StarTalk Radio - Food in Space! With Alton Brown and Guests

Episode Date: November 23, 2021

How good is food in space? Neil deGrasse Tyson and comic co-host Jordan Klepper feast on food science and the challenges we face sending food to space with chef Alton Brown, food chemist Dr. Arielle Johnson and NASA food scientist Dr. Grace Douglas. NOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons can watch or listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://www.startalkradio.net/show/food-in-space-with-alton-brown-and-guests/Thanks to our Patrons Jeni Morrow, Hyrule Ok, blufor, Timothy Dalby, John Turnham, SkellyIRL, and Chuck H for supporting us this week.Photo Credit: Pink Sherbet Photography from USA, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons 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. StarTalk Live! Start talking live! Town Hall. The topic is food. Food, the science and technology of food on Earth and in space. I want to first introduce my co-host this evening.

You all remember him from Comedy Central, Jordan Klepper. Jordan, come on out. Hey, everybody. Good to see you. Hello, everybody. Good to be here. Good to be here. We got you.

And you've hosted Klepper. Hosted the well-named Klepper on Comedy Central. Is that the most creative name you can come up with? It's the most creative name, yes. But it's a series of documentaries where you're exploring topics in America. It turns out this is a strange country we live in. So I went out there. I talked to people. Yeah.

You've got to meet these people, Neil. They're very strange. So I've been lucky enough to meet a lot of them. Excellent. Yes. Jordan Klepper. Excellent. So there we go.

All right. So also joining us, in addition to the inimitable Jordan Klepper, is flavor scientist and food chemist, Dr. Ariel Johnson. Dr. Johnson, come on out. Hi. Oh. Dr. Johnson, come on out. Hi. Thanks. Jordan. You have a PhD in viticulture and enology.

Enology, yeah. At UC Davis. That's where I went. Isn't that just code for wine? A lot of wine. We actually did a lot of studies of different beverages. So there was some gin, some tequila, a little bit of... Beverages, yes.

Beverages. And to be fair, Neil, I have a doctorate in scotch. Yeah. Doctorate. And our feature guest this evening is the one and only Alton Brown. Alton Brown, come on out. So let me fill in some of this bio. So, you hang tight for a minute. You were like PhD.

Oh, shit. Really? Is that what you're talking about? You're a PhD advisor to the premier restaurant Noma in Denmark. Yes. That's like one of the most premier restaurants ever. It did win best restaurant in the world a few times, yeah. Under your watch? Sometimes. That's amazing. So this is a job?

It is a job that I kind of invented. When I was doing research in grad school, I went over there to see what they were up to and write some papers and then I was like, hey, I'm available. Why don't you guys hire me? Because we're having such a great time. That's great. I want that job. I'll settle for a reservation. Yeah. So. She's also the science officer on a show called Good Eats. I heard about that. I heard about that. That there's a show that even has somebody called a science officer.

Good eat. 14 years on Food Network. Good eat. That was the original run. We actually just crossed 20 this year. Oh. Can I ask her a quick question? Where is Flavorama in juxtaposition to Flavortown?

Are they close to each other? They are close to each other, but Flavorama has much better urban planning and an actual sewer system. There you go. And clean water. Cool. We have you on this show because you're not just celebrity chef.

You have made it a career to juxtapose, to cross-pollinate the fruits of science and its research into the food you prepare. Yes, sir. This is an important place to be as we go forward in this world. I believe that it is. So what intrigues me about the two of you, especially since she's on your staff. Consulting flavorama-ist. Okay, this means sort of on the staff. So you come to science from food,

and she comes to food from science. Could you both share with me what that trajectory was? You first. Oh, for me? Well, I was always super interested in food as a kid to the point where, like, my grandmother was a really good cook and I'd go over to her house

and she had this, like, amazing cookbook collection and sometimes I would just, like, get on the floor and read them for hours. And I'd cook a lot. Then when I was, like, getting into getting, like, a bachelor's degree, it turned out you could do food and science together. As a bachelor's degree? No, I was doing a bachelor's degree in chemistry. So I was super interested in chemistry. You're fundamentally a chemist. I am, yeah. All of my

formal training is in chemistry. Good, okay. Yeah. It turned out that chefs were interested in science and scientists were interested in working with chefs. So I did some of that here at NYU and then found a graduate program that would let me continue. So UC Davis ended up out west. So Alton, how did you get to science from food? I got to science from food by realizing that I wasn't a very good cook. That's how I got into comedy. That's how you got into comedy. that's how I got into comedy that's how you got into comedy I had left you have a show on Food Network and you just said

you're not a good cook I'm better it got better but when I went off to culinary school I had changed careers because I wanted to make a food show and I got off to culinary school and realized holy crap I'm actually not very good at this but what I figured out is that if I could understand the science

of what was going on in the food, I could be a better cook. And so that was the tact that I took with my show, which is that if we all just understand what it is the food freaking wants, we can make it better. And the answer to that is almost always science. So you're saying, not to put words in your mouth, but anyone in the kitchen can become a better scientist with a dose of science literacy added to it.

Yes, but they don't necessarily have to. You can become a better cook through science. You can definitely become a better scientist through cooking. Definitely. But I don't think that you have to have science. There are people that are just great cooks. I'm not that. No, that's not what I asked. You get a great cook. Now you add some science to their great cooking. Does their cooking get better? It can. I'm not going to say unilaterally that it will because some people don't care,

nor should they because they're cultural cooks maybe. And they're cooking out of traditions. They don't have to understand what's going on. I trained under some really great French chefs. All they had to do was scream really loud. And the food was delicious. Wait, so the French, that is a science. Yeah, it's just like, idiot! That's part of the science.

So goddamn good science of management. But I do think that, at least for me, and I think for American culture, certainly where we are, is that if you are willing to learn some science, it will make you a better cook. Was that answering your question? Yeah. So you advise Noma Restaurant, head of R&D. The idea that a restaurant would have an R&D head, that tickles me. But what particularly intrigues me is that this is in Denmark,

But what particularly intrigues me is that this is in Denmark, and that restaurant is committed to local ingredients. Yeah, so like… So doesn't that greatly limit what you can create? It is a huge and sometimes terrifying limitation. I know the first year that they opened, this was before I got there, they were like, great, we're going to use seasonal Nordic produce. And it was November, and their vegetable supplier came to the back door and was like, great, here's your seasonal Nordic produce. And it was like three beets and a carrot. But in many creative pursuits in the arts, I think that, you know, creative

constraints really help you be more creative. And so in that case, the constraint of having to source ingredients from the Nordic region, the Scandinavian region, which is very cold, has a very short growing season, not a lot of sunlight. There's no citrus there either. There's no citrus. No citrus, no olive oil,

great dairy, but a lot of fruits don't grow there. There's no wine that really grows there. Other than that, it's a great restaurant. Yeah. Get me out of play. They have the finest reindeer piss. You can actually get the reindeer moss

from the inside of the reindeer's... No, stop that sentence. Where? Where? No, no. stop that sentence. Where? Where? Where? Stop that sentence. Get flavor from the inside of the reindeers. I don't want to hear the end of that sentence.

But yeah, so lemons don't grow in Denmark. Wait, just to be clear, you just affirmed that reindeers do exist. Reindeers exist. They're a real thing. Okay. I just want to be clear. And something comes out of them. Various things come out of them. There's many gastronomic options inside of a reindeer.

I am never going to Denmark. So you're saying that what you would do is substitute what might be familiar flavors with something else that approximates it. Yeah. So any good examples of that? Well, actually one thing, so like cooking tends to be better if you have some acidity. It just like brightens up all the flavors

and a lot of chefs like to use lemons for that. If you don't have access to lemons, it turns out that the, well, the native European forest ant, Formica rufa, they're called Formica because they produce a lot of formic acid. So these are actually like tangy ants. So by going into the forest, you know, looking for mushrooms or berries or flower petals, you start tasting these ants.

You're like, wow, these are... You start tasting the ants. Wait, wait, wait. She just worked at a zoo. No, no. Ariel, you rummage the forest floor for ants, taste them to see if they will work in this world-class restaurant. I have done that, yes.

So it turns out these ants are very acidic. We have, at Noma, we had friends that were chefs in other places in the world, like Brazil, who were experimenting with ants. No, the native Amazonian cuisine uses ants.

So we're like, well, why not try these ants that are swarming all over us? And it turns out, so ants are very acidic, so you can make this quite acidic and refreshing

ant paste that we put on like a juniper and blueberry. It was good. It was really good. Jordan, she used the word refreshing.

She did. Yeah. You're not going to comment. Ant paste. But also, it turns out that so ants have a lot of pheromones. They use chemicals to signal with each other. So they have like what's called a chemical ecology.

And we were, you know, we were tasting these ants and like, yes, I know. You're getting turned on by the ants. you're getting turned on by the ants. You're getting turned on by the ants. But it turns out a lot of the chemicals that they use to communicate with each other are some of the same volatile flavor molecules that are in herbs and flowers and other tasty plants.

