Japanese Space Food

You’re in space. The trip up took 8 hours- most of which involved you sitting sideways strapped into a second-hand shuttle waiting for air traffic control to give you the all-clear, with no option to get up and go the bathroom (yep, adult diaper). Now you’re on board a creaking old Russian hybrid rust-bucket where everything stinks of Ozone, you’re losing bone mass on a constant and permanent basis, the weather outside sucks, you can’t relax for a second without strapping yourself to a wall because your limbs float off randomly in zero-G, you can’t go to the bathroom without having to attach undignified hoses to your body, and you’re sharing the cramped and claustrophobic quarters with a bunch of super-earnest elitist prats.

The least you could ask for is a bit of honest-to-goodness, home-made cooking just like Momma used to make. Well, you won’t get that, but if you are a Japanese citizen you are entitled to freeze-dried comfort food mass-produced by machines in high-density chunks. Flavors so delicious as Shrimp Gratin, Kimchi, Ramen Noodles, Yakitori, with Ice Cream to top it off.

I picked these J-space foods up at Miraikan a few months back, a science museum that was holding an exhibition on Pterosaurs. There was a wider range, but they were ¥500 each so I only bought the two you see above.

I opened them to take photographs and since then the opened packages have been sat on my shelf, awaiting the moment when I was bold enough to bite into their dry and dusty ‘goodness’. Every time I fumble in that shelf now, the opened packages spill food-dust. So, I better screw my courage to the sticking place and give them a try. Why not begin with the Ebi-Gratin, or Shrimp Gratin:

Gratin is very popular in convenience stores here- normally a gooey melty white-saucey calori hit, with a few tid-bits of beef or shrimp perched precariously on top. In the space-food version, you can see the red outline of the shrimp baked right into the cookie-like white stuff.

Here goes (yes, I’m really going to eat it, right now, as I write this):

OK. Incredibly dry and chewy- fibrous, light taste of gratin. The shrimp seems to have been vaporized or fossilized or something- there is only a slight color change in the pattie where it used to be. Like I’m digging for gold and find a shrimp-vein in the rock. “Ho! I think there were shrimps here! I can see their color outlines!”

What?

OK. Not bad though. This is my breakfast. I’ll just eat one though. Save the other for another time (yeah, right.)

Ice cream:

Mmm, pretty good. Milky, smooth when wettened in my mouth, a little chalky but not too bad. Wow, dry ice cream- tastes like ice cream! The wonders they can create!

Now I expect big things from the space industry. Federation of Planets and Food Replicators and Quantum Torpedoes and etc may be a little way off yet- but I’m all for them all when they come around. When I’m a 200 year old age-corrected cyborg, or a program flitting through the Net (‘Great Link’) seeking out the newness, I rather expect they’ll be prepping roast soy turkeys on a deep-space station out past Uranus, while working on the galaxies first stable worm-hole.

Salut! Let freeze-dried ice-cream lead the charge!

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