Old-School Space Food

[Ellen Shapiro]

Hi Vickie. I was thinking about space food and space travel, thanks to your Q&A, and it occurred to me that even though space food sounds like a very futuristic venture the reality is that the facilities for preparing and eating food in space right now are the opposite of futuristic: they're really quite primitive.

I've just been traveling, as I do most every year, in the Himalayas, and I was wondering: does NASA's space-food team study the techniques that pre-industrial peoples like those in Nepal, Tibet, parts of Africa and South America, and Mongolia use to preserve food without refrigeration for long periods of time? It would seem that the old ways of curing, drying, smoking, and otherwise manipulating food to be stable might have applicability in space. Just a thought, if you'd care to comment.

[Vickie Kloeris]

We actually do use all those methods of perservation in at least some of our products. We have dried beef, cured ham and smoked turkey. It's just that we use modern (and I might add safer) methods of achieving those results, rather than the primative means.