Is this the foundation of molecular gastronomy? I've heard that term. And frankly, I never really understood what it meant. I think a lot of people don't understand what it means. Well, that's why we have you here. Yeah, yeah. So some people, some like journalists and stuff, attach molecular gastronomy to certain styles of cooking.

Technically speaking, molecular gastronomy is a field of study. The basically paying attention to molecularly, the chemistry of everything that happens in food and cuisine. So in cooking and in growing food. So it's related to food science. So you think about the difference between taste and smell? Oh, yeah, all the time. So which, can you, and flavor, can you judge,

is there one more important than the other? And flavor, can you judge, is there one more important than the other? Is there, how much of our DNA gets directed to, what can you tell us about this? I can tell you a lot about that, actually. So although when we like eat something tasty and we experience the flavor, we think, we feel like that's happening in the mouth and is all taste. Actually, a huge amount of flavor comes from smell. There's a process called retronasal olfaction.

Retronasal olfaction. So that's in contrast to orthonasal olfaction. Of course. Of course. We all knew that. Right, right. I think that's a cocktail up on 44. Erectilnasal olfaction? I had one of those.

Invasive. Sounds like college. Ortho-nasal olfaction is sniffing. It's when you smell things. Why couldn't you just say, what, thank you! Because we have smell complaints for them. Smell has one syllable less I check. We can't really write it in a paper like,

today, this paper is about sniffing. And there's the problem with academia. Comic books, it's all we really need. So what happens chemically when we taste something? So when we taste or when we smell something, there's molecules in your food. It's full of molecules. It's made of molecules.

Well, get some fresh stuff. No, without molecules, there is no food. Okay, well, let's ask a scientist. Zoom in, all of it's molecules. He'll get my back on this. It's molecules all the way down. Some of my best friends are made of molecules, okay? Yeah.

That's the bumper sticker right there, buddy. So you eat food. The food has a bunch of molecules. Some of them can bind to receptor proteins. These are proteins expressed on the outside of cells in our tongue and in our nasal cavity. So, like, the tongue. And the nasal cavity, which I can't show you,

but it's this little patch of... You actually stuck out your tongue to tell us what your tongue is. Yeah. But nasal, olfactal, whatever, you just said that and kept moving in the sentence. He's got to, I bet. Well, I mean, I have the tongue demo ready.

I would have to crack open your skull and show this little patch, and then you'd be dead, of the olfactory epithelium. So molecules in the food, we have taste receptors, but we also have the largest family of genes in our genome is devoted to smell. So this is approximately 400 different genes.

It's about 2% of our genome. So it's a huge amount of genetic information. Wow. It's like roughly the same amount of genetic information that separates humans from our closest primate relatives. And is this because it's more important to smell the bear than to taste the bear? Well, usually with tastes,

you have sweet, sour, salty, bitter, umami, and then the sort of deep scientific research is trying to find more. So anything- It's the Cheetos sensor, yeah. I'm with you. It's better to smell the bear before you're close enough to taste it. Well,etos. It's the Cheeto sensor. Yeah. I'm with you. It's better to smell the bear before you're close enough

to taste it. Well, yes. That's the point. I agree 100% on that one. So the reason I bring up orthonasal olfaction and retronasal olfaction is because smell plays

two roles for us and for a lot of animals. So there is the sniffing in role, the orthonasal role. So that's smelling the bear before we get there. And then once you, let's say,

fight with the bear and conquer the bear and roast the bear. If you're eating the bear and I think, you know what I mean? What are you doing in Denmark? What's going on there? That's how you get the job. You have to conquer a bear. Should we see the bear, understand the bear That's how you get the job. You have to conquer a bear.

Shouldn't we see the bear, understand the bear, and run away from the bear? Is that step one? No, it's straight from smelling to killing and roasting. Wait, wait, wait. So Ariel... But then when you have food in your mouth, you're also experiencing smell.

So it has this dual role of sniffing things out in the environment, but also giving you this rich sensory experience while you're eating. Now, given all that you know about receptors, the shapes of molecules as they enter our head, can you imagine either you or a future AI inventing a whole new smell or a whole new flavor?

Is that a possible future goal of what you do? Well, interestingly, so the human sense of smell is very flexible. So we have about 400 different receptors, but we can smell thousands upon thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of different odor molecules. So through what we call combinatorial coding, you're able to kind of, rather than just picking out one particular molecule, you get like a pattern for each type of molecule. So actually, like quite frequently, the flavor industry will synthesize a new molecule that has never existed in nature before, but we are able to smell it. Okay. So you can have a new smell that's a combination of other smells that doesn't exist itself.

Yeah, or the pattern that it makes in the brain actually activates different memory associations. So if this part hanging off the molecule kind of reminds me of lavender, and this part of the molecule, this is your brain shocking, kind of activates the like leather memory. Oh my God, it's my grandmother. That's what it smells like. It smells like grandmother. So Alton, in principle, you don't have to be in her lab to come up with some truly innovative new flavor. You're the guy.

You're like, you are food geek in the food universe. But I'm not inventing new flavors. I mean, she's talking about actually inventing something that doesn't exist that you wouldn't be able to. Only your limbic system would be able to figure that out. You combine other flavors in ways no one had previously dreamt of into a new culinary masterpiece. Has he met me?

into a new culinary masterpiece. Has he met me? What I try to do is to make something taste more like what you think it ought to taste like. So everybody knows in their head what mac and cheese ought to be like. Oh, yeah. Right? But when you make your own mac and cheese,

it very often does not reflect that sense. So what I try to do is to make food taste more like the thing you thought it ought to taste like. And sometimes that involves adding things that you didn't know would go in there. So very often that is waking up one flavor by supporting it with another. So I might go into macaroni and cheese, and I might put a little bit of nutmeg in there because I know how that supports certain cheese aromas. And I do know that as food is coming up…

That's why they sometimes put that in lasagna. Yes. They'll put just a little… In bechamel sauce because bechamel is one of the binders. But see, as food, and this is something Aaron and I have talked about. Wait, you said bechamel sauce? Is that what I've been making? I didn't know that.

Well, in lasagna, there's often a white sauce. That is what the French would call bachamel. Why are the French making lasagna? I'm sorry. I didn't mean to blow a gas. Because when it comes to cooking, the French do whatever they want to do. They invent all of it. But the point is, is when you go to eat, very often the aroma gets to your nose

long before the food gets. So we eat with our eyes, then we eat with our nose, and then it finally actually gets into our mouth. Well, there's a lot of things that we can do with herbs and spices. There are actually a lot more about making that connection first, because then you're like, oh my God, I'm home, you know? Or, oh my gosh, I'm loved, because some of us grew up associating love with noodles. That's okay. That's fine.

But sometimes it's turning around and saying, and this is something that, because I've read a lot of Ariel's work, is that you all of a sudden realize, okay, this compound in this food would actually taste more like itself if we put this in it. But yet this is not something that you would normally associate.

You wouldn't think of. Okay, for instance, I can make chicken soup taste hella more like chicken by using miso paste in it. Not enough so that you would recognize that it's there. Okay? And there are a lot of ways to play that game in the food world.

Back me up on that. So this is you experimenting in the kitchen. Absolutely. But how do you tap Ariel's expertise when you're in the kitchen and you're left alone in the kitchen? How do you grab? Well, the number one way that I tap her knowledge is when a word

has more than five syllables. I call up Ariel. I say, what the hell is that? And then she answers with a bunch of other five-syllable words that I still can't understand.

Because you have a look-up chart. You just have a look-up chart. But a lot of time, it's coming to... When I read really great chemistry, some of it's just understanding how things work. But some of it is then understanding

how we can take our knowledge, and especially now in a culture, we have more foodstuffs available to us than any culture ever in the history of mankind. True? Yes. Yeah, more than kings and queens. I don't f***ing know.

Sure. Yeah, more than kings and queens. I don't f***ing know. Sure. Yeah, I guess. Look, 10 years ago on TV, there were a whole bunch of things I couldn't do that I can do now because you can simply order things by going like this, okay? So, you know, 10 years ago,

we weren't using Aleppo pepper in dishes for home cooks because they couldn't get it, right? Today, we go like this. As we have more and more stuff available to us, we've got to figure out, well, how do we use this to still make food that we want to eat? Now, she works with people that are actually inventing new foods and new flavors.

I just want to make the macaroni and cheese better. All right, but often when we think of sort of food experiments, any normal person would wonder whether you guys in the kitchen are going to somehow take our palate to the limit. So I just want to know, is there some limit beyond which you would not try? Some combination of ingredients, short of it being actual poison. I'm just wondering, is there, or is anything fair game? Poison's a funny thing because...

No, it's not a funny thing. Not very funny. I'm backing up Neil on this one. It's not very funny. It's not. We have very strong taste receptors for astringency, do we not? And bitterness. And bitterness, greatly because it keeps us from eating poison.

And yet, we teach ourselves to drink things like coffee and scotch, which ought to be poison, but they're not. So some of it's training, some of it's acclimation, cultural acclimation. Wait, wait, wait. If that flavor is associated with things that will kill you, then it's just kind of by accident that you're still alive if you like this flavor of bitter. You just...

