Space Food!

Sandwiches hit different at zero gravity. While at NASA, Vickie Kloeris managed the food systems for the Space Shuttle and later the International Space Station. She joins host Sean Mobley to chat about the weirdness and wonderfulness of making a menu for astronauts.

Link to learn more about Vickie Kloeris’ work and book: https://vickiekloeris.com/ 

Link to donate to The Museum of Flight: https://pages.museumofflight.org/flight-deck-donate

Transcript after the player.

00:00:00

SEAN MOBLEY:       The Flight Deck is made possible by listeners like you. Thank you to the donors who sustain the Museum of Flight. To support this podcast and the Museum's other educational initiatives, visit museumofflight.org/podcast.

[Intro music]

SM:     Hello and welcome to The Flight Deck, the podcast of the Museum of Flight in Seattle, Washington. I'm your host, Sean Mobley. What's your go-to comfort food? In this season of The Flight Deck, we're talking about Space Stations, and food is one of the key components of any space mission, let alone long-term habitation in space. Vickie Kloeris spent decades as a space chef designing the meals that astronauts took with them on the Space Shuttle and then later the International Space Station. In this episode, she joined me to reflect on the vital role of food in space.

[Intro Music]

SM:     Vickie, thank you so much for joining me today on The Flight Deck.

VICKIE KLOERIS: You're welcome. Thanks for having me.

SM:     Vickie, why don't you share a little bit more about what you did with NASA. How did you even get involved with this in the first place? Did you always see yourself as a space food scientist?

00:01:22

VK:     Absolutely not. I didn't even see myself as a food scientist when I went to college. I was a microbiology major undergrad, and when I got ready to register for my last semester, I was one hour of approved micro electives short. And so my advisor in the College of Science at A&M, he said, "Eh, just talk to one of your professors and do a white paper or something." But on the list of approved courses for micro was a four-hour food micro course over in the College of Agriculture. So I told him, I said, "That's what I want to do." And he tried to talk me out of it, but I said, "No, I really want to do that."

So I went over and took that course and got very interested in the application of micro to the processing and preservation of food. So I went into food science for my master's work and, when I got my first food science job in Houston, I started attending the local chapter of the Institute of Food Technologists, IFT, which is the professional org for food. I had joined IFT as a graduate student, and so I started attending the local section meetings in the Houston area and met some of the food scientists who were working down at the Johnson Space Center there. And I thought to myself, that has got to be the coolest job a food scientist could have, feeding astronauts for a living.

00:03:00

So I said, "If you guys ever have an opening, call me," and about 18 months, 2 years later, I got a call that they had an opening on the contractor team. And I went down and interviewed, and that's how I started my career at NASA. And after about four years on the contractor team, Rita Rapp, who was managing the Shuttle food system for NASA, unfortunately, she got cancer and passed away. And so I transitioned over at that point and became the manager for the Shuttle food system and became a civil servant and spent the next 29 years managing first the Shuttle and then the International Space Station food system.

SM:     Can you give just—I'm sure it was a "no two days are alike" sort of thing, but roughly what you might do in a given day or a given week as manager of all those systems?

VK:     My main responsibility was oversight of the contractor team that was running the food lab. So on the NASA side, we had two civil servants. We had myself, and I was in charge of the operational aspect of the food system: in other words, the production, the stowage, the shipping of the food to space. And then we had another food scientist on the NASA side who was responsible for the research work that was going on in the food lab. But everybody else on the team was a contractor in the lab, and so my responsibility was really to oversee that operational contract, to support the team in the lab, but then also I was the intermediary to the Shuttle Program and to the Space Station Program and to the Astronaut Office. And so I had fiscal responsibilities managing the budget and those kind of things and negotiating for the money we needed to do the work and then participating in the actual work in the lab. Because a lot of our work, especially on the operational side, was a team effort, so I worked pretty closely with the folks in the lab.

00:05:21

SM:     Now, Texas was and still is just one of the centers of space technology in the US. Did you grow up kind of interested in space? Did you have any inspirations, or was this just all new to you?

VK:     No. It wasn't all new to me because I grew up very close to the Johnson Space Center. I was born and raised in Texas City, Texas, which is about halfway between Houston and Galveston, so Texas City is pretty close to the Johnson Space Center. And so I'd always had an interest, a curiosity about the space program, but I had never really envisioned myself as being involved with the space program. That's not something I really envisioned growing up. I followed it closely, was definitely a space enthusiast, but didn't really see that as my career path until I kind of stumbled into it.

