Aussie Snacks on Mars

One of the things that fascinate me is how astronauts from different cultures take different foods into space. When French astronaut Thomas Pesquet blasts off to the ISS later this month, for example, he’s taking four French meals specially created by a Michelin-starred chef. (Including a truffled pie of potatoes and onions from Roscoff, slow-cooked beef with mushroom sauce, almond tart with caramelised pears, and a freeze-dried cherry tomato dish. Heston Blumenthal created the first space bacon sandwich for Tim Peake.)

As part of their training, each astronaut tastes the regular space food on offer to pick the things they think they’ll enjoy during their six months in space. On top of that, mission control includes snacks in the resupply runs to break up the meal monotony. Astronauts can make requests, and I imagine they send an intern out to the grocery store to pick them up. 

I was pondering (as you do) what snacks different nationalities would crave on a long-duration space mission. (If you’re wondering – lockdown has demonstrated that what I would miss most would be bacon-flavoured crisps.) 

And as I was pondering, I came across SnackSurpise. This subscription service sends you a box of snacks from a different country every month. So Ryan and I signed up for an intercultural shelf-stable space snack experience!

Our first box turned out to be a collection from Australia, which is perhaps not as exotic as I’d hoped. We chose the Mini Box, so we got six different snacks and a nice booklet of facts about Australia. Did you know that – despite living alongside many of the deadliest species on the planet – Australians invented a new species to scare tourists? They said the carnivorous Drop Bear dropped from trees to attack