Yes. Yes, okay. I mean, at some point, somebody had to eat that first oyster or somebody had to sniff that first Band-Aid. I don't know. It's a dangerous world out there. Somebody had to pluck that chicory from the field

and be like, I need a vegetable. And chicory is a perfect... or the first rhubarb, where they figured out, oh, the last five people who ate this died. I'm going to cook it. All right, so I bet Jordan's with me on this. If the last four people died, I'm not cooking it. Yeah, I'm like, you know what?

We don't need to eat rhubarb anymore. At all. What's this bag of cheese thing you're talking about? Yeah, not even in a pie. But we don't,

humans don't do that. We do not do that. Dead humans. We keep going back. Dead humans will do that. No, we're so curious. We see that stack of bodies and we're like,

no, I can do it. Here's the true innovators. Eat that ant! Somebody! Right? What you need is a bunch of archaic frat boys around daring each other to eat things. And so one of them will figure out.

That didn't kill us. Mushrooms would be the perfect example. Try this mushroom froth. One tasted good, the other made you trip, the other dissolved your liver into a puddle. That didn't kill us. Mushrooms would be the perfect example. Try this mushroom broth. One tasted good, the other made you trip, the other dissolved your liver into a puddle. Yeah. You learn real quick, you know?

Is this why people go to this restaurant you work at? Is there just a pile of bodies outside and being like, this is a good restaurant, you gotta try it. Well, we... No reservation. Dragging the people out. Don't have the money. Don't drive the rhubarb.

We would never pick things like mushrooms that we had, like, not a really good botanical and ethno-botanical idea of what was safe. And we would also never feed anything to a customer that we hadn't eaten ourselves first. Good policy, sure. So if everybody in the kitchen is dead, shake shack. There were episodes of one of my colleagues trying out a new mushroom

and having to run to puke in the dumpster before he had to go into service, and then we never served that mushroom. But no human customer has ever gotten... Ariel, are you saying that your own staff and the occasional customer are the experimental playground of your culinary

exploits? Welcome to Flavorama, everybody. Good luck. Should we call you Dr. Flavor? You can. Evil Dr. Flavor. you Dr. Flavor? Oh, yeah. You can if you want. Evil Dr. Flavor. Evil.

Evil Dr. Flavor. Evil. Dr. Evil Flavor. You have a server who comes over and then a priest comes over after the meal. Well, no, I mean, in all seriousness, for any of the, like, quote, unquote, novel things that are happening at these restaurants,

you're usually, you're trying out new things, but you're drawing on either validated scientific research or long histories of safe techniques. So for some ingredients, there are no safe way to eat them, or you can eat them, but only once.

And for some things, there's things that we... That's called poison. We have a word for that. Yes. There's techniques that we know we have to use for them. So, yeah, no, there's a lot of safety and concern over safety. I have one note. In place. I have a note about mushrooms.

Before any customers eat them. I think most people don't know that the common ancestor between animals and mushrooms that the common ancestor between animals and mushrooms separated in the tree of life later than that common ancestor and that which produced green plants separated. So that humans and mushrooms are more genetically alike than either humans or mushrooms are to green plants. So that last pizza you ate, you're an incestuous bastard.

I think the word you're looking for is cannibalistic. Yeah. Have I not been having sex this whole time? Is that how you do it? We've been talking about sex this whole time, right? Wait, what's happening here? Just an arrow, because we only have you for a few more minutes.

Because we're going to swap you out with yet another person on stage here. Much like your restaurant. A couple of things. Are there any obvious challenges that you see in this moment for the future of cooking? I want to ask both of you that. If we only had this, or if we could only do that, just something that is on the horizon that's in the lab that's going to show up soon,

what might that be? Well, I would say if we only had governments that understood that global warming's happening and if we don't do something, we're f***ed. that global warming's happening, and if we don't do something, we're f***ed. Alton, that's in our third segment today. Sorry.

You provided the segue. You get Dr. Turn. Ariel. Some of the stuff that I'm most excited about at the intersection of food and science right now has to do with plant breeding and seed breeding. So for a very long time, plants have been, especially in the U.S., bred for uniformity, for yield, and for shipability. So if you hear your grandmother saying, like, oh, the tomatoes don't taste like when I was a little girl, like,

that's because they don't. They have lost flavor in the process. Turns out it's actually very simple to breed plants for flavor, just not a lot of people are doing it. So there's actually very simple to to breed plants for flavor just not a lot of people are doing it so there's some very cool projects um especially out on the west coast university of oregon university of washington the bread lab uh is one of them um where they are growing vegetables and grains and uh things like wheat and barley to be extremely flavorful and cook very well um so that i think is one of the most exciting combinations of uh food and science to be extremely flavorful and cook very well. So that, I think, is one of the most exciting combinations of food and science to be hitting the grocery stores sometime soon.

But will it be shippable, and will it be packageable? Because that's how we got to flavorless tomatoes to pick with, right? Sure, but if you... And uniformity, and beautiful, and... But if you can breed tomatoes to grow well in specific regions, or... Then you don't have to ship them. Then you don't have to grow well in specific regions or... Then you don't have to ship them.

Then you don't have to ship them. Duh. If you grow... Did I get you on that one? Yeah, definitely. Face palm on that one. There's a barley project in Oregon called the Multi-Barley Project, and this is a very biodiverse strain of barley.

You can grow it in many places, and each place will express a different sort of phenotype and flavor. So terroir, you get a different ter of phenotype and flavor. So terroir. You get a different terroir. Very nice. The terroir. Very wine word there. Terroir.

Terroir. Terroir. Well, we're going to end this segment, and we're going to get ready for the next segment, which is going to be all about food in space when Stark Talk continues. Yes. And Dr. Ariel, thank you for coming.

Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. I'm Joel Cherico, and I make pottery. You can see my pottery on my website, CosmicMugs.com. Cosmic Mugs, art that lets you taste the universe every day. And I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson. Star Talk, segment two. Welcome back, Town Hall.

We are live from Town Hall in New York City. I'm with my comedic co-host, Jordan Klepper. Hey, everybody. Special guest, Alton Brown. And in this segment we're going to talk about food in space. I need an expert on that and we got her. Now joining us is NASA food scientist Dr. Grace Douglas. Grace, come on out.

Grace, thank you. Grace is the lead scientist in NASA's Advanced Food Technology Research effort. Thanks for coming up from Houston. Yes. To be in New York for this. Absolutely. I'm a little afraid to ask you what you're holding in your arms there. Some snacks for you. Absolutely. I'm a little afraid to ask you what you're holding in your arms there. Some snacks for you. Snacks. They look nasty. Nasty. We'll talk a little bit more about those

a little later. So tell us, what is the Advanced Technology Food Project at NASA? So basically, we have a food system that works on the International Space Station, but we know that there are shortfalls and we need to get to long-duration space exploration missions. And so in advanced food technology, we do research on foods. We do research on how to fit in the very, very small resources that are provided on missions. And we also do research on how we're actually promoting crew health and performance, so making sure that the food can actually do that. So I'm curious about something.

When we think of NASA, we think of rockets and things. Hardly ever do we think that there are people in NASA trying to keep the astronauts alive. And so you're in that division, right? And of course, the astronaut program is based in Houston. So it would make sense that the food research is there as well. Yes. So you've got the, so specifically, you focus on how food tastes or just whether it goes bad or not? We have to focus on every part of it, which the key components of it are the safety,

nutrition, and flavor. Because food for the International Space Station actually needs an 18-year shelf life at a minimum. And it's better if it's long. 18 years? 18 months. Months. 18 months.

18 months. Sorry. That's still a long amount of time. Let's be clear. Oh, that's fine. Okay. Yes. This turkey sandwich will last.

Don't worry about it. I thought he said 18 years. That's an 18-month turkey sandwich. Fine. That's true, Jordan. Both of those don't sound good. They don't sound super tasty. Okay.

Wait, so what is non-safe food? Well, that would be food. So we process our foods to make them safe. We have freeze-dried foods, so microorganisms can't grow in there. And we have retort thermostabilized foods, which is basically canned foods, except we use a pouch. So that's the silver pouched item. That one. Nope. This one. Yes. So this is basically similar to what the military uses, but it's lightweight, so we can get it up into space. Mass and volume are huge considerations for spaceflight. So the pouch is lightweight.

Yes, the pouch is lightweight. This is a canned food in a pouch, basically. And so we have to process. This is processed to commercial sterility, just like canned foods in the grocery store. Yummy. Sterility. So we don't. So microorganisms are your enemy. For safe food, yes.

Over time, when you have to store it for that amount of time and we have no refrigerators and no freezers and the possibility that we still won't have those going on a Mars mission where the shelf life will need to be five years at that point. That's enough for a return trip. Yes. Right, right. So you haven't yet talked about flavor. Yes.