SM:     Isn't it funny how that happens? You grow up with these things that you enjoy, and you don't realize that, at the end of the day, it's places where a lot of people work with a lot of different rules.

VK:      Uh-huh. [Affirmative]

SM:     You think about NASA. You're like, well, you got to be an astronaut or someone building rockets. Same thing happens with museums. I was like, well, you've got to be a certain thing. Then I realized, well, they're just nonprofits like anything else. Yeah.

 VK:      Right. Yeah.

00:06:56

SM:     So as to the food aspect, let's shift over there. Can you talk a little bit about just the role that food plays in our lives just even here on Earth, like the cultural, the biological role. I mean, food's important.

VK:     Yeah. Food is important. It's important from, obviously, a health perspective, but it's also important from a psychological perspective. And it was interesting during my career to see how that evolved in the space program because I came to work very early in the Shuttle Program. Only 16 of the 135 Shuttle flights had flown when I came to work at NASA, and during the Shuttle Program, food was just not all that important. I mean, the Shuttle flights were relatively short, especially the early ones. Most of the crew members, they considered it like a camping trip. It's like, "Oh, I've got this food list here. I can choose from it. I'm sure I can find something I like. It'll be fine." It wasn't a super high priority for very many of the Shuttle crew members at all.

It wasn't until in the early '90s when we partnered with the Russians, and we were going to— decided to build the International Space Station. And we were sending our astronauts to the Mir Space Station to get some experience in long-duration space flight. And at that point, the original plan was that there was not going to be any NASA food onboard Mir. Those folks that went to Mir were going to eat all Russian-provided space food. But the Astronaut Office wasn't happy with that, and so they negotiated and got permission to send a small quantity of NASA food along with those crew members. And so in talking to some of those first crew members, the attitude was kind of, "Well, I'm busy learning Russian, and I'm busy learning the logistics of Mir, so I don't have time to worry about food. Just go back and look at my Shuttle menu." Because these were all folks who had flown on Shuttle before. "Just go pick something off my Shuttle menu. It'll be fine."

00:09:20

Well, that was their attitude, so that's what we did. But then when those folks came back after having been up there—I think most of those early folks were staying about four or four and a half months up on Mir, something on that order—they came back and said, "Ugh. I should have paid more attention." During a long duration space flight, food becomes a lot more important. Very different than a two-week Shuttle flight. And so from that point on, the whole Astronaut Office attitude towards food really changed because word got around. "Hey, when you're up there a long time, it's pretty important." It becomes pretty important from a psychological perspective because it's one of the few creature comforts that they really have.

SM:     Yeah. It sounds like it's something you don't realize until it's gone.

VK:     Yeah.

SM:     Yeah. Kind of like—not unlike on Earth. That beloved family recipe, you'll never make pancakes the way your mom made them or your grandma made them.

VK:     Right.

00:10:23

SM:     And then you're doing that also in orbit, miles and miles above the planet. [Laughter]

SM:     So another thing that happened during the Shuttle era was a diversification of the Shuttle astronauts and not just from the US too. There were guest astronauts from other countries. How did you and your offices have to adjust and change or shift directions to help also these people now from other countries?

VK:     One of the first examples I can give of a dramatic change that occurred was very early in my career. The Shuttle had what was called the fresh food locker. And the fresh food locker was supposed to be for fresh food, things like apples, oranges, things that would last a while without refrigeration, and it was loaded usually the day before the launch. At that point, we were taking and putting sliced bread, just commercial bread, in the fresh food locker for them to make sandwiches with. Well, shortly after I came to work there, Rodolfo Neri, who was a payload specialist from Mexico, flew, and he wanted to take corn tortillas in the fresh food locker. So we sent corn tortillas.

His fellow crew members saw how easy it was to take a tortilla, roll it up, and it was like a sandwich without having to deal with all the bread, the two slices of bread and all the crumbs in microgravity. They were like, "We're done with bread." And you have to remember this was in the mid '80s, so '85, '86, somewhere along in there. This was before there were breakfast tacos at every—and so Anglos weren't as familiar with tortillas as they are today. Let's put it that way. To this day, they are the most important bread product that NASA provides to the crews on orbit.

