British Food: The Ideal Space Food?

Despite most Americans joking about Victorian Era British food as the “worst tasting gourmet food ever”, is British food the ideal provision for long-term space missions?

By: Ringo Bones

Most Americans might joke all they want behind the double-entendre of the iconic British pastry called spotted dick, but if British astronaut Major Timothy Peake gets his wishes, the “British Taste” could gain as much worldwide favor as the “British Sound” did in the global hi-fi world. UK Astronaut Timothy Peake has recently raised a competition among British middle-school students to improve his “space meals” for his deployment onto the International Space Station scheduled for 2015. In response to the challenge, the British students already had recently produced a number of potential “British space food” prototypes for Timothy Peake’s meals for the ISS next year.

According to Timothy Peake’s past experiences while training to become an astronaut in NASA, dehydrated food currently made my NASA currently consumed by astronauts working out their scientific experiments in the International Space Station are not exactly “gourmet tasting” – i.e. it tastes bland and seems to have a “life of its own” when it comes to texture. Were the provisions used on the British Antarctic Survey during the beginning of the 20^th Century tastes better than NASA’s current space food? Sadly, it is not just Major Timothy Peake that’s been complaining about NASA’s space food on the ISS.

Most astronauts that had served on the International Space Station – including the American ones – say that regular dehydrated freeze-dried food being served on the ISS isn’t as nice tasting as it should be. Given that one of the world’s greatest military geniuses, Napoleon Bonaparte, said that “an army marches on its stomach”, would there be eventually a space food revolution on the ISS? And this time, it was a Brit who fired the first shot?