Cooking Pasta on Mars
Fact: Humans need food and water to survive. On Earth as in space. Yet you don’t often find talks of food in science fiction – a passing mention at best and pills are often used – while finding and preparing food in space or, worse, on another planet would present rather a crucial challenge to explorers.
Space food has made a lot of progress since the dry freeze stuff they used to feed the Apollo guys with but food on board the International Space Station (ISS) still has to come largely out of pre-cooked/frozen microwaveable meals in pouches that can be sucked at, for reasons of microgravity. Chefs have been called upon to prepare Christmas or New Year’s Eve special meals for the Station but they still come mostly in that easy to eat format. Some adventurous astronauts do try cooking – most of them are scientists to some degree or another so enjoy twisting their brains over a problem – but the experiment is still not part of their daily exercise problem, possibly because they do have easy access to supplies from Earth. And yet cooking in space presents a real challenge and one that must be tackled for human exploration missions.
So you send your heroes on a deep space mission. Far away from home and its comfort. What could be better for the soul – and stomach – than the perfect dish of pasta?
Let’s explore the recipe: what does it take?
Well. How about pasta itself? No worries there, the astronauts (in particular if some of the crew are Italian) would have smuggled the right stuff in the luggage allocation, along with the required amount of salt. Terrestrial proven shapes might not be adequate for space use but let’s get back to that later, as our cooking heroes are faced with the biggest challenge of all: Cooking the pasta.
Check the instructions on the packet. They require that your astronauts bring a large amount of water to a boil.
First problem: Where will they get those three or four litres of water from?
The ISS (and any other spacecraft of your choice, in particular if bearing human or humanoid creatures) does carry water supply for drinking. However, for long term missions, the volume of stock available is not sufficient and therefore most waste water from urine and moisture condensed from the air (coming from simple human breathing) is purified and reused.
Do your heroes really want to cook their pasta in this? There are little viable alternatives: Yes, there is ice on a lot of planets – or fluids in the Orion Nebula – but who knows what this might contain as micro-particles, nutrients, germs or alien life – or if it is in fact made of water at all – so the recycled fluids solution might be the safest bet. In fact, your would-be-cooks’ problem might be more one dealing with taste as purified water is rather bland and totally deprived of any nutrient, and your adventurers might need to add extra salt, if not whole series of minerals to bring the water back to a normal state and nutritional value.
Second problem: Bringing the water to a boil. Which spells playing around with tools but more important still, playing with ambient parameters.
Cooking anything on some planets is nearly impossible: Don’t bring a gas cooker to Saturn; with a 97% hydrogen atmosphere, you’d end up blowing up quite a large chunk of the galaxy – and think about the resulting embarrassment… (or do it and enjoy the aftermath)
If you think a gas cooker is a little cartoonistic an approach, do remember that any electrostatic/electromagnetic discharge in such flammable environment might set it ablaze. So do think your equipment accordingly.
Moreover, on the ISS, another spacecraft, or on the surface of a planet, the astronauts will often suffer from an instance of partial or total microgravity. Or, in some cases, be crushed by atmospheric pressure.
A litre of water on Earth has a boiling point of 100°C (212°F) at sea level atmospheric pressure (about 1 bar) but any changes in the pressure will affect this: a lower figure would mean a longer time needed to reach the boiling point while higher pressure will increase the speed accordingly.
If and when the water is finally boiling (don’t rush it – try to boil water on Mars, with an ambient pressure of 0.007 and an mean surface temperature of minus 63°C might well take you ages – Get some snacks for your cooks while they wait), the heroes will be required to throw in a handful of coarse salt and then the pasta. Well. That’s what mama’s recipe is saying but should they try to open the container in microgravity environment they’d have to start chasing their randomly moving boiling water about. Unless the action is taking place on Venus, where they wouldn’t probably left with much between the effects of the average temperature (482°C – Cool your water to boiling temperature) and that of the enormous pressure (92 bars! Do your cooks have a cooking pan/container that can withstand this? Never mind about it being non-stick, they’d have to scrape the fluids from within the metal work…).
As an afterthought, maybe it would be easier for them to chuck the pasta and salt together with the cold water at the start and use some sort of autoclave. Of course the discerning gourmet would have the trouble of checking the al dente status of the food but a few months on the same planet (or the same orbit) should allow for plenty of trials and errors. In particular as far as errors as concerned. To the point where your astronaut might be out of pasta (there are limitations to the amount each astronaut is allowed to take along – just like on a low cost flight, actually) and suffer from acute depression.