00:12:37

SM:     Yeah. That's such a cool story of, yeah, people who just brought their culture along with them, and it turned out to solve a problem, right? Because bread has a long history at NASA if I'm not mistaken. What is the fundamental issues with bread? I know there's some great stories around bread.

VK:     Well, crumbs is the biggest thing, and that's not just with bread. That's with any food. Crumbs are always something that they have to be really careful about in providing foods and planning foods because they're very difficult to deal with in microgravity. And early in the space program, they even flew an irradiated bread product. Yeah, they were concerned about yeast and molds, and this goes back to Mercury and Gemini. But, like I said, they were so happy to get away from the sliced bread because it tended to be difficult to deal with in microgravity, and it got hard pretty quickly too. And so, yeah, they really liked the idea of the tortillas. They were a big hit for sure. Still are.

So when we started working with the ESA astronauts, the European Space Agency and the Japanese Space Agency and Canada, we would invite their countries to provide items to store on Space Station in the preference food that they take with. Each crew member gets a certain amount of preference food on Station. So during the Shuttle Program, we had what was called a 100 percent personal preference menu. So the crew members would come in. They would look at the food list. They would say, "Here's what I want, breakfast, lunch, dinner." They would choose it for every day for the flight. And that worked great because the food and the crew members were on the same vehicle, and they never got separated.

00:14:36

We tried that on Station, and it was a big time failure because the food would go up on the cargo vehicles, and the launch of the cargo vehicles would slip for one reason or another, and so the crew members would complain. They would come back and say, "You promised me I was going to get the food that I asked for, and part of the time I was up there, mine didn't get there in time. So I had to eat leftover Joe Blow's food, and Joe Blow had terrible taste in food." So it became a big sticking point. We got a lot of complaints. And so the ESA, the European Space Agency, had a brand new cargo vehicle they were going to fly, an unmanned cargo vehicle. First flight, NASA wanted to load it up with food and with clothing because they didn't want any one-off science equipment on it in case it didn't make it.

We knew there was going to be a lot of food on it, but that initial flight kept slipping. They had technical issues, and it would slip. So we didn't know who was going to be on orbit when that flight got there. So, in the lab, we sat down and basically we put together a standard menu that included all our products with as much variety as we could possibly provide. And we presented that to the Astronaut Office and said, "This is what we want to put on this vehicle." And much to my surprise, they came back and said, "Not only do we want you to put this on that vehicle, but we want you to use this going forward. We want to use the standard menu." Kind of the compromise that we made was that even though it was a standard menu, they were not going to be eating per the menu.

00:16:25

It's packed pantry style, so all the meats are together. All the veggies are together. There's like eight different categories. They're going to have one of those eight open all the time on orbit and, when they go to eat, they're going to select from those eight containers. So even though the contents are standard, the way that they eat them, the order that they eat them, that's all preference at the time.

So it's kind of a mix between a standard menu and a preference menu. And then we also agreed to let them have a certain amount of preference containers. A crew member who's on orbit for six months is going to get nine containers of food, preference food, and five containers of preference beverages. Those 14 containers are much easier to get there at a certain time. You can plan that better

If you're trying to do a full sixth month menu, it's going to be somewhere between 70 and 80 containers, and that just doesn't work. It just will not work. And so the standard menu was actually implemented on expedition 16, and we're up to—I believe we're on 72 now unless I've lost track. But I think it's 72. And so it's been in place for quite a long time, and it gets changed. They tweak it. Products go away, and they replace it with other things. And they're constantly getting feedback from the crew members on the products, so if something is consistently rated low, then they're either going to reformulate it or take it off the menu. So it's changed over the years, but the concept of the standard menu has worked incredibly well.

00:18:13

SM:     And it sounds like—you said it's a compromise, but one of the psychological pieces of this does sound a bit like autonomy, right? Because so much is out of your control when you're an astronaut. You're not even hitting the launch button to go. And when you're up there, your time is, a lot of times, very scheduled. You're doing experiments on behalf of people back here on Earth.

VK:     Right.

SM:     You're in a very controlled environment in orbit. That is a lot to take in, but this is something you can control, either the menu beforehand in the olden days or, like you said, people might eat the food in a different order—

VK:     Yeah.

SM:     …than expected. Because it's like, "You know what? This is a little thing that I can control."

