StarTalk Radio - Cosmic Cuisine

Episode Date: March 28, 2013

What ingredients provide "The Right Stuff" for an astronaut's dinner? From BBQ to ice cream, we feast on food fit for the stars. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early.

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. Welcome back to StarTalk Radio. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. And this week our special topic is on space food. What do they eat when NASA casts astronauts into orbit and beyond? And to help me digest this topic, I've got with me a comedian, Eugene Merman. Eugene, this is not your first time on Star Trek Radio. No, this is the second time.

If we're counting, if we're using the traditional numeric system that I've become used to. Base 10. Otherwise, it would be I've become used to. Base 10. Otherwise, it would be 1-0 if it were base 2. In base 7, what's visit would this be of mine? It would be 2. Yeah. Yeah. Just testing you.

For the geeks out there. You passed. Really up until probably 4 or 3. Anyway. So we're talking about space food. How do you prepare it? How do you package it? How do you eat it?

And I don't know if you knew the earliest flights like the the mercury flights they just went up in orbit for you know hour and a half couple hours and came back down so no one was thinking space food they didn't bring like anything no no well they might have had some reserves in case they landed somewhere unpleasant on earth and they had to stay alive for before gps would ever find them. This is way before any actual... Like Detroit. So back then, they would have sort of their reserves for if they landed in an unseemly place. But otherwise, in space, no.

In fact, they didn't even have really ways to go to the bathroom. They would just... You go in orbit, a couple of orbits, and orbit is an hour and a half. You're up there for three hours, four and a half hours. And so it's really just to see if you could survive the trip. So technology has advanced so much that we can send bathrooms into space? Yes.

Is that what you're saying? That's exactly what I'm saying. Or means of excreting in space. And what goes with that is, of course, the ingestion of food. And so it required longer duration trips in space. So the next program after Mercury was Gemini, where they went from one astronaut to two astronauts. Gemini, the twins, isn't that clever? It's very clever, yes.

I wish I could send that congratulations back in time. So Gemini, Apollo, follow Gemini, and that was the embodiment of the moon landings. Apollo ended, but we still were going into space. We had Skylab, which was our first sort of space station. Mir, the Russian space station. Mir is Russian for peace. Yes, I know. You knew that.

And world. Oh, because you are Russian, aren't you? Yeah, that's the reason. I even know the other meaning of the word. It means world? Yeah. I didn't know that. There you go.

I'm glad to come and help astrophysicists learn. Why didn't they have a second word for it? It was the same way that, I think it's a homonym. I forgot what all those words mean. Okay, I'll take it for it. It's a homonym. All right. A samonym.

Yes, a sound-a-like-sy. And so then, of course, the International Space Station, where people are up there for not only days, at least days, but in some cases weeks, months. And in a few cases where Russians who have the record, they're up there for more than a year. And so I interviewed Dr. Charles Borland, and he's a NASA consultant who's been developing food and food packages for space missions for 30 years. He goes way back, and he's co-authored the book The Astronaut's Cookbook, Tales, Recipes, and More. And he visited me in my office here in New York City, and I want to share some of that interview with you. So let's check out what he has to say about space.

You've been feeding astronauts from the beginning. Well, it was Apollo 12 when I first came to work. Okay, so they'd already landed on the moon by then. Okay, so you're a newcomer. That's right. So tell me how the food has changed. Well, we found out in late Apollo that we could eat with open utensils in space, which was a major change. Oh, instead of sucking food out of packs. Sucking in out of a package. And then we also found out that we needed

to heat food. And we started heating it on Skylab. So Skylab came after Apollo, so that would have been like early 70s. Right. And so you didn't trust astronauts with a fork or a spoon in the early days? What's the problem? Well, I thought the problem was that it would interfere with the equipment if it had spills. But we found out that if it's wet, the surface tension will keep it on the utensil so you can eat most things. Oh, so what you're saying is that if you're going to have open food as opposed to food squeezed out of a pack, that food would have to be a little bit sticky.

Yeah, it has to be wet. Wet, so that it stays on your utensil. Right, if you open a package of peanuts, it's all going to float away. And then the peanuts in places you don't want it to be. Right. No loose food in zero-G, period. That's what that is, Eugene.

And you know, food is packaged in a variety of ways. There's so much we take for granted on Earth that when you're eating it, you kind of expect gravity to bring it back to your plate. Yes. As you tell kids, eat over your plate, eat over your plate. In space, there is no such commandment. Mm-hmm. Because. The food.

Yeah, the food floats in front of your face if it falls out of your mouth. Would people just keep it floating in front of them and pick at it? Well, you can do that with M&Ms and other things. Ribs? Floaty ribs and floating soup? Yeah, but see, M&Ms have clean, hard surfaces on them so that they can actually careen off of sensitive equipment. Ribs would have a different relationship.