Sauce? You can’t have pasta without sauce. Well, the good news is that sauce can easily be provided via those standard frozen space food pouches. The tricky bit being the actual mixing of pasta and sauce together. Possibly – again – you’ll need to cook the elements together. It can be done, some earthy apparatus are already achieving this feat of engineering. It needs a good steering mechanism as microgravity will not necessarily let the elements mingle and stick together, although humidity might help. New pasta designs might have to be derived, to allow more sauce gathering and keeping.
And then your valiant cooking explorers will be left with the last step: eat their hardly deserved dish of pasta. Chasing the dish about in microgravity could make interesting scenes. Is someone playing “The Blue Danube”, yet? But whatever you plan them do next, avoid the temptation of a food fight. Gravity and air resistance/drag would completely take all the fun out of it. And besides, your astronauts have had way too much trouble to prepare that simple dish already to be wanting to waste it thus…
Sources
Planetary parameters :
Solar System
Solar Views
Astronaut’s daily life:
Astronauts’ life according to ESA
Journal about cooking on the ISS
Last minute: Weirdly enough, while I was going the last edits on this, the European Space Agency published this video on food and space:
I suspect that anyone on the surface of Saturn or Venus will have more pressing problems to worry about! *laughs* Nevertheless, the points you raise are vital: the daily tasks that we take for granted (usually “women’s work”) keep us alive — and their logistics are crucial to the success of crewed space exploration.
One of my favorite things to do when reading – especially when I’m reading something dull – is to look for the stuff that the writer left out. Like making food and using the toilet. Those are the obvious ones, but they’re so important that I’m amazed by how often they’re just assumed. After all, there are still places on Earth where managing those two tasks can take up a person’s entire day (yes, usually women), and there is no place on Earth where those tasks are unimportant.
And so much thought and effort goes into taking care of input and output on the space station! Writers should be inspired, hah!
There’s other stuff to consider, too, though probably nothing more important.
Good post.
I’m succumbing to the temptation to quote the relevant portion of the interview that first brought me to Crossed Genres:
Crossed Genres:
We send astronauts up; we try to keep everything very clean and very sterile. Am I right in guessing that it just doesn’t seem viable if the population is going to stay there for very long?
Athena Andreadis:
Well, these are not self-sustained, long- term missions. The real reason for the sterility is not to contaminate exoplanetary samples. Also, if you read the fine print, you find out that one of the major and most time consuming tasks in places like the space station is scrubbing the fungus off of surfaces because there are no countervailing entities to take care of it. Not very heroic. All these macho alpha-type people up there going ‘scrubba-scrubba’.
That is still one of my favorite moments from last year. ‘Scrubba-scrubba’.
As a result of that conversation, I have plans to insert tiny scrubbing robots (with composters inside instead of vacuum bags) to roam the surfaces of the next big starship I write. Think, Roombas on the Enterprise!
Heh, heh! Helping foster real science and the scientific mindset while having fun. The best of combinations!
I would love to see, instead of pills, something along the lines of a gum like in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”. The act of eating is hardwired into our instincts and I’m not sure that cutting out the act of eating even if the body was nutritionally satisfied would be fulfilling. I think a well-designed gum that provided nutrition, variety, and some semblance of the act of eating would be an efficient way to satisfy hunger in hostile environments.
A really good answer, full of ratioinlaty!
Pizza Girl: most definitely. Like all our physiological processes, eating is a complex act even if it’s one of the Four Fs. Salivation, for example, is not only important in moistening the food but also in sending signals to the brain (and hence to the hormonal network) that the hunger is being addressed.
The behavioral aspects of food and eating are fascinating. A lot of the work I find most interesting (done with animals rather than people) comes out of Fred Provenza’s lab at Utah State.
How do animals decide what is or isn’t food?
How do they decide what to eat at any given time?
What factors affect food preference?
In most cases, the answers aren’t what you’d think, and fictional extrapolation to humans could be very interesting.
The only SF I can think of off the top of my head that addresses actual food preparation in outer space is from C.J. Cherryh. (That’s off the top of my head, of course — there’s undoubtedly more.) Finity’s End, f’r instance, has a lot of kitchen stuff in it — a big kitchen feeding an entire ship. But as is fairly typical in SF, there is a presumption of something approaching Earth normal gravity when food prep is actually underway.
There’s also a fair amount of food prep in the Foreigner series, when Bren Cameron & the atevi make their trip on a ship in outer space — & food consumption during a period of weightlessness — as well as some discussion of the very bland diets of the humans who’ve been up there in outer space all along.
What about food supply? On missions spanning years, or even indefinite in length, you’re going to run out of the pasta you stuffed in your luggage pretty quickly (assuming you ever figured out how to cook it), not to mention all your other food, unless you grow it yourself. We’re still waiting on a successful long-term closed ecological life support system, & until we get one of those, there’s not going to be any years-long humanned space missions in the first place.
