Moonshots & plant-based foods: The evolution of space meals for longer missions

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

The earliest space missions were short-duration and used products like food purées in tubes. But the Apollo moon missions could cross 10 days, which required far more research into how food worked in space both when consumed and, as important, when it came out. In Packing for Mars, Mary Roach’s hilarious book on space logistics, she explains that space food had to be compact and free of crumbs, which would float in zero-gravity.

One solution was to compress everything and coat it in fat, which bound the food together. But this had a terrible effect on the digestive systems. “When you have one pair of underpants for a two-week space flight, anal leakage is not your pal,” writes Roach. NASA had to enlist the help of leading food companies, like Pillsbury, to develop new products and processes, like freeze-drying and food irradiation. Today irradiation is used by Indian mango exporters as a way to kill pests, without damaging fruit, so other countries will allow them in. One of the most important spin-offs from the space programme was a food safety system called Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP), which was developed with Pillsbury to ensure safety of products that went into space. In the 1970s when several food contamination cases caused alarms in the US, the food industry adopted HACCP from Pillsbury and this is one reason why global food supply chains can operate with a fair degree of safety today.

This is the real value of ‘moonshot’ projects. The term now applies to very ambitious projects, which have no guarantee of success. Yet the ground-breaking research required often has side benefits that more than