Oh, I meant dry rub, sorry. St. Louis dry rub. Exactly. Okay, that would work Exactly I thought that was assumed So it's packaged in many ways And when they eat They actually They'll strap the tray

To their lap And they can be What we would think of As upside down But it won't matter The food is attached To the plates And the plates are attached

To the tray The tray is attached to them And it's surface tension That keeps the food On the tray Exactly Well right So they try to eat foods That are wet and we'll learn more from what's the

driest wet food could like could it be like like chicken or something like would it be a curry like how driest wet food like meaning is it all liquidy question sorry no no so not so it just has to be able to want to attach to itself. So it has to be full of desire. This is the weird. It just has to prefer to be attached. It has to. If it sees. So haven't you seen two drops of water very close to each other on the table?

Oh, yeah. And if you connect them a little bit, what do they do? It's my favorite thing. Make a pile of water. Two drops next to each other. You bring them close enough. Are you writing a poem? And they touch.

And they kiss each other. Then both puddles merge into one you writing a poem? And they touch, and they kiss each other. Then both puddles merge into one. It's a beautiful thing. Try it at home one day. I will. I can't wait. And the same thing is true then about chicken tikka masala, you're saying? I don't know that food.

Say yes. Okay, yes. So on the International Space Station, when they rehydrate food, they have special rehydrating machines. They can rehydrate it with cold water or hot water to reconstitute the food in order to turn it into something that they would recognize or love. And so Charles Borland, like I said, who was a food scientist in the service of NASA, I spoke with him about what it is to develop food for zero G. And what he has to do differently than what would otherwise happen on Earth's surface. Let's see what he tells us.

Have you done the zero-g plane? Yes. Have you done it while eating? Yes. Did you barf? Yes. Yes to all of the above. The first time I barfed about the second parabola,

and then I took drugs from then on. I could last for about 30 parabolas without. 30 parabolas. So the parabola is the trajectory of the plane. It's a loop that goes up, and as it falls back to earth, you're weightless, basically. And they normally do about 40 of them. 40 in one trip. Right.

Now, if you're weightless, so too would be your vomit. So that would not be pleasant for other people, I wouldn't think. It's not even pleasant for you. I found out the first time you don't vomit in zero G, you hold it. Oh, you hold it. I don't even know what that means to hold it. I don't know if you're biophysically capable of holding vomit. So you put your money where your mouth was. You're designing food. You ate it in zero G. You're testing to see what effect it would have on you. That's admirable. Basically, we're testing the packages to see if you could open it and if you could eat from it with utensils. Right.

So if you're trying to rip it open and it flies out of your hand and then it scatters everywhere. Yeah. For example, on Skylab, we had a big can. And it's a pop-off lid. You pull the lid off. You open that in zero G. Half the contents come out with the lid. That's bad.

Bad. The challenges of zero G eating, Eugene. Wait. So the plane, it with the lid. That's bad. The challenges of zero-g eating, Eugene. Wait, so the plane, it falls? Yeah, so basically that's correct. So the plane goes up and it takes a trajectory that is effectively free fall towards Earth. How long does that last? How long do you have to eat your soup?

Yeah, so if you want to eat your soup in zero-g, you've got about 20 seconds to do so. In fact, for scenes in the movie Apollo 13, they want it to be authentic, so they were all actual zero g so they have to staple together these 20 second filmed intervals to make it look like they were continuously in space so was he saying that he falls 30 times testing yes at 20 seconds yes and it's on drugs that's what he drugs to prevent him from throwing oh not like, not like PCP to feel invincible? I don't know what other drugs he might have taken, but he's just trying to not throw up.

I see. What we really need in this conversation is an actual chef. Who knows what it's like to fall from space eating food. Or at least knows how to make food. So we have with us, live in the studio, we have Brian Ray. Brian Ray has competed in nearly 20 episodes of The Iron Chef. If you know the show, you know how challenging that is. Yeah. And it's on the spot.

You don't know what you're going to have to make beforehand, and they reveal it, and there you go. And it tests your creativity, your panache. I would be crushed by the stress of Kitchen Stadium. And I didn't have to take drugs to do it. There he is. Welcome to StarTalk Radio, Brian Ray. Hey, Brian. So right now, you're co-executive chef at Budokan, a restaurant in New York City.

Yep. Features, let me guess, Asian cuisine. Yeah, modern Asian cuisine. Budokan. Chinese, primarily. This sounds like one of the evil enemies in Star Trek. This is Budokan. Budokan is, it does, it sounds like an angry monster.

Budokan is a theater in Japan. Oh, I didn't know that. Budokan is a very, like, theatric theater. Is your food particularly theatrical or histrionic, should I say? So one of the reasons why we love having you on the show, because you're not only an expert chef who's competed, but not only that, your father was an electrical engineer for NASA. Yeah.