I really enjoyed this article, as well as the links you provided at the end. In Sandra Magnus’s journal about cooking on the ISS, the way she described making tortillas reminded me of the video of Soichi Noguchi making sushi on the ISS. (That is, make sure all of the ingredients are sticky enough to adhere to the tortilla/nori, then roll it up so nothing floats away.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfwqLSHvu3E
The free-floating piece of sushi that comes flying at the camera seems to really illustrate your point about “chasing the dish about in microgravity.”
[...] should read . . . Cooking Pasta on Mars, about the complications of making decent food during space [...]
[...] – Science in My Fiction discusses how to cook pasta on Mars. [...]
Food is not a minimal concern. We all eat everyday. So designing our food for a worldbuilding would require research into how chemistry affects various lifeforms. Our particular building blocks lends us to appreciate the blends of sweet, sour, salty, and bitter. But maybe our structure makes us enjoy this chemical make up of those flavors. I would find it fascinating to explore who a different chemistry would make a Jovian or Martian enjoy an entirely different set up of how the elements combine.
I believe Klingons only saw three colors. What would that do to food appreciation? How does that play with the preparation of gaah?
Tom
No maybe about it, Tom: we have receptors in our tongue and mouth for the basic tastes and our sense of taste is also coupled to our sense of smell. Any change in either/both of these will affect how we perceive and crave food.
I somehow doubt that Klingons only saw three colors. Their clothes alone suggest they see the entire spectrum that Humans did (so does the fact that the two can interbreed).
More of this, if you’re curious in my book To Seek Out New Life: The Biology of Star Trek.
In fact I was puzzled by the statement (in the ESA daily life article) that the taste buds are getting less active with microgravity. Not too sure why (possibly they just don’t regenerate as quickly) and I’d have to contact one of our space doctors for an explanation.
I like a little science in my fiction, too, so I just wanted to add a little bit more of it:
Saturn is not nearly so explosive as you think. Saturn’s composition, more or less is about 96% hydrogen, 3% helium, 1% other stuff.
Most significantly, the “other stuff” category doesn’t include oxygen. Hydrogen doesn’t explode by itself. It explodes in the presence of sufficient oxygen (at the classic 2:1 ratio), when you give it a spark. You could spark the crap out of Saturn’s atmosphere and it isn’t going to explode because there’s just no oxygen floating around to combine with the hydrogen.
You can, indeed, forget about bringing a gas cooker to Saturn. But not because you’ll blow up the planet. Rather, because there’s no oxygen to help you burn the gas in your cooker!
As far as boiling water in zero-g, there’s a difficulty you haven’t explored. When we boil water on Earth, the water boils at the bottom of the pot, the steam bubbles up to the top and escapes in the atmosphere. It does this, of course, because gravity creates a pressure differential from the top to the bottom of the pot, and being less dense than liquid water, the pressure differential pushes the steam up to the top. That is, the steam escapes because it floats.
In zero g, there’s no pressure differential running through the water, and thus, no reason why the steam should escape at all. What is likely to happen is that the water will stay liquid for a while, but then as it reaches the boiling point, steam bubbles will form more or less well distributed throughout the volume of water. These bubbles will expand rapidly (explosively), because they add surface area through which other water molecules can transition from liquid to vapor phase: every molecule that vaporizes makes it easier for other molecules to do the same, so you get a runaway effect.
Basically, in zero-g the water will do nothing for a long time, and then explode in a foam of steam and hot water that rapidly converts to all steam. Ouch.
As an engineering problem, though, the answer is pretty straightforward. The water just needs some artificial gravity, which you can get by boiling it in a container that is rotating at the end of a bar of sufficient length, perhaps counter-balanced by a heavy weight. That will create a pressure differential which will allow the steam to escape safely by floating “up” in the normal manner.
Clarke sorted out how to make tea on Mars, using a pressure cooker.
(You may want to revise the piece on the relationship between ambient pressure and time to reach boiling – if you were not cooking inside the pressurised habitat on Mars then your water would boil very easily at the low ambient pressure, whereas if you were in a habitat pressurised above 1 Bar you will have to put more heat into the water to boil it…)
Do you actually want to boil water though?
I think the problem is actually to reach 100 deg C, for tea and pasta, but only 85 deg C or so for coffee.
This is quite distinct from making bubbles, is it not?
So cook under pressure, perhaps more than 1 Bar, and control temperature directly. And that is an incidental and probably irrelevant detail that I’ve neither seen in any SF nor really need to.