Just whether the thing, whether it's bad for you. Three points. The first is safety. The second is nutrition. And the third is acceptability. And that's in total. So how about potato chips well so potato chips are interesting you can send them but they often have a lot of crumbs

and so crunchy that causes a problem in microgravity um so okay so safety has two meanings then yes it does that's that's very true will it kill you because it, I don't know, it floats into your nose or something? Or whether there's some microorganism that'll give you a stomach virus or something or whatever? So foods like potato chips are shelf-stable, so they will last. They will tend to go rancid over time. You'll get some off flavors. They won't taste as good. And the food

definitely needs to taste good. If it doesn't taste good enough, the crew doesn't want to eat enough of it or choose those foods. And then they can lose weight. They can lose bone mass and muscle mass. And so we really have to provide food that they choose to eat, that they want to eat. And so there's a common assumption that high-performing individuals like astronauts will eat whatever you tell them to eat just to get the mission accomplished. Basically, we could give them vitamin pills, we could give them protein shakes, they'll get it done, which actually those things are not that healthy. But they're actually just like us on Earth and they really want good food, nutritious food,

and food becomes very important in isolation and confinement. I hear that astronauts might lose their sense of taste in zero-g or in space. Is that true? What is meant by that? So some astronauts come back and say the food tasted different, or they didn't taste it as much as they would on Earth. And so maybe something's going on right. But there are other astronauts who come back and say they didn't notice a difference.

And there's several things that could possibly be impacting that. So there's a fluid shift towards their head when they're in microgravity. And so that can give them the sensation like when you have a cold. So you wouldn't taste things as well. when they're in microgravity. And so that can give them the sensation like when you have a cold, so you wouldn't taste things as well. Also, everything they're eating is out of a package and they're not cooking. It's just heat and add water. So they're getting packaged foods in and out without cooking.

And then the aroma doesn't rise in microgravity. It just dissipates. And there's also a lot of competing aromas on the International Space Station if you ever live in an enclosed environment with five other people. So... The Russians. You used the word aroma, but you really mean stank. You said aroma, but you mean like BO.

There can be bad smells over time if you're in an enclosed environment with a lot of other people. Really? Is there any kind of a food space race? Like, are the Russians developing flavors that are more intense than American flavors? Is there a competition in that? How are we doing? Are we going to win?

Who's got jambalaya? Is that on our side? I would think that the Chinese would actually have this because of their spice range and because of the use of things like Sichuan peppercorns and whatnot. Those would be very opening-of-the-head kind of flavors. Russians, pfft. Vodka, though, vodka.

So, Grace, would you one day call up Alton and say, help me out here because my astronauts are about to mutiny? They did. Emeril Lagasse Bam sent food up to was that that was the space station right

yeah he helped work on a few formulations so just to be clear when he says Bam isn't he always putting garlic

into his food no no it's anything he wanted Bam Bam okay

just checking you guys remember Bam right Bam formulation the problem is in space Bam what the hell Bam. Bam. Okay. Just checking. You guys remember Bam, right? Bam. Formulation. The problem is in space, like, bam, what the hell?

How did, I hear the jambalaya went over well. So, actually, I think we might have a, I don't know if I brought that one out, but I think it's out there, the spicy green beans. It's in the white package over there.

This? Yeah. This is the tomatoes and artichoke. That was actually one of those that he helped. This is spicy green beans. It's in the white package over there. This? This is the tomatoes and artichoke. That was actually one of those that he helped. This is spicy green beans. Bam. Yeah. No, I'm not going to eat. No.

Yes. No. Neil should eat that right now. No. Yeah. Right now. Let's just be clear. Let's just be clear.

Grace, you brought these because these foods are expired from yourself. That's right here. Good till 5,027. More than 18 months. How important is variety? Variety is actually... Don't answer that until he eats those green beans. Look at that.

Look at that move on. They're actually freeze-dried, so I don't know how easy it would be to eat those. These here? So, this... Tomato and artichoke. I recognize it from here. You read the packet.

I did, yes. It's in Russian. So what kind of variety is offered? Because I think a lot about, suppose I only could eat one food on a Mars mission, what food would that be? I'll tell you what that food is in a minute. After you eat the green beans.

No, no. Green beans. Green beans. Tell me about variety. You are not. So, so, so. Green beans, green beans. Ha! So, tell me about variety. You are not gonna do it, are you? You are not gonna do it. Come on, Neil.

They want you to eat them. Fine! Yeah! Fine! Fine! Look at this, All right. Help, help. Wait, there's another packet inside the packet? Oh, none for me. Damn.

Okay, how do I put water in there? Can we force? You need a needle to put water in there. I don't have a needle. Where's your kit, man? Oh! Jordan. One of my chef friends.

They should have one. What if I found something to cut the end off? Could we just, you know? I'll go find some scissors. That's going to be okay. You're going to get your beans. Don't worry. So was this in an opaque packet to prevent light from getting in?

Because clearly it's shrink-wrapped or freeze-dried shrink-wrapped. So now air is not going to get in. That reduces oxygen. But is light also damaging to this? For certain vitamins, light can be damaging oxygen and moisture. And that package does not protect from those things. So we do add the aluminum foil layer to get a longer shelf life. I forget.

Nutrients, of course. Yes. Vitamins are not all stable under all situations. Right. Especially vitamin C. It's very, very unstable, and that's why scurvy was so prevalent in the history of exploration before spaceflight. How's scurvy doing up there on the International Space Station right now?

We've got that thing covered, right? For the International Space Station, yes. Not yet from ours, though. Are you dealing with, are you getting a lot of feedback from astronauts? I got to imagine astronauts aren't the easiest people to work with as far as taste testers go. Is that in and of itself hazardous? Don't, don't, pay no attention to that. as far as taste testers go? Is that in and of itself hazardous?

Don't... Pay no attention to that. That man struggling to open a package over there. Is this... This is recent. So, technically, this is what we call on Earth a corkscrew, but... Here. I don't want you to do your... I need you to open my...

Okay, all right. Bam! Should he pour some water in there? So it takes like 10 minutes to rehydrate with hot water, so... I think it takes an hour to rehydrate. No, it's going to be fine. That's in hot water. And we... All right. Here werate. No, it's going to be fine. That's in hot water. All right.

Here we go. Wait, wait. Here. Actually, it doesn't smell too bad. Wait, wait, wait. Wait, Jordan, smell this. It doesn't smell too bad? It doesn't smell too bad.

There's like a nice curry smell to it? Yes. Yes. It smells like a Thai coconut soup. Okay, that's enough. I'm a professional. I know it's enough. All right, we'll let this hydrate.

Ten minutes? How much in cold water? We'll let this hydrate. Yeah, we'll let that hydrate for a minute. But we're not going to forget. So if I'm a typical astronaut in the American sector of the space station, how many options am I going to have for dinner? Well, we have about 200 different foods and beverages on our standard menu,

and then they can supplement that on the International Space Station with some preference foods that we send specially for each crew. And that sounds like a lot perhaps, but if you were to talk to the people next to you and ask them what they ate for lunch, it's probably very different than what you ate. There's a lot of variety here on Earth. We take that for granted. And it's also important for crew to get variety. They say they really love getting choice in their food system that helps keep them eating enough so that they don't lose weight, they don't lose body mass and muscle mass and bone mass. So those things are very, very important to have the variety.

And honestly, as we go towards Mars, it's going to be much more difficult to provide that, both because we don't have a current food system with that shelf life, although we are working on those challenges, and because we might even pre-position food ahead of a crew, which makes it very hard. On a supply chip. Yes. Yes. So, I mean, Mars is really far away. I mean, you can explain probably why we can't send resupply once we go to Mars. Yeah, because you're not in phase with the position of the planets in orbit. So you're better off sending food up first. Yes, in another phasing of where Mars and Earth are in their orbit with respect to each other. Then how long would you have to wait between sending food up and sending it? Right, so every 26 months, Mars and Earth are

aligned so that you can go there in nine months. But once you get there, you have to wait again until they realign in order to send another supply. So what you could do is send a supply before it or after it so that they don't have to try to make food while they're there. But there's a time delay for that to happen. Do you mean grow potatoes in poop, Neil? We'll get there. Is there one food that is perfectly nutritious so that if you ate it, you wouldn't have to eat any other kind of food?

Why wouldn't that be that new product Soylent? How about that? Well, it might be wouldn't have to eat any other kind of food? Why wouldn't that be that new product Soylent? How about that? Well, it might be. It might be Soylent. Any food that's designed, and I'm sure that you guys have tested just about everything. By the way, are M&Ms really like cigarettes in prison on the space station? Because I read that M&Ms are like, where are the M&Ms, man? I want my M&Ms because they float around and you go, ah, and it's great.

On the space station? Yeah. I'm not lying, am I? M&Ms on ISS are the same as cigarettes in prison. Yes. Or coffee, because they don't let you have cigarettes in prison anymore, but it's true, though, isn't it?

Well, they actually get coffee that they want on the International Space Station. They can have it with milk and sugar or, well... Kona coffee with cream and sugar. Whoa. That's good. So is there... So other than Soylent, is there one...

