Knives, for instance, pose a hazard an accidental puncture of equipment could be catastrophic. The first thing you have to realize about space, says Jennifer Levasseur, who curates the some-485 items of space food at the National Air and Space Museum, is that it changes everything about what you can and cannot eat. The good news is that, as the Smithsonian’s collection amply demonstrates, the history of feeding men and women in space is plenty fascinating without it. The astronauts, it seems, didn’t like the stuff. Freeze-dried ice cream did make an appearance on the Apollo 7 mission, in 1968, but was scratched from the space program soon after. Or, rather, I was eating what only very few astronauts ever ate (unless, of course, they too grew up visiting the museum gift shop). But astronaut ice cream came with the ultimate value-added, better than hot fudge or peanuts: I was eating what astronauts ate!Īs it turns out, I wasn’t. It had the consistency of Styrofoam and left a strange, slick film on the back of your teeth even at that age, if pressed, I would have had to admit that regular, frozen Earth ice cream was in every way superior.

This was before freeze-dried ice cream had become standard museum gift-shop fare-obviously way before the advent of The highlight of a weekend in the nation’s capital was unwrapping that weirdly light packet, revealing the tricolored brick within. focuses less on my exposure to the splendid pageant of democracy, or soaking in the accumulated treasure of America’s cultural history but, rather, on a 3- by 3-inch foil-wrapped block of something called astronaut ice cream. Surely I’m not the only one whose primary memory of childhood trips to Washington, D.C.

Freeze dried astronaut food