VK:     Yeah. Exactly. And so the preference containers do allow their country, their respective countries to send items. As long as they meet the shelf life requirements and the microbiological requirements, NASA will pack stuff for them. And the way it works is basically the Russians feed the cosmonauts, and NASA feeds everybody else on orbit. That's just the way it's set up. But they share food back and forth all the time, and they do a lot of joint meals. When Station first started out and was quite small, all the dining was done in the Russian segment. That's the only place they had a galley for food prep. But as Station got bigger and the crew sizes increased, they added a food preparation area over in the US segment as well, and so now they still have a lot of joint meals. It's almost like planning dinner parties now though. They have to make an effort to get together because they're not automatically all dining together like they used to be. Yeah.

00:20:04

SM:     Let's talk about dining together. So you've spoken at length about the psychological benefits and the cultural benefits, and one big time food plays a role here on Earth is in holidays and celebrations and birthdays and dinner parties like that, you said, for social gatherings. Can you talk a little bit about those special occasions and what you were able to do to help those astronauts feel connected to each other and back here to home?

VK:     So, yeah, I mean, the holidays were always a big deal whether it was on Shuttle or Station. And, typically, on Station, when holiday was going to fall in the increment that a crew member was on board, usually they would get together with their fellow crew members who were going to be up there with them at the time, and one or more of them would set aside one of their preference containers and make it into a holiday meal. For instance, for Thanksgiving, one of them would say, "This is going to be our Thanksgiving," and then they would fill the container with everything they needed to provide a Thanksgiving dinner for the whole crew. There's a sliced turkey in the menu.

There's some of the traditional things available, and then they would also take some commercial items, things like cranberry sauce that normally wouldn't be on orbit.

00:21:31

They would take some commercial off the shelf and send it to orbit so that they would have as many of the traditional things as they could. If there's a cargo vessel that's going up to Station right around holiday time, you can bet there's going to be some special stuff on there for the holiday.

And it was the same way for birthdays. They would plan birthday celebrations if they knew a crew member was having a birthday. Some of the military folks would even do something special for one of the Navy holidays or one of the—they would do special stuff. And, really, any opportunity that they had to make a day a little different, they would take advantage of, which you can see why. I mean, now it's sixth months or a year of basically staring at the same walls every day, so anything you can do to make it different and jazz it up a little bit is going to be welcome.

SM:     Speaking of jazzing things up, food and eating is multisensory experience. Part of taste we know, for example, is smell. So can you talk about how your senses are changed when you're up in space and how you have had to adapt the food to make sure it's palatable? What were some unexpected things?

VK:     So that has always been an issue throughout my career. I remember Canada, at one point on the Shuttle very early on in my career, flew an experiment where they had solutions of sweet, sour, salty, bitter, the traditional. And they had crew members rank the intensity on the ground and then try to have them rank it again in orbit to see how microgravity affected it. The problem on Shuttle was the fluid shift because, when you first go into orbit, all the fluid in your body shifts to the upper part of your body. They would make jokes about having chicken legs because their legs would get visibly skinnier on orbit. And so, automatically, you're congested, and it's like when you and I have a cold. It alters the way food tastes to us.

00:23:58

And that's because when you're congested, you're not getting the aroma through the back of your nose like you would normally get. And so either the food's going to taste different, or it's going to taste like nothing depending on how congested you are. Well, so that was a big problem on Shuttle, and that kind of blew the experiment out of the water because the congestion interfered with really being able to make a determination as to the taste change. Was it the congestion, or was it actually microgravity? They couldn't really make a determination. But because of that, condiments were always popular on the Shuttle, and one of our most popular food items was our freeze-dried shrimp cocktail. It was freeze-dried shrimp with a powdered tomato-base sauce, but it had horseradish in the sauce, so it had a nice little kick. And so the kick would get through that congestion for some of them.

But I can remember crew members, after every mission, we would do a food debrief with the crew, and we would talk about taste change. And some of the crew members, it was so funny because some would come back and say, "Oh, yeah, my taste really were altered in orbit. Things tasted really different than they did on the ground." And then others from their same crew would say, "Oh, no. That's all in your head. It wasn't any different." Now, on Space Station, it's a little different because they're up there for so long that their body eliminates that excess fluid, and so over time that congestion's going to go away. It pretty much goes away.

