astronomical shipping costs to destination orbit. The price to ship water up there is roughly $83,000 per gallon. So you got to recycle, folks. The International Space Station's WPA, or Water Processor Assembly, involves harvesting water vapor, and then that's in conjunction with a UPA, which is short for Urine Processor Assembly. Don't you dare, wretch.
Don't do it. I hate to break it to you. Where do you think your water comes from? A huge sparklets barrel in heaven? No, dude. Your Nalgene is filled with liquid that used to be frog snot and cruise ship toilets and elephant tears.
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Chapter 7: How does the environment of space affect astronauts' eating habits?
So according also to a 2023space.com article titled, NASA just recycled 98% of all astronaut pee and sweat on the ISS and engineers are thrilled. The end result of this water reclamation is far superior to what municipal water systems produce on the ground.
So yeah, if you drink a glass of earthling tap water with your MRE or meal ready to eat, it is technically grosser than what they eat miles above the planet. They're like, it's war chow. Exactly. Get used to it, right?
Shut up and chow down. Exactly. But today it's different. There's, I think, Lavazza sent up an espresso machine because the coffee is, again, just powdered like an instant coffee. You add water. Another company called Zero Tea Kitchen sent up an oven so they could bake the first cookie in space. There's lots of people who are trying to help these poor astronauts with food.
When we're talking like first space flights, I imagine this wasn't even a concern for decades because they were up and back pretty quickly, right? Right. When did they even start worrying about like, you're going to need a snack?
Yeah, I guess it would be... Around the Apollo era, when astronauts started going to space for longer term and they would actually need to bring days of food supply and keep it in their capsule with them.
And then now the food plans are changing even more where the current food system is supposed to last five years and they have the deep space food program at NASA, at least, to start to think about what is food for Mars. And what are the challenges associated with preparing those foods? How will different space environment conditions impact the food? Will it degrade?
Will the color, texture, nutrition value change for these trips where the return date is not even known?
So the Deep Space Food Challenge concluded in 2024, and the three winners were a professor and student team from UC Riverside who invented Nolux, which means without light, and to grow plants and fungi in a dark little chamber using acetate to stimulate growth instead of light.
And another winner of this challenge was this nifty contraption called SATED, which stands for Safe Appliance, Tidy, Efficient, and Delicious. Okay. And it uses centrifugal force to press food against a heated cylinder, thus enabling the layering of foods, such as the coveted slice of za in space.
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Chapter 8: What are the future prospects for food in space exploration?
It stands for Nutritional Closed Loop Eco-Unit System. And that helps farm greens and vegetables and edible bugs with minimal effort from the crew. It's kind of a set it and forget it Ron Popeil situation. At that point, are they trying to terraform and grow, you know, Matt Damon potatoes in a bubble?
Sometimes I'm sitting in a room and I don't know if I'm on a set of a science fiction film or if I'm actually in a real science movie. meeting because you think, is this really what's happening right now?
There's the veggie project on the ISS that's growing fresh ingredients in space, but these are really just herbs and little pieces of lettuce that are more for emotional well-being to add a sprig to your food. It's unrealistic that an astronaut could truly sustain themselves off of what's possible to grow in space, at least with what
technology we have now. And this suitcase-sized ISS garden launched in 2014, and it's grown mizuna mustard, red Russian kale, some edible zinnia flowers, and some Chinese cabbage. So it's just nice to have a sprig here and there, but it is no hometown buffet salad bar. because you are very far from a hometown, and NASA does not have the budget for all you can eat.
Also, hometown buffet doesn't even exist anymore. Since the start of COVID, people were not down with just a plexiglass sneeze guard. So America's favorite unlimited cafeteria experience went belly up. Do you have to look through a lot of research on what do the astronauts say? Were they like, this is dog shit?
Like, I couldn't even eat this. So for me, it was more interviews, anecdotal reports from astronauts, mostly ESA and NASA astronauts. And oftentimes when interviewing them, they sort of start off by saying, you know, food doesn't matter. This was my life dream to go to space. I was perhaps trained in the military and it's no concern for me because I'm just in space.
I'm just happy to be here.
But then you get a little bit deeper into the conversation, and then the complaining starts, and the food's horrible, and they don't have anywhere to put their food waste, so they get this tremendous food fatigue because they have to eat their food out of this plastic, and they can't just throw it out because it could rot or even combust, so they actually have to lick all of the packages clean after every single meal.
There's no fridge to store their leftovers. One Italian astronaut, Paolo Nespoli, told me the chocolate's horrible. So he's complaining about the chocolate. The truth comes out eventually.
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