How often do I get a chef with genetic links to NASA engineer? I know we're all thugs normally. But at your age, you were probably like a little tot at the time he was doing this. Yeah. What do you remember that he did for NASA? The stories that he told us, he worked for Grumman. He tested the test, he tested the LEM.

Oh, so the Lunar Excursion Module. So Grumman, right on Long Island here, this is where they built the module. So this is what landed on the moon. Yep.

Yeah. My brother Eric was born at the time. Is that right? Okay. And then he also... This would be your older brother. Correct, yes.

Yes. Uh-huh. Yes, much. And then he also helped with the Saturn V booster rocket. He helped with the Stage 1. Stage 1. That's like the first one.

Sounds like it, right? Sounds like you know about as much as me about the Stage 1 rocket, Neil. So that's great. So you've also worked as a sous chef at Mesa Grill in Las Vegas and in New York. I ate at Mesa Grill. Beautiful place. Cool. I don't know if you were there while I was there, but the food was really good.

Well, if it was really good, then I was there. So I'm wondering, if space tourism is on the horizon, then somebody is going to want to bring a chef with them one day. Absolutely. Because this astronaut food thing is not going to fly, literally or figuratively. So if you're one of these chefs, what might you envision for a restaurant in orbit? For space tourism, you'd be there for a long time. Exactly.

It'd be a vacation. Everybody's paying a fortune just to go into space even for a few moments. $20 million. So, I mean, what would you pay to go to, like, a gourmet hot restaurant? You know, great cocktails, great cocktail servers. Probably $20 million in 2000. NASA should be run by restaurateurs. If it was, they'd probably already have a casino in space. Oh, so you're saying it's got

the wrong people with the visions. Exactly. You need hungry people with visions to take us into space. Because in zero-G, your cooking would be really different, I would think, right? I mean, food preparation would be different. And I'm thinking, what's the big challenge when you make a souffle? Like, if you peek at it by opening the oven, what happens? Well, of course, it's going to deflate. It's going to deflate. And when it deflates, it collapses.

And it's ruined. Under its own weight. Of course. So if you cook a souffle in space, there is no collapsing under its own weight because it's weightless. So it would be easy to make souffles in space. So that's one food we got. What else? Go down the list.

Okay, how about the ribs? Can we make ribs for this? Yeah, absolutely. Eugene has ribs on the brain. Yeah, slow and low. So one of the problems is I don't know if you'd want to cook the ribs in space, because if you do it right, you would smoke it for 36 hours. Yeah, how does smoke work in space?

And where does the smoke go? Yeah. That would look odd. Do spaceships not have chimneys? Yeah, you can't vent. Isn't there venting? No, what they do is they have filters, and you re-filter. In fact, they filter all, you know, it's quite efficient up there,

because you can't stop at the quick mart and swap out your food plus your garbage there's not a garbage disposal and crack a window yeah so you know that's this this this is what will challenge us when we come back what i want to do is talk more about how you cook food in space how you drink in space and i'll get some culinary advice from chef ray All that after the break. This is StarTalk Radio. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, and we're talking about space food today. A couple of things. I imagine a lot would be different. Tell us what unique things you do in the kitchen,

and let me react to what might have to happen to that in space. We already settled the souffle thing. Souffles don't fall. You can be an awful souffle maker and it'll stay puffy. What else you got going in the kitchen? How do you deal with open flame? There's a lot of things where a quick blowtorch or you need to have that. Yeah, open flame doesn't work well in a closed

capsule. And seasoning too. Seasoning? Yeah. Oh, so here's the thing. Your seasoning would have to be liquid so that it can stick. The food has to like itself, right? If you start shaking a salt and pepper shaker, it all goes into the air around you. So if you had a nice crispy fried chicken, you're going to have to spray it with? Spray it with a liquid, salty, peppery thingy. So you'd have to turn all of your spices into liquids.

Wow. That shouldn't be that hard, right? Sure. That's what else is a sauce. But spices liquefy. You're describing sauce. Yeah, basically. But what is the word for these liquid spices? It is too bad we don't have one on Earth.

They have one on Mars. Yeah. Yeah. So other things. I'm told in Japan there's some tradition where they eat food off of a naked woman that's laid down in a table. Is this true? I think we should make it a tradition here also.

I think you were literally confusing that tradition with something you saw in Cinemax. Was that right? On Cinemax? No, I don't. Yeah, I get basic cable. I don't get Cinemax. But that would be odd behavior in space. Absolutely.

And then she could walk around too in space because it would stick to her, right? It would stick to her, yeah. So there is no horizontal. In fact, you can put it on all sides of her body because the food would stick to any parts of her at all. That's one of the disappointing things of eating food off a naked lady here is that she can't walk around. It is such a bummer that she is table-like. These are your persistent disappointments, I understand. And so a few other things, moving liquids around would be a challenge, right?