There is one. For instance, if you were to tell me, you got to go right now and you're going to only have one food to live on, I would probably say quinoa. I ain't going into space. No, I know the perfect food. I don't think I asked you. I know the perfect food.

What is it? New York pizza. You give me, I've thought perfect food. What is it? New York pizza. You give me... I've thought this through. If you put me on a mission to Mars and I had only one food, it would be New York pizza and like a... That's one. Wait, hang on.

And a strawberry milkshake. That's two. Yes. I could eat that every day for five years. And in about a month, how do you think you'd feel? You'd be like, hey, hey, hey. This hat's short, you get it? Wait, wait, wait.

So let me ask another kind of question. There's food as nutrition, but sometimes you want space to feel like home if you might be homesick, especially on a long mission. And you're not just far away from home, you're far away from your planet as it recedes in space. Alton, don't you specialize in like homey tastes? Not only that, I think that, and you can obviously speak to those flavors. I think there's actually something to be said

for the actual cooking process itself as well. Oh, the ritual. The actual ritual. They ritualized the pizza here. That was a whole family affair. Let's face it. That was like the most Instagrammable of all moments. Hey, if I had zero gravity, I could do pizza too.

But sure, there are flavors of home. And I'm sure that you guys spend a lot of time trying to hit on what is going to make people feel like they're still connected without making them blubber like crybabies that mommy's gone. I mean, because there's, homesickness is a weird thing. And it's got, you know, there's so much different emotions tied up in food.

And as people get further and further away, say going to Mars, at what point does the power of what food can do to people's emotional mindsets become something that we've never even thought about? You guys have got to be studying that. How do you even go about studying that? Sorry, I had to ask. You want to roll it.

I want to know. I shut up. I'm just really curious because I know here on this planet. Even though I asked you that question, you can pass it on to her. That's fine. Because she's going to have the answer that I want at least. How do you figure that out? Well, that's actually a very complicated question.

Because like you just mentioned, you like pizza. Everyone wants something different. And there is no perfect food. So you have to eat a wide variety just to get all your nutrients. And we have to be able to provide choice so that people can get all those nutrients. Like fruits and vegetables actually have thousands of phytochemicals. We don't even know what they all are and how they're interacting with our bodies, with our microbiomes, with our gut-brain axis and impacting how we think and how we feel. And all of those things are happening just from

what we eat. But just to be clear, what you just referenced there in those few sentences, isn't that like newly emergent understanding of the role of the microbiome within our body? Yes. We think we just eat food and it comes out, but there's like countless microorganisms doing our bidding for us in our digestive tract. What? You make it sound like Game of Thrones is going on inside. I'm doing my bidding.

Take a knee. So, but to the point of the question, there's all of this going on, but there's certain foods, certain rituals that we associate with home that could serve our psychological state mightily. So how much thinking do you guys do about this? So we think about that whenever we're developing new foods.

But the goal really is to provide a variety because we have to be able to meet the needs of many different people. And they're a captive audience. So once they go into space flight, we can't send anything else. So it's not like going to the grocery store and you can pick what you want that day. So they have to be able to find stuff that's there that they want to eat every day, which is its own challenge, and food that does give them comfort.

And we have a lot of crew come back and tell us that food became so important in space flight, they didn't realize how important it was going to become. What about the ritual part, as Alton describes? Because, I mean, almost any movie, the most tense, intricate, or personal part is when everyone is around a table eating food. Like an alien.

I wasn't really thinking about that, but sure. Okay, so the dinner table, you know, we mock what happens at Thanksgiving when weird uncles come by and aunts with different political views than you have. So we mock that, but in fact, the food is what got everyone

together. It didn't even matter that it's a holiday called Thanksgiving. It's a holiday where food is front and center. And as Alton has persistently described, this is a taproot ritual that we have as a species. So in space, are there ways that these other rituals fold into just even the preparation and eating of food? Well, we do provide time for them to eat together. And so usually a lot of crews try, they get to do this at their own discretion. So a lot of crews try to find time every day or at least every week to have a meal together for that very reason.

And they find it helps build cohesion. It does stimulate conversation, especially when you have international crews. And they can share international foods at that point too, because when you have international crews. And they can share international foods at that point too because the Russians have a Russian food system and the U.S. side has a U.S. food system. And then when we have a crew from Europe or Canada or JAXA, the Japanese Space Agency, they will bring some of their own foods.

And so there's a lot of camaraderie around that. And that is incredibly important and something that we definitely have to consider as we go into exploration. How to stabilize those foods too so that they can continue. And there's also water supply because you can't, unless you lasso a comet, the water you bring has to be recycled.

Most of the water on ISS is recycled. So should we ask further about that or just leave it right at that? Jordan, should we? I'd like to know a little bit. I mean the first thing... Yeah, the first thing you have to get off the table is do you drink your own pee?

Then it's like, are you guys eating together? What do you cook? Like, every first question about a space station is like, urine. You drinking it? Okay. Now, how are you doing? How's your family?

Your pee is not the only body fluid where you can recover water, just to be clear. Oh. Well, there's your sweat, right? Yeah. Yeah. And the fact that you can exhale onto a mirror and it will fog the mirror means there's moisture coming out of your breath. You're dodging the are these people drinking their pee question.

Totally drinking the pee. Totally drinking the pee. Totally drinking the pee. So, for StarTalk, just recently, I interviewed two International Space Station astronauts while they were on board. And you may recognize their names, Jessica Meir and Christina Cook. They made headlines for being the first team,

female team, to spacewalk together. And we chatted about food in space. Let's check it out. For long-term space travel, obviously there'll be some expectation that you grow your own food. And is there, how close are we to growing all of your own food without requiring sort of supply chains, either to and from the space station or to and from Mars, if that's our ultimate destination? Absolutely. Great question. I think that right now we're at a place where we're learning the best ways that we can grow things in space, but where we're really looking to go is to develop systems that are,

one, closed loop systems. So a system where we're using waste products from various sources and feeding those in to the actual plant development. And that can include our carbon dioxide cycle, our oxygen cycle, and our water cycle. And we actually have some really neat life support systems on board right now that are testing some of those technologies. Another aspect of the food system that really has to grow

would be incorporating proteins. Right now we have lettuce as our main crop that know, crop that we've grown. We've grown different things up here. They've grown flowers. We're looking into starting into vegetables and fruits, but incorporating protein sources like peanuts or maybe legumes, I think is the next sort of big leap. We're not quite there yet. As Jessica mentioned, we've had salad and we joke sometimes that the caloric intake that we've used so far in growing it might be a little bit more than what we end up consuming. But obviously, the techniques are what's important in proving out the systems and the operational concept.

I'm guessing that you're not going to anytime soon start traveling with farm animals. So likely all of your protein will come from plant-based sources, which would mean the future of space exploration would be vegetarian. That's what that sounds like. Maybe. We're not sure. We also do have some other devices that are pretty exciting up here right now. We have one facility called the Biofabrication Facility, which is actually the goal of that is to grow human organs

in space. Now that's of course not for food or consumption. That is to contribute to the deficit of organ for transplant operations on the ground. By any kinds of efforts on the ground, when you are trying to produce these tissues and make these bioartificial tissues, there are some problems with the support structure for these. And so the theory is that in microgravity, we won't have that problem with the support structure so we can better grow these bioartificial tissues and then turn them into complete organs. Going a little bit along with that with 3D printing, we have other 3D printers up here to make other pieces of hardware. The Russians also recently tested some animal cells, so some animal protein cells to see whether or not they could 3D print meat. So there are some

experiments that are trending in that direction as well. I don't know why I didn't think of that. Of course, if you can lab grow proteins, meat proteins, then you never needed the animal in the first place. And then there's another source of protein for you. Well, excellent, guys. Thanks for taking the time for StarTalk Radio. And we got you on video as well. And so very much appreciated this. Thank you very much. Thank you, Neil. It was our pleasure. Station, this is Houston ACR. That concludes our event as we count down to 20 continuous years of humans living and working on the International Space Station. Space Station. I gotta interject. When the movie Gravity came out, I posted a series of tweets that commented on things they missed, like Sandra Bullock's bangs always

pointed downwards. And I said, am I being harsh? And I said, anytime you see anybody in zero G, the hair is going wild. And so I wanted to see wild bangs on Sandra Bullock, and we did not. Everything else was zero G except her hair. I just wanted to let the record show. So Grace, what are the capabilities?

What's in your mouth? Spit that out. It was pretty good. Yeah, I know. I said it smelled good. But I tasted it. It's good. It smelled good. Just smell the bear. Eat the bear. It's really spicy,

which you find that most people really do appreciate on station, right? There are a lot of crew that like this. Pepper, chili. It's not all crew, but a lot. Now, if you're not necessarily a proponent of the fluid in the head theory, that everybody up there is like they've got a cold, what do you attribute this desire for spicier food? Well, so that also is just, I mean, not every crew looks for spicy food. Not everybody.

