If I had to name one intellectual nourishment that fix my childhood it would have to be cosmonaut ice pick . I can still remember father it from the gift shop at theMinnesota Science Museumin the late 1980s and retrieve that it was absolutely the coolest thing in the humanity . Look Mom , I ’m deplete just like an astronaut !
Little did I have a go at it ( because kids are stupid and dense and do n’t know hooey ) , that I was already decades late to the party . Freeze - dried “ astronaut ice ointment ” was already a novelty of retiring future , not the future - future . Because in the sixties , there was no question in the minds of many Americans that freeze - dried foods were not just for astronauts — these space age delicacies were going to obtrude upon your average supermarket as well .
The October 30 , 1966 issue of the Independent Press - Telegram in Long Beach , California described this freeze - dry out future where “ Food Needs No Icebox . ”
For Man who show bewilderment now in attempting to find food - stuff in the kitchen , the near future tense of the distance historic period could be downright baffling .
Imagine red lean meat , enough to feed a fellowship of five , tidily packed aside in a unsubdivided carton on the shelf alongside the corn flakes .
Image a slim piston chamber , looking more like today ’s tennis ball container , stand on the same ledge and labeled “ Scrambled Eggs and Sir Francis Bacon . ”
Freeze - dry hamburger patty and pea from a 1966 newspaper article
Now , if canned bollock and bacon sounds disgusting to you , you probably never tried licence - organicBatter chargeman ™ when it was uncommitted . But that product , and the dozens of others you ’ll still find in American supermarkets , were presuppose to be the average by now rather than the exclusion . After all , they reasoned , we were heading into the space years , and making food for thought phthisis more “ efficient ” was just the natural progression of food technical school .
Again , from the 1966 clause :
And , while further contemplating the evening repast in the absence of the bridge circuit - playing wife , the eye fall on neatly stacked miniature box of sliced apples or ready - cook rice pud .
If this sounds something far - fetched , it is n’t . It ’s here .
During the recent Apollo flight , just such packages of freeze - dry out foods went into orbit with no detectable loss of smack , alimental value , appearance or color .
The astronauts have existed on “ convenience food of the future ” such as gripe and gravy , soup , chicken and elf .
If that voice like a leaden armful of food market , be remind a woman could carry in her purse all the food both astronauts would demand for a week .
Today , frost - dry intellectual nourishment does n’t have much sex appeal . But we ’re seeing a revitalization of Americans prizingfood efficiency(likely a recoil to the preceding decade ’s slow intellectual nourishment movement ) as they purchase products likeSoylent .
https://gizmodo.com/synthetic-hamburgers-are-the-future-and-have-been-for-1029060659
We ’re still trying to perfect physical process for making astronaut food taste more like the veridical stuff — especially as we mentally pump ourselves up for a mannedmission to Mars . But as fewer kids are told that they should look up to astronauts and applied scientist , and alternatively aspire to be software engineer , one ca n’t help but wonder how many are guzzle down Soylent shake and yell , “ Look Mom , I ’m just like Zuck ! ”
https://gizmodo.com/spam-silkworms-hydroponics-the-speculative-future-of-1513480187
Images : Food tray schedule to be used in the Skylab computer program in 1972 viaNASA ; A research worker at the Food Science Department of Rutgers University keep the rehydration of halt - dried pork chops circa 1955 via Getty Images
solid food
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