And how would you sauté in space? Sauté. Sauté is French for to jump, you know, and so. You'd have to create a little basket. I've been working on this, a space pan that I will be selling. You have a patent ready for this. Yes, a spherical wok. Eugene, space pan.

So all you would need is weight to put down on your sauté, and it wouldn't jump. It would just sort of stay there, but you would sort of jiggle it, I guess. Sure, absolutely. I mean, when you cook, you know, there's constant movement, especially like Budokan. It's a Chinese restaurant. There's a lot in the wok. There's a lot of walking. Yes.

Could you use a wok in space or would everything fly away? Every time you flipped it, it would go up into the ceiling. And there's no... Do you know what you need? Here you go. A three-dimensional spherical wok. Yeah. So every time you flick it, it'll hit the other surface and fry there as well.

That's the idea of my space pan. I'm taking your invention here. I'm sorry. Jeez. And here's a creepy one. Carbonated beverages. You don't want that in space. Because on Earth, you drink some Coke or Pepsi, whatever, and it bubbles up in your stomach. Where do the gases go? They rise

above the liquid, and then it comes up your esophagus, and then you burp. In space space the gas does not know to go quote above the liquid it just emanates anywhere around the liquid and it is not concentrated ready for you to exhale no pain in space so if you ever burped in space the gas would come up with what the gas was mixed with so all the food and liquid would come up in your burp. And that's just nasty. The word is vomit.

That's what vomit is. You would vomit Coca-Cola. That's what every restaurant wants. I want to get back to my interview with Charles Borland. He's a food scientist for NASA. He had visited me in my office a couple of months ago. And he's designed food his whole life. And I asked him what his favorite food was that he

designed for the space program. Shrimp cocktail has probably been my favorite. Favorite space food. Was this freeze-dried shrimp that you had to reconstitute? Right, freeze-dried, and then you add water when you get ready to eat it. I guess that's better than no shrimp at all, but it can't be like what you get on the fresh fish market. It's really close because it turns out the shrimp freeze-dry real good, and then they rehydrate so that they look like fresh shrimp. So you had to test all the seafood to find out? Right. Did you have human guinea pigs or did you actually eat the food that you were preparing to test it? We had a taste panel in the laboratory. A taste panel? What's that code for? Eating rotten food. Okay, so in cocktail, so does that stay as one of your favorite foods?

Yeah, and also irradiated beefsteak is one of my favorite foods. Irradiated beefsteak. So this is you subject it to high doses of radiation, kills all the bacteria, so there's nothing to decompose the meat. Right. You just open it up, and you can warm it if you want, but it's shelf-stable for several years. Quantify several. Five to seven.

Five to seven. Yeah, that's several. Right. Yeah, but's several. Right. Yeah, but no one's going into space for seven years. So why would you have to prepare food that long? The Apollo missions were no more than ten days. Did anyone tell you the missions weren't really lasting that long? Well, in order to have something that lasts a long time,

you have to have a lot longer shelf life than you expect to use it. We didn't expect to keep it for seven years and use it. But if you know food starts decaying the day it's processed and it's a matter of time it might be days might be years before it's inedible. Plus when you prepare it then it has to be packaged and then there's all the lead time before the launch so there's all this extra time the overhead time. That's sometimes close to a year on almost any space mission. So you're just being extra safe. Right.

Okay. Now, all these people who are afraid of irradiated food, I think in France they call it Frankenfood. So what do you say to them? I say it's absolutely safe. We don't have any test that's proven that it's harmful. So you think they just fear the technology. It's just new to them, and they don't know what it's doing, and so therefore they'd rather not take the risk. Right.

I call it anti-technology. Anti-technology. So we could roll you over to France and say, here's the man who's been eating this for 40, 50 years, and he's looking healthy, right? Right. So what food would you take into space? Well, first off, I don't want this guy writing my menus. The irradiated beefsteak, he could really sell it to you.

Well, the astronauts have more than 200 items they can pick from. They're not just handed food. They actually have some selection. I bet that's more than what's on your restaurant's menu. All right. Yeah, he doesn't have irradiated beefsteak, but I bet it's still pretty good. I bet it would be a novelty item that some people would buy. I would certainly

order it. Really? Yes. You know, aged steak, right? This is aged beef. Okay. Is it Kobe beef aged? No, it's just massage. It's just massage and fed beer. And then exposed to harmful levels of radiation so that you can eat it, whatever, for seven years. Just keep it in your pocket. Just keep it there.

You know, so gourmet meals, that's not an unheard of concept. In fact, did you know that Charles Simone, who's one of the Microsoft billionaires, paid $20 million, which is lunch money for him, to go onto the International Space Station for 10 days, and he went through the tourist agency Space Adventures. Okay? And this was not

through NASA. It's like a Disney ride. Not NASA approved, right? And his girlfriend at the time helped create a freeze-dried meal of quail roasted in Mandarin wine, duck confit with capers, chicken parmentier, apple fondant, rice pudding, and semolina cake with dried apricots. Yeah, my girlfriend does too. Eugene, guess who his girlfriend was? I don't know, Rachel Ray.