And some of that might be because they're just eating prepackaged foods the entire time they're up there and they're not cooking and things like that.

So that does provide differences in flavor. Condiments is one of the only ways that they have to customize their own foods. People bring up

their own hot sauce bottle. They let you do that. Because it's not like a giant glob of sriracha floating through the cabin would be a problem. Well, they do get sriracha. Imagine if you're like, my eyes! You know?

They do get sriracha. They do get sriracha, but do they get it in like little bitty packets? They don't get like a bottle. Just don't touch the fingertips to it. They do, they get a bottle. They get an actual, how do you get it? How does that work?

So, well, they send condiments and they have a little fridge up there now. And how do you dispense the sriracha? Well, it has a certain surface tension. So that's how they eat as well. So everything has a certain surface tension. And if you put it on your food and it has that surface tension, it stays. It stays.

Just like it'll stay on a spoon or a fork while you're eating it or in the package. Like pudding. It has very high surface tension. Yeah. Also, do we need to call out the fact that... Why, yes. I had pudding. The Russians are 3D printing meat next door?

That was just an offhanded comment. Oh, yeah, and also... So, Grace, what are the actual food capabilities on ISS right now? For daily food consumption, it's prepackaged food where they add water or they heat it. No, manufacturing I'm talking about. And then as far as, so that you saw that they grew some salad and the veggie, and that's it, as far as foods that they're actually eating.

Will 3D printing be something that, I mean, because a lot of people think that's going to be an answer. So we've got an image of them harvesting mustard greens. Let's see if we have what we have up there. Why mustard greens don't look like that? Okay. Yeah, but if I'm in space, somehow I'm not thinking, gee, I hunger for mustard greens. No, you want pizza. So tell me, if, as they said, growing the salad takes

more energy than the energy it then provides to you, what hope is there that this would ever work? Well, they mentioned that this is proving out the systems at this point, and that's true. Because if we're ever going to become Earth independent and move towards those systems, you have to show that they work. And it is very challenging to water crops in spaceflight. So we prove them out with the easiest systems, which are salad crops.

And so next, they're planning on growing tomatoes in space. And so that requires artificial pollination. So there are a lot of things that you have to prove that you can do and actually get these things to grow. You just bring swarms of bees into the space station. What could go wrong?

So I want both of your opinions about the future of lab-grown meat as a solution to the protein challenge in space. Are you cool with... Alton, are you cool with lab-grown meat as a solution to the protein challenge in space. Are you cool with, Alton, are you cool with lab-grown meat? I'm cool with it as a concept. I just don't know why we need it. I don't crave, I think that we've got to get to a point to where we're like, okay, well, we don't crave meat so much that we're willing to put this much energy

into simply making an analog of it. Why not just make something delicious out of the things that we have that are renewable and that make sense? And, you know, one of the issues now with meat analogs is that we're going to... 80 people agreed with you on that. Yeah, okay. But they were the cool ones. One of the issues I think we're going to get into with meat replacement is that it's all based on pea protein, essentially. There's a lot of pea protein involved. And, you know, that just means that we're shifting.

No, no, that's meat substitute, not lab grown. You're talking about absolutely lab grown. Yeah, yeah. I am talking about, I was talking about meal replacement. Growing meat proteins. I don't, growing organs for transplant is one thing. I don't know that we need to grow meat. I don't, I guess we've got to find out if we've got to do it. But I don't know that I need to grow meat. I guess we've got to figure out

if we've got to do it, but I don't know that I think it's necessary. Grace, where are you? I think that looking at all of these options as we have a growing population, we have a lot of challenges here on Earth. We have challenges in space flight with resources as well. Looking at options and seeing if they can become feasible is definitely worthwhile across the board because we have a lot. Looking at all options. Right. Looking at all options. There are still a lot of challenges with lab-grown meat that would need to be solved before that

can become a viable option. Plus, you need to do the trade studies to see, is this actually saving you anything? Because there's a lot of processing going into those things. But looking at all the options is necessary because we have a growing population, because we have resource limitations on Earth, and that's very true in spaceflight too. One of the challenges in spaceflight that's a little bit unique, especially with exploration missions where we only have a few crew, is that they would have to do the process themselves. So any process that we think could be a solution,

do the process themselves. So any process that we think could be a solution, it would have to be a solution from the beginning of producing it all the way to the point of consumption. Because if an astronaut has to actually participate in that process, I don't know, maybe some people like to go home and do a science experiment and then eat that science experiment after they worked for a whole day, right? But in general, we like to look at things for exploration, especially as what are you willing to do in your own kitchen? And if some of these solutions can become resource viable for exploration, meaning they use less resources than a prepackaged system, or perhaps you could find in situ resource utilization

on a planetary surface. There's people… So ISRU, very big concept in NASA, right, where you go there not bringing supplies with you, you go there, look for the supplies that you would then use in situ while you're there. ISRU, yeah, very big concept in NASA. Sorry. So, yes. And, you know, there's groups that are looking at taking the carbon dioxide

and using the carbon in that as a source for so many other things. And if you start using that as a feed source instead of having to take sugar or things like that, once we start overcoming these challenges, there's going to be new things that open up. But it is easier on Earth because those would be somebody's job.

And we go to the grocery store and we buy a finished product. For the crew, if they have to participate in that product, in that production in any way, it has to be incredibly acceptable, something that we would want to do here on Earth. Or one of the astronauts' sole job

would be to be the chef. So, Alton, if we... It's mushrooms again tonight, kids. Well, Alton, there's got to be some interesting future in lab-grown meat proteins, because then you could molecularize it and put in one of your own unique

sort of flavored... I'd be more interested, though, in coming up with various pastes that you could print, though. I mean, like krill or some other animal that has a huge bio payoff as far as its feed to body weight ratio. And then taking that and turning that into, like, okay, I'm going to take this cup of water, and I'm going to grow blah, blah, blah krill in it, sea monkeys, and then I'm going to grind them up in this machine, and I'm going to print a hamburger out of it. to grind them up in this machine, and I'm going to print a hamburger out of it. To me, it's like,

if we can think of things that already grow, that are already, you know, life forms that we know that we can take advantage of, that don't care that much about gravity, maybe they grow on water, whatever. There are bacterias that produce, for instance, we talk a lot about umami as chefs, you know, there are bacteria that grow glutamates, and glutamic acid can actually come off a bacteria. If all that could go into your little printer kit, you could just say, what do you want tonight? Well, I'll have that hot dog. There's recent research that shows that a very efficient, even sustainable source of protein is rodents.

Yes, absolutely. What's the... New York City. We've got... So our rodents eat pizza, by the way, just so you know. We've all seen the video, Neil. Yes, the pizza rat. So, great.

Is there any talk at NASA about breeding rodents for protein for long-term missions? Well, actually, they can be a good source of vitamin C. So no scurvy, yay. I'll take the scurvy. So is it happening? Space rats? So what I would say about any sort of animals, you'd still be thinking of you have people...

I'm not talking about any animals. I'm talking about rodents. But this is still true for rodents, so it would be true for anything. As soon as you start having a group of explorers who are intended to go out and explore the Martian surface and then they come back, what are you willing to do in your own kitchen?

And if you start having things like rodents, is that really something that we find acceptable? Is it something they would find acceptable? Because we're trying to promote high performance. We want them to be at their top physical peak, at their top cognitive peak. So we want to give them foods that they really want to eat. And then there's also an interesting thought that that could be the only other life form they're interacting with. And, you know,

there's cases where if you become really attached to that life form... I saw that movie. It's called Willard. Yeah. Have you thought about maybe a mind experiment where like, okay, they're going to Mars. They're not going to want to eat rats, but they don't get any kind of outside information except for the stuff that we give them. So we create some sort of television shows where the reality back on Earth

is where suddenly it's very cool to eat rats. And now everybody's eating rats. And Jennifer Aniston loves rats. She eats rats. And over the time, they're traveling for months and months. And they're like, this seems to be the new cool thing. I don't know.

Maybe this is something I could try. And now they're eating the heads off rats. Are they none the wiser? Has NASA thought of that? Jordan, where did that come from? Jordan. It's a propaganda machine. That's what a spaceship is.

So after you've gone out on the surface of Mars, you want to come back and have a big juicy steak is what you're saying. Or a really nice salad. No, nobody comes back from the surface of Mars and wants a salad.

It's just not. Not even the vegetarians. No, no. They want a steak too. We got to end this segment. Coming up on the next segment, we're going to actually talk about the sustainability of food on Earth when Stark Talk

continues at Town Hall, New York City. We're talking about food in space and on Earth. I've got Alton Brown in the house. Thank you. He's a patron saint of food geeks. He's a patron saint of food geeks. We've... We also have Grace Douglas. Dr. Grace Douglas from NASA, Houston.

