us, we stand on the cusp of a new era of space travel.
In the coming decades, there will be celestial cruises
aboard Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic. There may be
off-world factories and lunar mining operations, cour-
tesy of Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin. There will probably be
hydroponic grow houses at Elon Musk’s SpaceX colony
on Mars. Even the bureaucrats at NASA have grand plans
for the future. But while a new generation of aerospace
engineers toils over the tech that will get us into orbit
and beyond—reusable launch vehicles, rocket-bearing
planes—an important question remains unanswered,
Ekblaw says: “What will delight humans in space?”
Even in the near term, this is not a frivolous concern.
A one-way trip to Mars will take about nine months,
which is a long time to spend inside a hermetically
sealed tube hurtling through a cold, dark void. Like all
animals, humans require stimulation; without some-
thing to break the monotony, most of us end up like a
tiger pacing its cage—stressed, depressed, and prone to
problematic behaviors. Indeed, many scientists believe
that boredom is one of the most serious challenges fac-
ing future spacefarers.
Until now, design for space has focused on survival.
But Ekblaw thinks it’s possible, even essential, to imag-
ine an entirely new microgravitational culture, one
that doesn’t simply adapt Earth products and technol-
ogies but instead conceives them anew. Cady Coleman
amused herself by playing her flute on the Interna-
tional Space Station—another astronaut brought his
bagpipes—but future travelers might instead pick up a
Telemetron. They might wear clothes spun of special
zero-g silk, or sculpt delicate forms that couldn’t exist
on Earth, or choreograph new forms of dance, assisted
by their robot tails. They might, in other words, stop
seeing themselves as homesick earthlings and begin
to feel like stimulated, satisfied spacelings.
Whatever else they do, they’ll require nourishment,
which is why food is a central focus of the MIT pro-
gram. NASA and other government space agencies have
traditionally treated food as a practical challenge—an
extreme version of provisioning for an outback camp-
ing trip. But while a highly trained astronaut might be
able to subsist on space gorp without losing her mind,
what about a civilian with a one-way ticket to Mars?
Coblentz, who is leading the Space Exploration Initia-
tive’s gastronomic research, argues that, as much as art
or music or movement, good food will enable us to thrive
as we leave Earth behind. It has always been the glue
that connects us to each other and to the environment
around us. Our pursuit of food has shaped the evolu-
tion of our sensory apparatus—the very tools through
which we, as a species, perceive the world. The choices
we make every day about food selection, preparation,
and consumption lie at the foundation of our identities
and relationships and affinities. As the Italian historian
Massimo Montanari succinctly put it, food is culture.
This truth will surely endure into our interplanetary
future—even as far as the 24th century, if Ekblaw’s
beloved Star Trek is to be believed. When Captain
Jean-Luc Picard narrowly survives an attempted
body-snatching by the Borg, a group of pasty techno-
supremacists who invade his mind with nanoprobes and
threaten to steal his humanity forever, the place he goes
to recuperate is his family’s ancestral vineyard in France,
where his brother still works the soil, tends the vines,
and harvests the grapes, and where the meals are made
from scratch. Picard was lucky: Real-life spacefarers
won’t have the option of hightailing it back to Earth to
regain their sense of meaning and identity. They’ll need
to make it fresh in whichever brave new world they find
themselves. As Coblentz puts it, “What will the terroir
of Mars be?” To find out, she’s compiling a speculative
guide to the kinds of culinary tools, tastes, and rituals
that might help humans feel at home in space—an inter-
planetary cookbook.COBLENTZ GREW UP just outside of Toronto and spent her
summers canoe-tripping in the Canadian wilderness.
After high school, she studied design in New Delhi and
New York; she favors the all-black wardrobe common
to the field. Yet her love of backcountry exploration has
translated into a fascination with extreme environments.
Before she came to MIT, she investigated the role that
food plays in prisons and on the battlefield. Still, outer
space presents challenges all its own; before she could
begin developing interplanetary recipes, some market
research was in order. And so, on a sunny morning in
September, she invited Cady Coleman, Italian astronaut