It was Martha Stewart at the at the time yeah so they were buddies that's a good girlfriend to have when you're going into space yes great pillows and tips for crafts did he bring tons of popsicle sticks things to make so another quick point is that in space by the way your body is designed to pump heavier up to your brain than down to your lower extremities because it knows it has to go against gravity. If you don't have gravity, you have fluid buildup in your upper parts of your body. Do you become super smart?

No, but you become bloated in your upper parts of your body, and it interferes with your ability to sense taste, which is why astronauts generally prefer much spicier food than normal. Let's find out. I asked Charles Borland, again, food scientist with NASA. The guy who does drugs and airplanes. I had to find out what's going on with Tang. Let's see what he says about that.

Settled it once and for all. Did Tang come from NASA? No. No? That's like saying Pluto isn't a planet anymore, which we've been saying for 10 years. That's one of these fundamental truths of the universe, and now you're telling me no. And I have to believe you, because you've been around from the early days. So what gives?

Well, I've even heard congressmen say that NASA invented Tang, but Tang was on the grocery shelf before NASA was ever formed. So Tang was selected by NASA, perhaps, and that's what gave it the notoriety, I guess. Right. Okay. So it is astronaut food what gave it the notoriety, I guess. Right. Okay, so it is astronaut food, but it wasn't invented for... No. And between you and me, I never really liked Tang. And the choice between Tang and actual orange juice?

I'm taking the orange juice. I'm sorry. Well, the reason we do that, if you freeze dry or dehydrate orange juice in any way, and then vacuum pack it, because you have to vacuum pack beverages, and then when you get ready to rehydrate, it'll be solidified and it won't rehydrate. Oh, it becomes orange solids. Non-dissolvable. Non-dissolvable solids.

Solids. So the Tang is just a powder with the sugar in it and there you go. You can do anything with Tang and not hurt it. There you have it. You can do anything with Tang. Tang, the ultimate freedom. And not hurt it. There you go. I like do anything with Tang Tang the ultimate freedom And not hurt it There you go

I like that I like that Eugene Merman Piping in Also did you know Tang was invented By a guy named William Mitchell

Who was working At General Foods And it wasn't popular initially Because in America We make our own orange juice So how could it possibly Be popular But then you find out

This same guy Invented Cool Whip Pop Rocks And Quick Setting Jello be popular but then you find out this same guy invented cool whip pop rocks and quick-setting jello this is a chemist a brilliant food chemist I should have shrine to him in my house says the professional chef because surely you use cool whip on all your gourmet dishes and pop rocks pop rocks absolutely yeah pop rocks in space that would be interesting, wherever that

will take you. When we come back after the break, we're going to talk about water, so fundamental an ingredient in food, as well as, oh, by the way, it's why food reheats so well in a microwave oven, because microwaves heat water, the water molecule, by vibrating it.

But they don't have the, so in space, they heat them other ways as well. But we'll get to that and find out if, do you need to take all the water there is with you or can you find it elsewhere on your journey? When we come back to StarTalk Radio. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, and we're talking about space food today. And I have joining me comedian Eugene Merman and professional chef Brian Ray. Brian.

Yes. Where are you cooking food these days? I'm going. A restaurant called Budokan. Budokan. Chelsea Market. And Chelsea Market. I'll be there. If you're in New York, check it out. Budokan. He's not there now, obviously, so somebody else is cooking for you. Yes. That's right. Sunday night. Don't go Sunday nights. He's not there., obviously, so somebody else is cooking for you. That's right. Sunday night. Don't go Sunday nights.

He's not there. I don't know. So some of the things they serve, not only food, but beverages matter. Yeah, absolutely. We talked about the fact that in zero G, burping is really bad. It's equivalent to basically throwing up. Well, burping soda is really bad. Is burping regular bad, too?

I don't know. The gas has to be in a different place from the food in order to come out of you. And the gas knows to go above solid things when you're in one seat. But if you're just drinking water, will you throw up? I don't think so. I have to check on that. I don't know. Because all I did was the research on the dissolved gases in the CO2 gases.

That's everybody's problem. But one of the beverages people like to drink is wine. I ain't going to Mars unless I can bring some bottles of wine with me. I'll just let you know that right now. A Macallan 12 would make Mars wonderful. And so, and one of the things they do is, if you want fresh food, you can bring fresh food up there immediately, and then you can eat it. But then if you want fresh food later, fruits and vegetables, there's talk of bringing seeds on a long Mars journey, which would last at least nine months to get there and another couple of years before you come back.