Jordan Clepper. So we talked about molecular gastronomy in space, and now let's talk about the future of food on Earth. So both of you, I want to ask. By the way, when I look to NASA, I look at NASA solving problems we didn't even know needed solved, and then you learn that they actually have application back here on Earth. So when you look at the challenges, Alton,

we have overpopulation. That's going to be a thing. If it's not a problem now, it will be soon. We've got climate change, restructuring where things are grown and where they're not grown. Are the honeybees? I want an update on them. I don't know what... It ain't good. And overfishing. So all of these problems on Earth. So I want to ask you, where's this headed? So all of these problems on Earth. So I want to ask you, where's this headed?

And then, Grace, I want to know, can you foresee any of the challenges of the Mars food problem actually having an application back here on Earth? So, Alton, where are we? Overpopulation. Are we going to be able to feed 10 billion, 20 billion people? Yes. Eat more people. I saw that movie.

Soylent Green is obviously the answer, but I think it can be done with a more culinary flair. Okay. We have to diversify our palates. We have to diversify our food supply system. One of the issues that we've run into in the United States is that we went to centralized farming and centralized processing in this country after World War II.

And we transport things great distances instead of making things very locally. And the result of that is that we end up having, all of a sudden, maybe 70 people in six states get sick from something from lettuce, right? Which really shouldn't be happening. But that's because we've got a food system that is based on giving everybody everything all the time.

We're certainly giving people things out of season and things that require massive amounts of resources to grow, massive amounts of water, massive amounts of land, certainly in the case with most cattle and other land-based animals. What we're going to have to face, the fact of, is that so far we have not managed things terribly well. We have not managed things terribly well. The oceans certainly are a case in point. So I think what we're going to have to do, and this is going to be very difficult because it does require some international cooperation, is that we've got to re-examine the viability of what local farming looks like.

And one of the ways that I feel hopeful about is the idea of vertical farming in the ocean, which is that we can take a patch of sea, maybe a mile offshore of someplace like Northern California, and that we can farm it from the surface all the way to the floor in a way that is sustainable, in a way that is also beneficial to the surrounding ecosystem. So we're talking about growing filter feeders like mussels that grow on ropes or oysters on the bed, growing a lot of kelp,

and also harvesting the animals that live inside that kelp in such a way that these kind of micro farms can create a lot of protein and a lot of nutrition while being sustainably managed. And that's a long answer. But I do think that what it's going to take in the long run is we've got to vary what we eat and we've got to decentralize our food processing system.

Do you see anything lined up with what you're doing in Houston that could actually benefit any of this? I would say that a lot of the goals of NASA are similar to the goals in the world. We need to find things that are going to grow in very harsh environments and not even necessarily that they're going to be outside, but the fact that you have to limit the water that you're using, that you have to find stuff that's going to be very resilient and crops that can just keep growing in those environments in very small confined spaces as well. So, you know, your idea of vertical farming and having some of the more sensitive crops even be grown in that sort of method so that you can really control it and produce more food and

control where it's going is definitely an advantage of those areas and definitely things that we'd have to look at if we're going to solve the world food problem. I think that there's a lot of other things that are out there that are being developed that we might start seeing in the next couple years too, just in relation to things like the lab-grown meat and things like that. So we need to be exploring all of the options. And for NASA, the real goal is how do we miniaturize that and how do we reduce the resources to such a low level

that we can actually put it on a space mission? Because it's very, one of the biggest challenges we always have with food, which weighs so much, is we have to reduce the mass and reduce the volume. So anything that we send to make food has to have reduced mass and reduced volume. The other thing is anything we send with food has to have a five-year shelf life if it's going to Mars. Any of the reagents that you're using with it, seeds would have to have a five-year shelf life in the radiation environment. So we have a storage concern there too, and that could be something that might also become more interesting on earth as time goes on. So I think the idea that our resources are limited and we have to

find those solutions, we tend to work with industry and with academia to find those solutions. And NASA is not an island in the middle of the country. Right, exactly. Yes. So Alton, have you seen effects of the climate shift in what your tasks are in the kitchen, the availability of some foods relative to others, or the cost? Absolutely. A really great example of something that's going on right now that folks here might not even know about

is that sugar prices are about to go up quite a bit. Here in the United States, in this past year, last two years, the sugar beet crop failed in a good bit of the upper Midwest, Midwest due to weather conditions that have been attributed to global warming. This means that we're not going to be able to produce enough sugar and are going to have to now import it. But our governmental systems are set up specifically to place very high tariffs on foreign sugar because we wanted to keep our own sugar prices at a certain level. And now for a lot of foreign crops. It's not just the sugar.

It's not. But the big thing right now, though, is coming into the holidays, major industrial bakers are getting force majeure notices from the growers basically saying, yeah, sorry about that not having any sugar. So now we're having to say, holy moly, we've been self-supporting since the 30s in sugar, and now we cannot provide enough sugar for our industry. But there's a flip side of that. Like, for example, it's a little bit warmer in England now, and last I checked, they're growing wine.

There's champagne coming out of England, and they're, like, boasting of it. Have you had any of it yet? No. Yeah, well. My family's from Michigan and they claim that Michigan will be wine country by 2070.

I'm hoping that's the case because I bought a significant amount of property. When you start looking at, you know, major growing areas where something is very special, I mean, you know,

you joke or we're joking about champagne. I meant sparkly wine, of course, because champagne is only grown in champagne. But I'm talking about that champagne. When you're talking about those kinds of micro products, like in France, very, very few degrees of change or a little bit of change in rainfall

is going to completely knock that out. So I think that it's time to start. The microclimate defined the product in the first place. It did. The terroir, the microclimate, the sun that hit this side of the hill that had this much chalk in it, so this much radiation went back. Yeah, it's all about that microterroir and those microclimates. Well, those are now changing, whether we want to admit it or not.

They are. And so that is going to change the products that are available. So the best sham freaking pain in the world might be coming out of Detroit any minute. Get into property now. It could happen. I mean, it is not... Tell me about the bees.

Bees are in horrible shape. Bees in space actually really like that idea. Because, you know, bees are the major pollinator of food crops in the United States and actually in most of the world. And due to some chemicals that we have used on our crops, the bee population is falling at an alarming rate. And when that drops to a particular level,

it will simply be impossible to fertilize certain plants. Most of the crops in the United States are pollinated by bees. During that season, guys drive around, and girls, flatbed trucks full of beehives, park in the field, wait a few days, and then drive off. And those bees provide the pollination services. And so every flower that gets pollinated, some kind of fruit came out of that flower. Exactly. This is the whole process. Or just the cross-pollination of male and female plants. Trees, it doesn't matter what it is. Right, right, right.

And we're losing colonies at a horrible rate. And I hate to say that there have been some laws and legal shenanigans, even just this year, that have perhaps made it harder to protect them, which is concerning. So, could the future of molecular gastronomy find scientific chemical solutions to some of these problems that global climate change is bringing upon us? I will tell you that I know for a fact… Just to preserve some of what we cherish? I don't know about that, but I do know that there is one very, very, very highly respected technical university on the East Coast that is working on robot bees. I saw that episode of Dark Mirror.

I'm telling you, though, robot bees are actually happening. We will have micro-robotic pollinators for specific plants. And they will be sold to us by Monsanto. Just you watch. But talking about the specific, you know, I think that if cooks, whether it's molecular gastronomy or whatever, chefs as influencers, cooks as influencers, we do play a very significant role in this

because we help figure out things for people to eat and then make them popular. And right now, in the last 20 years, that has really been the globalization of ingredients, which has massively been the result of one thing, the internet, and specifically Amazon, which love it or hate it. Transportation.

Yeah, love it or hate it makes it possible for anybody to have anything any darn time they want. If I was doing a startup right now, it would be figuring out how to farm out of Amazon boxes. I would want to turn Amazon boxes into a farm. There's got to be a way of doing that. So farming, as we know, large animal farming is hugely consumptive of water and land and resources and the like.

So there's the stuff that tastes like meat but is vegetable-based. What's it called? Well, there's Impossible Burger and Beyond Meat. Beyond Meat, right. So has NASA considered Beyond Meat to keep the flavor spectrum broad for those in space? So our foods right now, actually, we do send quite a few meats. So we can send real meats, prepackaged, and they do last for several years to the crew. So right now that would probably not be a solution

because you'd just be replacing the meat with that burger for a few people. And in general, most people in this country even are still omnivores. So there are very, it's a small percentage of the population that's vegan and vegetarian. So we support what the crews generally want to eat so that we can, you know, keep them eating. However, you know, as you go forward in this area and get to a point where we're having colonization and people have specialized jobs and now you are growing crops, potentially that would be a solution there where that somebody's job is to make that sort of burger that way. So it could potentially happen. We don't really know

what the future of space food is going to look like. So it's wide open and it's really what can the solution be and can you get the resources down to enable that solution. There's actually a lot of resources that go into making those burgers. Alton, did you visit one of those plants? I have, yes. And what was your reaction? Wow, that's a lot of pea protein. That's a lot of pea protein.

That was your reaction, okay. That is most of what is going in there. But it's got a longer shelf life than meat. Well, not if it's in one of these, right? I mean, meat... Can be several years. It doesn't matter for a package like this. And if it's radiated so that you kill all the bacteria.

