One of the things that fascinate me is how astronauts from different cultures take different foods into space. When French astronaut Thomas Pesquet blasts off to the ISS later this month, for example, he’s taking four French meals specially created by a Michelin-starred chef. (Including a truffled pie of potatoes and onions from Roscoff, slow-cooked beef with mushroom sauce, almond tart with caramelised pears, and a freeze-dried cherry tomato dish. Heston Blumenthal created the first space bacon sandwich for Tim Peake.)
As part of their training, each astronaut tastes the regular space food on offer to pick the things they think they’ll enjoy during their six months in space. On top of that, mission control includes snacks in the resupply runs to break up the meal monotony. Astronauts can make requests, and I imagine they send an intern out to the grocery store to pick them up.
I was pondering (as you do) what snacks different nationalities would crave on a long-duration space mission. (If you’re wondering – lockdown has demonstrated that what I would miss most would be bacon-flavoured crisps.)
And as I was pondering, I came across SnackSurpise. This subscription service sends you a box of snacks from a different country every month. So Ryan and I signed up for an intercultural shelf-stable space snack experience!
Our first box turned out to be a collection from Australia, which is perhaps not as exotic as I’d hoped. We chose the Mini Box, so we got six different snacks and a nice booklet of facts about Australia. Did you know that – despite living alongside many of the deadliest species on the planet – Australians invented a new species to scare tourists? They said the carnivorous Drop Bear dropped from trees to attack
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Join us for an exclusive conversation with presenter, broadcaster and author Alan Titchmarsh. Recorded at BBC Gardeners’ World Live, and Hosted by presenter and broadcaster, Nicki Chapman, the audience listened in as Alan discussed what it means to be a good gardener… You can buy tickets for the next live show, BBC Gardeners’ World Autumn Fair here.
Header image: Suited up to simulate the conditions of working outside on Mars. Jonathan Clarke (the author, left) with visiting engineer Michael Curtis-Rouse, from UK Space Agency (right). Jonathan Clarke personal collection, Author provided.
In Jade Pearls and Alien Eyeballs I talk about the journeys plants have made with us – crisscrossing the globe and leaving Earth entirely for missions in space.
I’m hoping to go and see The Martian soon, one of the few films to feature a botanist as the hero. Astronaut Mark Watney is one of the first humans to set foot on Mars, but accidentally gets left behind and has to survive on his own – and to do so he grows potatoes. He wouldn’t be the first person (or even population) to rely on potatoes for survival, but here on Earth there’s a slight snag. The potato (Solanum tuberosum) has an arch nemesis – late blight, caused by an organism called Phytophthora infestans. It cuts down both potatoes and tomatoes, and was the biological cause of the Irish Potato Famine in the 19th century.
Ever since we watched Away, Ryan and I have a new toast: “To Mars”. Unlike that fictional crew, we have no hope of ever reaching the red planet. But there are an increasing number of days when I think it would be nice to leave humanity’s mess behind and start afresh on a new world. But the prospect of forming a colony elsewhere in the solar system is a long way off, and when people talk about life on Mars they’re usually referring to alien life.
A little while ago, I told you about a preliminary experiment that Dr Wieger Wamelink and his team at the University of Wageningen conducted. It demonstrated that it is possible to grow plants in simulated Mars and Moon soils.