And if you're going to grow seeds, you might do it hydroponically, just in water, just in a water solution. And so all the ways water matters to space, I brought up with Charles Worland, who is my running interview as he visited me in my office. He's the author of a book all about sort of space recipes, because he invented them. They call themselves food scientists, not chefs. I find that interesting. Let's find out what he says about water in space. If they're traveling up with the water anyway, then why not reconstitute the food before you go? It's the same water. Who cares whether it's in the food or in a cabinet? So we do that on International Space Station because we have to haul all the water up there and so it's better to haul it in the food. But on shuttle it generates a tremendous amount of water. From the engines? Fuel

cells. Oh the fuel cells. Oh okay. So fuel cells you've got hydrogen and oxygen coming together giving off energy and the byproduct is just plain old water. Drinkable water. plain old water. Drinkable water. Drinkable water. You know, what does fuel cell water taste like? Do you ever taste deionized water? I don't know if I have.

I mean, you've got stuff in Houston that the rest of us don't have. You know, I run on higher octane, or I don't know what. Do you have four spigots in your bathroom? Or it's sort of like distilled water, too. Okay, so it's a little bland. Very bland. But it's okay. You can quench your thirst with it.

Sure. What I was worried about distilled water is they say that it's so low in minerals, it can suck the minerals out of your own body cells. Is that true? I sort of doubt that. You've got a lot of minerals in your body cells and there's very little water. Okay. So that's just an old tale, I guess. So there you have it.

So water in space. Do you know that on the space station, it's a very efficient machine for recycling water? Water is essential to life as we know it, of course. And, well, first of all, just consider what it costs. It costs anywhere between $10,000 and $ and 15 000 a pound to launch water into space so if that's what it costs you to get the water there you're not going to waste a drop of it so the filtration system in the air takes out the evaporated sweat from your body it sounds sounds delicious. Go on. As well as any moisture that you would exhale. This is the same moisture that would fog a mirror if you breathed on it.

And any other liquids that emerge from your body from any orifice. Right. They take these liquids, they process them, filter them, and then it's given back to you as drinking water. Basically, astronauts bleed each other dry and then plus their urine. Everything. We do not do that at Budokan. At Budokan, yeah. How much of the food has any

rehydrated urine or filtered, would you say? Well, the servers offer still sparkling or recycled urine. Gas without gas with gas. They even recycle any urine from laboratory animals that have been brought up. They bring animals to pee and drink it? These people are monsters.

Wait, wait, wait. Back up for a minute. This is insane. Wait, excuse me, Mr. Merman. Go on. The glass of water that's in front of you at this moment, how old do you think that water is? That's as old as the earth. That has passed through the kidneys of Abraham Lincoln.

That's fine. Some molecules there. The idea of bringing cats into space to pee for you to turn it into drinking water is way more weird than this is somewhere from a pond. A pond? Where do you think it was before it was a pond? Inside a rat. It was somewhere inside of some creature. It evaporated into the clouds and rained back down.

So all water is recycled at some level. In fact, the water on the space station is the purest water you would have ever consumed, even if they did extract it from the laboratory rat. Rat pee. Delicious. And you know, on Earth, you take typically 50 liters of water to take a shower. On the space station, they'll do it in four liters. Wow.

Four liters. Now, what I want to know about is if you're going to go into space, where are you going to get water if you're not going to bring it all with you because it's so expensive? And Mars has frozen water on it, and so that's a place to... They get it from the moms. The moms that are all there. On Mars.

Moms on Mars. Let's go to a clip again with me and Dr. Borland to talk about a trip to Mars and what food would be like on such a long voyage. So what do you imagine a trip to Mars, the food would be like on that? It would be any better than what they're getting now in the space station and space shuttle? I doubt it. When you go on a mission like that, it's always a fight between the engineers and the food people. We want to have good food, and they want to have less weight.

And the way to have less weight. And the way to have less weight is to take dehydrated food and try to recycle water. And get your water elsewhere. We think there might be water on Mars, so you're not taking as much water as take food to be rehydrated when you get to Mars. One other option that we looked at years ago that can't convince anybody to do it is use frozen food and use that as a radiation shield of your vehicle. Because once you leave the magnetic protection of Earth's field, anybody to do it is use frozen food and use that as a radiation shield of your vehicle because once you leave the magnetic protection of earth's field you're susceptible to harmful rays from the sun

harmful particles oh and it stays frozen because it's touching the dark side of the ship or something in space well how do you have to have refrigerators probably to keep and then you need energy yeah listen there's an energy problem yeah right you might be able to work out by using the outside somehow right because the particles don't like moving through frozen concentrated orange juice. No. It's probably a good shield, but I don't know what you do when you come home. I know, right? You had all your good juices, and then you just get irradiated like the meat.

Maybe it'll last longer. So irradiated food, it kills all the bacteria. It's the bacteria that decomposes the food. So you take out all the bacteria, wrap it, put it on the shelf. It's good for years and years and years. It sounds delicious. I'm just saying. I think when kids, like little kids, are like, I want to be an astronaut,

I don't think they're really thinking about the part where they're eating radiated meat. They're not thinking it through. And drinking very well distilled urine. At your Budokan restaurant, do you irradiate any foods? Well, some of our products come from Asia, so by law, anything coming in from China and Vietnam has to be irradiated.