Or just thermostabilized, like canned food. Do you get to meet the pea protein? Do you get to pet the pea protein? I named that. Oh, you named the pea protein. But if you guys knew that, for instance, okay, we can make a burger out of mushrooms and we can grow mushrooms in space

because mushrooms like it dark. They like it moist. They like, you know, then knowing how to do that would be a benefit, right? Because you can extract protein from them. It's a lot easier than raising a cow in space. Or are you telling me like that? That would be certainly true.

No, it's like, are you guys doing that? I mean, she's literally like... Anything would be easier than raising a cow in space, is my guess. I'm just spitballing here. Raising a wolverine? Could you raise a wolverine? I think pigs in space would be very, very difficult.

Teenager, yeah. But mushrooms and other things that have a considerable amount of glutamates and other things that have a considerable amount of glutamates and other proteins in them might not be. Anyway. So how do we balance, the two of you, I ask, how do we think about the relationship between our investment in space colonization and whatever secondary benefits we might derive from it and our investments in the Earth environment? Do you see a place, a connection between those two? Or are you going to have to fight with the environmentalists because they

want the resources just to fix things on Earth? Is there some part of your job that says, no, some of this could really help on the other side of this research chain? Right. And I think that's true across NASA. A lot of the things that we're doing and the fact that we're trying, everything we make, we have to figure out how to do it with less resources. And so in the end, a lot of that technology, you know, when working with industry and working with academia and working directly at NASA, is going to have ways that it can transfer to the world today because we are always pushing to get better at doing that. Now, I've said multiple times that I think the world's first trillionaire is the person who

figures out how to exploit the resources on asteroids and comets. So is NASA thinking about that creatively as part of the in-situ resource utilization? Space has unlimited resources, basically. You just need access to it. Or are you still just worried about what you bring and what you might be able to grow on the spot? Those kinds of investigations are going on together. So in the beginning, we probably will have to bring a lot more. But eventually, the goal would be self-sustainability

and Earth independence. And to get there, you need to be looking at these other things and proving them out because it's a huge jump to go to that. And we need to show on the lunar surface and then on the Mars surface that these things are working and we can depend on them. Because the worst thing that could happen is you're depending on your food growing and then it doesn't grow. So you want to make sure that you have food.

Just add poop and it grows just fine. Yes. We learned that on Mars. The poop potatoes. Yes. Can we talk about the Martian now? Can we talk about it? But aren't the things that you're talking about,

I mean, that's basically life on Earth in a microcosm. Limited resources, limited space, limited energy. That's what she said. And we're out in the middle of space all freaking alone. So, it's kind of the same thing. So, NASA, save us. Except, Alton, you can breathe the air here.

Well, now. Today. So, NASA is famous for how visible its achievements are relative to its budget. And I used to joke that how much people say, why are we spending money in space and not on Earth? I say, how much do you think they're getting in space as a fraction of the tax dollar? They'll come up with 10%, 15%.

And then I tell them, no, it's four-tenths of one cent. And so I keep thinking NASA should get the budget that people think they're getting. That would be amazing, right? So it's a testament to how visible NASA's achievements are because people think its budget is much greater than it is. Given that fact, what are some of the future plans for education? I read something about participation, crowdsourcing, some of the future NASA projects. What can you tell us about that?

So we are actually in this area, in the food area. We're exploring releasing a challenge to the public, to academia and industry to help us with these food challenges. Money. Right. So they would be incentivized challenges. We're looking at putting out a centennial challenge with cash prizes. Thank you. And so basically the goal is we need safe, acceptable, and nutritious food that reduces

resource use on these long duration missions. And we don't have a food system that can do that right now. And we are investigating a lot of the technologies that already exist, but we're always looking for new technologies. What is the next cutting edge going to be? So we're looking at releasing this challenge to the public sometime next year and trying to get to provide those incentives. And these kinds of challenges can also help, you know, create the next generation of scientists and the next generation of engineers and keep NASA and the United States as a leader in science technology. Is there a hashtag or a Twitter?

I mean, how is this getting out there? So it is, if you watch the website, nasa.gov slash solve, then you'll be able to see when this challenge is released. Oh, okay. It's a smart idea.

If there's one thing America's like, it's doing a food contest and getting money. You might be able to just give them a big t-shirt. Ultimate baking space challenge. And now.

And now. From space. Well, has NASA ever done that before? Yes, NASA does these challenges in different areas. What came out

of the last one? Off the top of your head? They did a 3D printing of houses. And that one had some pretty interesting, you know, looking at 3D printing your habitats. And 3D printing of houses can actually have a lot of applications. Got it.

So the real value here is, like the XPRIZE, is if you put up a cash prize for the winner, that the people who compete are all putting up their own money to compete for that cash prize. So what you're really getting is the sum of everyone's investment as a R&D magnifier on what the final product will become. It's an extraordinary system that actually works. And there are some cases where the people will spend more money

than what the prize will be just to win. And then they get the visibility and the fame and the attention. So I wish you luck on this, you and NASA. It's not luck. I wish you all the innovation that you deserve and that comes your way. So we need to land this plane. Sorry, we need to land this rocket. Is there just...

Alton, do you have any sort of parting thoughts for us? Yeah, I think that... By the way, you have a sort of parting thoughts for us? Yeah, I think that... By the way, you have a resting grumpy face. I just wanted you to know. If no one told you that, I didn't want to tell you. It's because I ate those beans. The beans were very, very good. I think that if I was going to have anything here to wrap up,

it's that everybody needs to pay a heck of a lot of attention to what they put in their pie hole. We need to be very watchful of what we're doing. We need to be more aware of where it's coming from, who's growing it, how far it's being shipped, and what kind of resources go into it. That means we're going to have to do a lot more work. We have to do more due diligence about what we eat because it has a very, very specific and direct effect on what kind of

resources we're going to have to work with, to win X prizes with, or to colonize the rest of space with. We do have to maintain home and we need to be better at it. it. Dr. Grace, any parting thoughts for us this evening? Well, I think it's pretty incredible that we've had crew living in spaceflight consecutively now for almost 20 years. And one of the things that we do know is that they all want to eat something different and food is incredibly important. So it's definitely something we need to consider as our challenges for resources and our shelf life requirements become longer. We really need to consider how are we going to solve this in a way where we're supporting our crew's health and performance. Because in the end, you know, as humans, we like to explore. And what we're doing at NASA is really what we're doing as a country. So this, you know, this is for all of us. And

what comes out of this is going to benefit all of us. Cool. Thank you for that. Jordan, Jordan, after your rodent-eating recitation a few moments ago, I'm a little afraid to ask your final thoughts. Neil, don't fear me. You know, I was moved today. I think I will watch the things I put in my mouth. I think that is a good thing to walk away from this with. I've been, part of the reason some of the things we've talked about in the past is sort of my love of NASA and American ingenuity.

One of your documentaries was all about NASA. We covered NASA and whether or not we're going to go to Mars and how you can invest in something like that and the byproduct of that can be so good for a culture like us. And so it's good to be a part of conversations like this because it gives me optimism. I think if we could put a man on the moon and if we can call the number one restaurant in the world

a restaurant that serves ant paste, then I kind of think we could maybe attack some of these problems we talked about here today. There's hope, isn't there? Yeah, exactly. No, excellent. Thank you, Jordan. So, Jordan, I think I'm a little older than you,

so my generation says, if we can pit man on the moon, we can do anything. You're saying, if we can make lemon paste out of ants, we can do anything. I think so, yes. That's a lower bar, I think. Well, I think my generation, that's where we set our bars. Can I talk about politics now? No, no, we're good. We're good. Nope. We're good. If I can offer some reflections on this evening. First, I was immensely enlightened by

all that each of you contributed, as well as Ariel Johnson earlier. And it's interesting, when you look at the history of human conflict, apart from religious wars and political wars, one of the sources of conflict was access to resources. Sometimes those resources are water. Sometimes it's food, arable land. Sometimes those resources are water, sometimes it's food, arable land. And so much of what we discussed regarding food is not food that separates us. It's food that brings us together. The fact that the different countries on the International Space Station,

that's what the I stands for, it's international, will come together and share food because we're all human and we all eat multiple times a day. So that this fact, which we have turned into ritual, and ritual is such a fundamental part of what it is to be human, of what it is to be human, I'm wondering whether our shared challenge of making sure Earth does not die under our feet, because if Earth dies under our feet, it doesn't affect just one country and not another, it affects everybody.

That's why we call it global climate change. We're all in this together. So I'm imagining a future where maybe there are no wars because our survival depends on each other and we being shepherds of the earth to nourish civilization going forward. And in that future, every country is around a table sharing food prepared from all over the globe. And that would be sort of my vision of eternal peace in this world. Thank you all. Thank you.

Jordan Kepler, thank you. Ariel Johnson in the back. Grace Douglas. Where's Ariel? Come on out. Ariel. Ariel. Alton Brown. I've been your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist.

And as always, from StarTalk, we bid you to keep looking up. Thank you. Thank you for the time.