00:25:44

But on Station, they're eating out of packages instead of off of plates, and so that interferes with their ability to get aroma. And when you heat stuff down here, all the heat rises, the aroma comes with it. In microgravity, heat, it can dissipate in different directions, so you lose some of the aroma, and you're in a closed environment with other competing odors. So all of that taken together, it's not too surprising that a lot of crew members report they feel like their taste buds are somewhat dulled on orbit. So, again, condiments and hot sauce remain pretty popular and have been pretty popular throughout the space program.

SM:     You just said, too, that on Shuttle they ate off plates.

VK:     No, no.

SM:     Oh, okay.

VK:     They've always eaten out of packages. I'm sorry. Yeah. It's always been out of packages.

SM:     But that just also brings up the question, too, of plates and presentation, right? There's no Michelin Star chefs doing plating up in space, but do you think that that is or should be a priority in some way? How did your office deal with presentation, and how do you hope presentation improves if the goal is to have more and more people living in space for longer term?

00:27:03

VK:     Well, and that has been discussed, especially by a lot of these companies that talk about putting up private Space Stations. And having worked with the crews and heard their issues and frustrations with dealing with food in microgravity and having stuff—no matter how careful we were about how we packaged it and how viscous, how thick we made the food so that—it would still get loose. And I can remember when Pringles came out. We had never flown chips in a bag during my career, but when Pringles came out, some of the crew members were like, "Aha. It's in a can. We can fly chips." They wanted to take them and in fresh food, and we didn't stop them from doing that, but we cautioned them. We said, "Look. Yeah, it's in a can and, yeah, it's going to work better, but there's still a lot of crumbs in the bottom of that can." And sure enough, after a couple of them—cans had flown, the crew members came back and said, "Ugh, we should have listened to you. That was a big mess." And the rule was, if you made the mess, you had to clean it up, right?

[Laughter]

00:28:18

So presentation to me, I mean, it's just like I've been on telecons with some of the private companies talking about, "If we do a private Space Station, wouldn't we want a cook? We'd want to do more traditional cooking." Because they don't cook up there. They just warm stuff up or add hot water to it or chill it maybe. That's it. And they're like, "We want to cook, and we want to do this and that." And it's like, yeah, I mean, that's an admirable goal, but at the same time, power is a huge issue. When we wanted to do refrigerators and freezers for Space Station, that was the original plan. When I was originally hired as a contractor, it was to design the frozen food system for Space Station.

But not too long after I came to work there, the engineers told the Space Station folks, "Look. You can either have—looking at the amount of power we're going to get from the solar arrays, you can either have freezers for food or you can have freezers for science." So we were back to an all shelf- stable food system. No dedicated freezers or refrigerators for food. And so going forward, in order to do some of the more gourmet-type stuff, you're going to need to be able to do traditional cooking, and that's going to be very difficult to do because of power and because of microgravity. So, I mean, personally, I don't see it being very viable until you have gravity. And they're working towards artificial gravity for spacecraft, but, until you have that, I don't really see some of this being very viable.

And NASA, they don't want to spend professional astronauts' time messing with the food. That's not what they want them to be doing. And most of the astronauts don't want to be doing that either. That's not what they're there for. So they want it to be easy. They want it to be quick. Sure, they would love to have gourmet if they could, but, yeah, it is what it is. But when you have private people that are flying and staying up there for a long time, the attitude definitely will change. The desire, the demand will change, but it's going to be a hard demand to meet. I really think so.

00:30:40

SM:     That also opens up, kind of, an enduring question about who is space for. If the idea is a private company wants to fly a chef up and have that be a selling point, it may add to a perception of, well, this is only a domain for rich people as opposed to NASA's approach, which is this is a chance for anybody to come up to space, which is whole nother conversation.

VK:     Yeah. Yeah. That is a whole nother conversation. And SpaceX is definitely going down that path with their private flight that they just did, and so there've been quite a few paid, private astronauts recently. And so, yeah, I mean, it's definitely changing. NASA's attitude towards commercial ventures has totally changed than during my career. Because commercial was almost a dirty word when I first started out at NASA. So, yeah, I mean, that's changed quite a bit. The partnership, the public-private partnership is quite different than it was. Yeah.