Is that right? I didn't know that. So what are they afraid of? Like bird flu and this sort of thing? I'm not sure, but exotic fruits like rambutan and things like that, they're all irradiated. I've never even heard of rambutan, so that's exotic to me. On your menu, when you serve it, does it say irradiated or rambutan?

It does not. Or do you phrase it differently? No, it does not. And also, what might be the future of this is you genetically modify your foods to survive a long voyage to Mars. By the way, getting there by our current technology takes about nine months. To get back, you don't just get in your ship and come back because the alignment of Earth and Mars is not favorable for the trajectory. So you have to wait until Earth and Mars reconfigure themselves to make the trip back.

And to do that, you've got to wait like a year and a half for that to happen. That's really the reason I haven't gone. That's actually... So a full-up round trip to Mars is like three years. And then you pre-prepare the food, and you want the food there the whole time. And so that's why you need food that can survive that trip. I can imagine a day where we genetically engineer food that will have, it's not only that will maintain its flavor,

but also maintain something very important in the chef world is the food texture, isn't it? Absolutely. Well, good as if it has the right flavor, but it's pablo, right? I mean, then it's just baby food at that level. Yeah, absolutely. So how much do you think about texture when you prepare foods? All the time. I mean, next to flavor, I think that's the most important thing.

Like, it's got to be fun and, like, on your palate. Like, everything plays, you know, spice, crunchy, texture, everything. I know someone who never liked shrimp because to them it tasted, they thought of biting somebody's finger. Really? Yeah, because if you bite your finger, it's like shrimp, except you bite harder and then it sort of snaps. So try it next time.

That's a person who doesn't know how delicious fingers are. That's their main problem. And one big fear in genetically modified food is you get one of these scenes, I don't know if you remember the movie from, was it the early 70s? Sleeper. Sleeper. Yeah. That's right. Woody Allen wakes up in the future, and they're there eating these genetically engineered

vegetables, and there's like a carrot the size of a tree log. That's my greatest fear with science. Incredibly big fruit and vegetables that seem unmanageable in New York City. This is a childhood nightmare. Huge vegetables invented by scientists. And there's the slow food movement, which I guess- Yeah, started in 1986. Vegetables invented by scientists. And there's the slow food movement, which I guess... Yeah, started in 1986.

Slow food. I always know that this stuff begins in France, right? Because they're very food... Yeah. They're food snobs, actually. Am I saying it right? Yes. Yeah.

Food snobs. And I think if you need food to last for five years, the slow food movement might have something to say about that. Yeah, if it's going to last five years, I mean, you definitely want to start with something good. Because no telling where it would go after that. What I wonder is... I don't believe slow food is slow decomposition of food. I think it's the opposite. It's food that you took a long time to prepare.

Yes. Well, we're coming up on a break. And after the break, I want to get to the bottom of what is this about astronaut ice cream. It's something that I never really understood. More StarTalk Radio. Welcome back. A couple of months ago, Charles Borland visited me. He's a NASA food scientist. Is there a second NASA food scientist? Because Charles Borland visited me. He's a NASA food scientist. Is there a second NASA food scientist?

Because this radio program is making me think there's one food scientist, and it's this guy. Charlie. He's a good one because he's been around for many generations of spacecraft. And we talked about the obvious most, the food that every kid wants to try, and it's astronaut ice cream. Let's check it out. Food that every kid wants to try. And it's astronaut ice cream. Let's check it out.

I'd love me some ice cream, but I've never really bought the packet on the shelf. We sell it here at the American Museum of Natural History at the Hayden Plantarium shop. But I always walk by those packs because I say, I am not. Look, I'm 20 feet from a Haagen-Dazs dispenser. I am so not buying astronaut ice cream. So what is astronaut ice cream? What do you do with it? I hand you ice astronaut ice cream? What do you do with it? I hand you ice cream, and then what do you do with it?

We cut it up in little small chunks, put it in the freeze dryer. That increases the surface area of the ice cream. And then you freeze dry it. It takes about a day and a half to do this. So freeze drying, if I remembered my food science, you blow air across the food while it's frozen, and then you evaporate or sublimate the frozen water, leaving behind the flavor and everything else that is the ice cream. Right.

And an interesting story about the astronaut ice cream is that it was only used on Apollo 8, and I don't think they ate any. They denied eating it, but it went up there. It was too scary, I guess. You know, what's funny is, there they are. Apollo 8, for listeners who don't remember is the first mission to leave Earth orbit and go to the moon. It didn't land on the moon but it did

a big old loop orbit figure 8 around the moon. So you're telling me they were brave enough to leave Earth for the first time a human has ever done so but were two chickens to eat the astronaut ice cream that you prepared? I don't know if they were two chickens or they didn't like it but later on when we tested it with other astronauts they didn't like it because it sticks to your teeth.

