Space tourists will be able to enjoy Michelin-star meals!
Top chefs from around the world are making food for the final frontier.
With companies such as Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic working on making space tourism more accessible, one has to wonder what other perks might be included in your out-of-this-world experience.
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Apparently, the next big thing in space travel is gourmet cooking.
But how do you take fine dining and get it into space when they are so extremely strict on what goes up there?
Well, the transition for chefs into an area of expertise dominated by food scientists has not been easy but very rewarding.
Astronauts from different countries and nationalities and backgrounds – and they are all going to be eating, at once, paella Valenciana. And this makes me so proud.
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Charisse Grey, who leads research and development for the chef’s ThinkFoodGroup, has said that food scientists are more focused on calorie intake and nutrition whereas they want to provide a tasty experience.
According to The Guardian: "Dishes had to be nutritious, survive microbe-killing sterilisation of 121C (252F), and largely avoid the use of free-floating liquids."
Things that are crumbly, like cookies and chips, won’t make it up there because if there’s little crumbs that come off it while you’re eating, they just float into space and can get caught up in the air filtration systems and create issues. I recall one of my first conversations that I had with Nasa and some of the food scientists … They were, like, ‘You have to let go of the feeling that the food has to look good.’ I won’t say that they’re perfect and I won’t say that they’re exactly what you would get out of a paella pan, as you can’t mimic the actual cooking process of the paella pan or the stew process of a pot. But they’re probably some of the best meals I’ve had out of a pouch.
While we're still working towards one day having a Michelin-star meal on Earth, it's incredible to see where science and technology is able to take people and food in the future.
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Main image courtesy of iStock/isakurt