Problem: Food tastes lousy in space.

The early space food from Gemini and Apollo looked terrible: blocks of dried “food” in plastic pouches. Add water and it still tasted awful.

Maybe better, but still bad

Over time, the food has improved. I once saw an email from a shuttle astronaut who said he was looking forward to eating on the ISS—he heard their food was better than shuttle food.

Early space food looked awful and tasted worse.

But, although we don’t yet have scientific proof, a large body of anecdotal evidence suggests that food tastes bad in space…even if that same food tastes good on earth. An article in Scientific American tells more about it, but here’s the gist:

Due to zero gravity, astronauts tend to have congestion—which dulls the senses of smell and taste. The smells actually in space stations and spacecraft tend to be sterile or worse…something that also makes eating less enjoyable.

One solution: strong condiments. Astronauts who normally don’t like spicy food on earth, seem to love hot sauce. And wasabi.

Better variety coming

Speaking of wasabi, there’s going to be a greater variety of food on the ISS soon. So far, all the food is provided by NASA and the Russian Space Agency. Additional food will be supplied by the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japanese Space Agency (JAXA) when the crew expands to six later this year.