SM:     You started talking a bit about longer term and just different approaches here, so let's look longer term. So if a goal is to get, say, a human settlement on Mars or a larger Space Station where people are there, where there's dozens or hundreds or, I think, Blue Origin talks about a million people or half a million people living and working in space, what are some of the biggest obstacles you see to that in terms of food as we stand right now?

00:32:22

VK:     Let's talk about the first mission to Mars, the obstacles that we have for that. Because that first mission to Mars, there's not going to be any infrastructure waiting on Mars. The food's probably going to have to be prepositioned. It's going to have to be shelf-stable. You can't depend on refrigerator or frozen food because, if your refrigerators and freezers fail, you starve. I mean, it boils right down to that. It's probably going to have to be prepositioned. And right now, with the propulsion systems, it takes about six months to get between Earth and Mars when they're at their closest proximity. After you do that six months, you're going to have to wait in the neighborhood of two years before they get close together again.

So by the time you produce food, put it on a cargo vehicle, send it to Mars, verify that it's there, then send your crew—and they go and they stay for the two years or whatever they need to stay— the food that they eat on that return trip is probably going to be about five years old, and it may be as old as seven years old. And that's going to depend on how it's prepositioned. Because there's talk of potentially using a solar-powered rocket to preposition the stuff, the supplies, rather than a chemical rocket, and a solar-powered would be a slow boat to Mars. And so that would even make the shelf life longer if they chose to do that.

And so the challenge is we can produce food for sure that is safe to eat from a microbiological perspective for that length of time. That's not an issue. The issue is we can control that microbial growth, but what we can't do is stop the chemical changes that occur in the food. And so, over time, the quality is going to degrade. The texture is going to change, the flavor, the color, all of it. And even some of the nutrients are going to degrade over time. The concern, the challenge is to have enough variety and enough high-quality food for that return trip that the crew will still be high- performing at the end of the mission.

00:34:54

The military's done a lot of stuff, a lot of research in the field with the MREs, with the meals-ready- to-eat, and they've shown that if you don't have enough variety or if the quality is poor, that the soldiers tend to eat enough to survive but not enough to thrive. And NASA wants a high- performing, thriving crew throughout the mission. So that's the big challenge for that initial mission to Mars is how—and one of the ways maybe to actually chill the shelf-stable food—because if you chill it, you slow those chemical reactions down, and so that extends the shelf life, extends the quality, extends everything about the food. But if your chiller fails, you're still okay because you won't starve. It'll still be edible, right? You'll still have something that it's safe to eat even if the quality is lower. That's the big challenge for that initial mission to Mars.

If you get refrigerators and freezers in space, sure, and you've got gravity, you can cook. You can provide food for a large number of people if you wanted to do that. Certainly not going to be cheap. Very expensive thing to do, but it can be done if you've got the power and the volume to do it.

They're growing stuff right now on Space Station. They have the veggie unit which grows some things like lettuce, cherry tomatoes, peppers, things like that, but the volume is so small, it's more of a psychological boost than it is an actual significant part of their menu. And when they go to Mars in transit, I'm sure they'll be growing stuff, but, again, the volume is going to be limited.

There's just not a lot of room that they're going to be able to dedicate to that. Especially on an initial mission to Mars, stuff that they grow probably won't be a significant part of their menu, but I'm sure it'll be present to some degree.

00:37:01

SM:     So it sounds like a mission to Mars won't be a surprise.

VK:     Oh, no.

SM:     Not that Apollo was a surprise, but they're like, "All right. Apollo 11, off they go." It's going to be a process, and we all hope that everything survives budget cycles between the three to six years.

VK:     Yeah. Yes. I [unintelligible 00:37:22]. Yeah, we do.

SM:     So you talked a little bit about what they grow on Space Station now. What technology that's been developed for growing things on Space Station or improving food for astronauts, what technology has made its way out into the real world?

00:37:41

VK:     It's interesting because not a whole lot, really. The technology that's currently used—freeze drying and thermo-stabilization, which is canning—those are really old technologies. That's not new. Now, we do have some irradiated items that are part of the menu, and that is comparatively recent technology. We have some irradiated meats that are made shelf-stable by irradiation rather than by heat. There's not very many of those. There's a few in the menu. There's new processing technologies that are being developed for the commercial sector that, when they meet fruition and when they're readily available and they're tried and true, they would certainly be candidates for space flight.

