🚀 go-pugleaf

-From: rabjab@golem.ucsd.edu (rabjab)
-Subject: best food for space?
-Date: 12 Jan 93 21:56:10 GMT
-Organization: ucsd

-I watched Robinson Crusoe on Mars the other day and got the idea to
-put my food in toothpaste tubes.  I squezed out all the paste into
-jars and used the blender to turn various foods into paste.  I'm
-having some problems getting the paste in the tubes, however.  Does
-anyone have suggestions?

-When that problem is solved, I am going to need to get more tubes.

Backpacking outfitter stores often sell (or at least used to sell) 
reusable transparent plastic toothpaste-type tubes for carrying things
like peanut butter, jelly, honey, etc. on a backpacking trip. The back
end of the tube (the end opposite the screw cap) is completely open, and
you dump your food in there, then take a little clip and use it to clamp
the back end shut. On the camping trip, you squeeze the food out the end
with the screw cap. When you get home, you take off the clip, wash out the
tube, and you're ready to fill it again. If you put perishable foods in
the tube and don't have refrigeration, watch out for food poisoning.

You sound like the perfect person to contact Pilsbury and get their recipe
for Food Sticks (a snack item that was sold in the late 1960s or early
1970s, I believe) to post to sci.space, or perhaps you could even talk them 
into starting up manufacture again. I liked the chocolate ones the best -
a perfect "astronaut food". (They may even have been called Space Food Sticks
for a while.)

And while you're thinking about foods for space, don't forget Tang. I don't
know whether it was developed specifically for the space program (anybody
know?), but it was selected for the space program as an orange juice 
substitute, because it's essentially nonperishable, and it can be shipped
up dry and reconstituted with water (which is available as a by-product of
onboard power generation). Reports from the early days of the space program
indicate that dried orange juice doesn't reconstitute very well, which is why
a substitute was selected.

John Roberts
roberts@cmr.ncsl.nist.gov