Over the break, Leslie just brought in, Leslie's our researcher, some actual astronaut ice cream. And I'm an astronaut virgin here. Me too. We each have a packet. One is chocolate ice cream with chocolate chips. Another one is an ice cream sandwich. And another one simply says ice cream. I'll try just the one that says ice cream. chocolate chips. Another one is an ice cream sandwich. And another one simply says ice cream. I'll try just the one that says ice cream.

Ice cream. Okay. Chunky monkey was not an option. How about to get the chocolate chips? And I'll do the ice cream sandwich. I'm a little worried about this. Ew. Oh, I see.

It's because I have three flavors. Yeah. So you're going to... Oh, this looks like an ice cream sandwich. It looks like what you remember you get in the vending machine? You get that? It like an ice cream sandwich. It looks like what you remember you get in the vending machine. You get that. It smells like ice cream. Eating this, I realize why they never bothered.

Mine is crunchy. Yeah. But it's got flavor. Sure. It tastes like the ice cream. No one's saying scientists can't make this. But actually, but I like the cold sensation on my mouth. Yeah.

So this is everything about ice cream except the cold, creamy sensation. Right. Which is kind of why you want ice cream in the first place. Right. It's the opposite. Wow. No, but I'm no longer an ice cream virgin. An astronaut ice cream virgin.

Thank you, Leslie. Leslie brought this in for us. Yes, it's delicious. Mmm. If you're listening, don't eat this. If any kids are listening, please don't bother. Don't try this at home is what you're doing. I mean, try it, but be disappointed

So Leslie, you picked that up at the museum shop I guess almost every science museum shop Has got Astronaut ice cream You got it There are other foods that have worked out Well in space, and others that haven't So you don't want foods that'll crumble

Because then they just make crumbs everywhere like crackers and... Like astronaut ice cream. What did this just do? Yeah, all this is is dry... Chips and crunchy food just does not work in space. So I bet after a while they start craving a crunch. I wonder what that's like if you're three years without being able to crunch a potato

chip. And so instead of bread, which can get very crumbly, they used tortillas. Tortilla worked out very, very well. One of the first Hispanic astronauts requested tortillas, and they found out quite by accident that tortillas, like the gringos found out that tortillas work better than their bread. Not only does it not crumble, you can wrap food in it, and that the food won't spill around.

The ultimate space bread. And so, you know, there are other, a couple of things. They tried pizza in space, but pizza always ended up soggy and chewy and micro-g. But I never eat pizza if I leave New York. I'm just saying. So you would then not do it on your way to Mars? No, because I would so not. If I don't do it in Hackensack, I don't do it on my way to Mars. No, because I would so not, if I don't do it in Hackensack, I don't do it on my way to Mars.

We've got one more clip of my interview and we learn about just some flyboys and what they wanted to take into space and what they were denied. Let's find out how that went. Let's go. Sonny Carter was an astronaut and he was also a flight surgeon

and he was also a pro soccer player and he found this barbecued beef in Georgia, or barbecued pork, that he insisted we try. Well, he sent us a sample, and it failed all the microbiology tests. What does that mean, a fail on microbiology tests? It had organisms in it that were not acceptable. I thought nothing survives barbecue. You're telling me he had barbecue pork and it still had organisms running around in it? Right.

So then, anyway, he wouldn't take no for an answer. These are fly boys. You know, they want what they want, yeah. And they sure as hell are not going to listen to a food scientist. Right, okay. He went back and got another sample and brought it up and we tested it. It failed again. I told him, no, we can't take it.

So then he gave me the name of the person down there and I called the guy and had him cook it and then freeze it, the whole thing, because they were doing pulled pork. Pulled pork. Oh, that opens, that exposes the... That's where they were contaminated. Yeah. And we did it and it passed. Because you pull it, then it's exposed to any microorganisms floating in the air.

Right. Right. And on their hands and gloves. Yeah. Did you alert him how many microorganisms he was eating in his pulled pork? You'd think he might say, okay, I might be the right stuff, but I don't want these organisms. Well, he didn't seem to be concerned about it. He'd been eating all of his life. So it'd be interesting if you did send astronauts up with these sort of organismically contaminated foods, and those microbes are exposed to high radiation

from the sun, you might mutate them into something interesting. That's a possibility. Because if you're out there all by yourself with, know, it's you, the capsule, and your microorganisms. No telling what comes out at the end of the day. You and your microorganisms. There it is. There's no, it's whatever is the portfolio of organisms you launch with, they're with you forever.

There are no others that will join your... So is the moral no pulled pork sandwiches in space? I think so. You've been listening to StarTalk Radio. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. And as always, I bid you to keep looking up.