Yeah. I mean, there's different processing technologies that are coming on scene that's not what you're seeing on your grocery store shelves or anything. And I find it really interesting that now you go down the seafood aisle, you see the pouch products, the pouch seafoods. And companies, they switched to that because—for the same reason that NASA and the military switched to pouches. They're lighter than cans. And so people I think really like that who want to take a pouched tuna or whatever in their lunch kit to work, and they're easier to open than a can or something like that.

And so even though that pouch technology has been around for decades, it's just now beginning to really show up in the grocery store in a significant way. It's just interesting sometimes how long it takes for things to adapt. And I mean, in Europe, those technologies, they're more shelf-stable oriented because they don't have as much refrigeration, freezer—that's not as common over there in houses to the degree that it is here, and so shelf-stable much further, more integrated in the market over there than it is over here.

00:39:53

SM:     You talked about how you were hired to try and create a freezer section, and that was scrapped. Over the course of your career, what were some of the bigger food-related failures that you experienced, and what did your office learn from them? What did you learn from them?

VK:     Most of those failures occurred on the ground when we were trying to develop products. Because we would get and say, okay, we're try to develop this product. So we would start basically with a recipe, but by the time you—you can't just take a recipe and freeze-dry it or thermo-stabilize it, can it, and have it work. It just doesn't happen like that. You have to change the formulation. It's a process. You're going to tweak it. And we would go through many processes before we would end up with a product that we were satisfied with. I can remember at one point we tried to do a pouched, a thermo-stabilized cheesecake, and we ended up just giving up on it because no matter what we did, it just looked terrible.

SM: So like my cheesecakes? [Laughter]

00:41:08

VK:     We tried several different iterations of it, and we finally just walked away from it because it just looked so bad. It would get so dark during the retort process that it just—it was terrible. So we gave up on that one. A lot of the failures would occur on the ground. Like I said, we did debriefs with the crew members, and we would get feedback after flights. And, also, prior to the flights, the crew members would come to the lab, and they would try the foods, and they would score them. We had a nine point hedonic scale where zero was "dislike extremely" and nine was "like extremely," and so they would rank them, and they would make comments out to the side.

And so they would use those. When they would choose their preference foods, they would go look at those scores that they'd given the food. And they're like, "Oh, I gave this one a nine. Maybe I should put a few extras of those in my preference containers," right, so that they would have extra servings if it was something they wanted to eat a lot of on orbit. Because when they were eating from that standard menu, they were sharing that with all the other crew members on board, so there weren't a lot of servings of everything because the idea was to have as much variety as possible. So if there was something they really wanted to eat a lot, they needed to put it in their preference. And so they would look at those scores.

00:42:37

But then we would also look at those scores. If something consistently scored low on those scores, then we would take a look at that product and say, "Should it be on the menu? Do we need to reformulate it, change it somehow? Why is it scoring so low?" It was always interesting to me in debriefs because crew members would come back and occasionally—not all the time, but occasionally a crew member would say, "I really think you should take this item off the menu. I just think it's bad. You should take it off." And more often than not, a fellow crew member would pop up and say, "Wait a minute! I like that. That's my favorite." So just like any other group of people, very diverse opinions across the spectrum about the food. Yeah.

SM:     So while you were there, Star Trek was out and the whole idea of replicator, right, that you would say, "All right. Give me an Earl Grey, hot." Did you all joke about that at the office?

VK:     Yes, we joked about that a lot. Yeah. I mean, that was always the thing. It's like, wouldn't that be great if we could do that? Wouldn't that make our lives really simple if we could do that? Yes. No. Yeah, we did make jokes about that, and I can remember NASA had—and not just NASA, but the federal government had and I assume they still have a program called SBIR, Small Business Initiative Research, and it was basically grants that small businesses could apply for. And I can remember one—and we would evaluate the proposals. Not every year would there be food- related money. Some years, there would be. Some years, there wouldn't be. But the years that there were, we would see the proposals and have to evaluate them, and I swear one of them came across—I doubt it got funded. I mean, we didn't make the final decisions. We just did the evaluations. But it very much sounded like a food replicator, and I thought, hmm, yeah. No.

SM:     A little ahead of its time.

VK:     A little ahead of its time. Yeah.

00:44:49

SM:     Were there other pranks and jokes that happened around the office or that astronauts pulled you into or anything like that?

VK:     Nothing pops immediately to mind, but I know that on orbit they would pull pranks on each other with the food. They would play with the food sometimes. Definitely. There was always photos of people throwing things around like M&Ms and them eating them out of the air and stuff like that. So that always went on. That kind of stuff always went on.

SM:     I mean, let's be honest. I feel like 99 percent of people, if you told them, "You're going to go to space tomorrow," and you're like, "What's the first thing you're going to do?" It's going to be either eat an M&M that's floating or drink a ball of water that's floating.

VK:     Correct.

SM:     So it's right there.

VK:     Yeah. That was always—yeah, let some beverage out in the air. Take the straw and drink it out of the air. Yeah. That was always a big deal too.

SM:     I think, to wrap up here, I'm going to ask you to maybe put on your science fiction hat still. Imagine we're 200, 400, however many years in the future and we've got a Space Station that's got hundreds if not thousands of people living up there, and because it's been so long, maybe there's even been some generations who were born up there. What do you think, what do you imagine food culture might be like for a group like that? How might things change? How might food adapt for folks who are living in space or on Mars long term?

00:46:37

VK:     I think it's going to depend a whole lot of what the focus of those people is, like what work they're doing. Because I just think if they're real focused on the science and the job that they're doing, then the food may not be as important to that person. It just depends on the type of people who are up there and what their focus is. If it's more like it would be down here in a city that had, say, a thousand people in it, then I think you're going to have possibly every spectrum. You're going to have people that think food is super important and people that think it's not. But I think when you get to that point, you're almost going to have to have your H-E-B or your Kroger in the sky so that people can choose what they want. I mean, even with the seven or eight or nine crew members that we have at a time up there, even among that small a group, it's difficult to meet all the expectations, so you just multiply that and it's only going to get worse. Yeah.

SM:     Yeah. Well, Vickie, this has been absolutely delightful. Thank you for sharing all of these stories and this insight into space food.

VK:     Well, you're welcome.

SM:     Where can people learn more about your long career, and where can people get more of these stories?

00:48:04

VK:     I wrote a book about my career. It's called Space Bites: Reflections of a NASA Food Scientist. It came out in December of '23, and the publisher is Ballast Books, like a ship's ballast. BallastBooks.com. You can get the book from their website. It's actually on Amazon as well and Barnes and Noble, I believe also. Any profits I make are going to food science scholarships. In it, I talk about some of the technical issues that we discussed today like shelf stability and some of the things in the food system, but mostly it's just anecdotes about my career. So I wrote it to honor my first boss and mentor at NASA who passed away in the fall of 2019. And when COVID hit—when he passed away, I thought it'd be nice to write a book and dedicate it to him. And then when COVID came along and we were locked down, I thought, "If I'm ever going to do it, now's the time to do it." Right?

So I wrote most of it during the COVID lockdown. And I wrote it to make students aware of food science as a career path because I kind of just stumbled onto it. It's different from culinary. It's different from dietetics. Food science is all about the processing and preservation of food, so it's commercial food, yeah, rather than restaurant. So it's different, and there's definitely a demand for food science graduates out there. A lot of people just aren't aware of it. And I also wrote the book because I wanted, like we talked earlier, I wanted to make people aware that there's more to NASA than just being an astronaut or being an engineer, that it takes every type of expertise to accomplish a successful space program.

00:49:56

SM:     Well, I hope people can check that out, and I am going to enjoy dinner tonight on a plate that is not floating in the air.

[Laughter] VK: Yeah.

SM: Thank you, again.

VK: There you go.

SM:     Have a good day.

VK:     Oh, you're welcome. You have a great day. [Outro music]

00:50:16

SM:     Thank you for tuning into this episode of The Flight Deck, the podcast of the Museum of Flight in Seattle, Washington. If you want to check out Vickie's book, Space Bites: Reflections of a NASA Food Scientist, we've got a link to it in this episode's show notes which you can find at museumofflight.org/podcast. The Flight Deck is made possible by the Museum of Flight's donors, everyday people who are just excited to share these types of stories. Special thanks to all of you for your support. If you like what you heard, please subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or wherever you downloaded us from, and please rate and review the show. It really helps spread the word. Until next time, this is your host, Sean Mobley, saying to everyone out there on that good Earth, see you out there, folks.

[End of podcast]