October 23, 2006

• Space Food

  Did you ever wonder how exactly NASA’s “dry ice cream” was made? If you go to a museum often times you will see, in the shop, packets of rather expensive freeze-dried ice cream. It tastes like ice cream, but it is DRY. How’d they do that?

  It is the perfect way to store food. When you dry food normally, in the sun or in heat, you don’t just take out the water- you also cook it a little, changing its flavour/texture. Water is necessary for bacteria and other things which cause food to go bad over time. Without water- no water, no change. So food can stay the ‘exact’ same way virtually forever. All you do is add water.

  So how do you do that?

  The Secret

  It’s rather incredible, and I just discovered it today. The pressure at sea level is 1 Atmosphere… you go lower, it gets above that, higher, less than that. In space, a complete vacuum, well- I think there is probably no pressure at all.

  Water works different at different pressure. You ever hear that water boils faster high in the mountains than it does at sea level? It’s true. The less pressure, the smaller the range is that water can stay a liquid. Guess what this means? There is a point, when pressure is almost gone, where water CANNOT become a liqiud at all.

  So what happens to it when it gets hotter, above ‘freezing’- its solid point?

  It skips the water stage and turns right into gas.

  So what does that mean?

  It means if you take away air pressure, and heat water, it becomes gas.

  So, say you take food and freeze it in a special chamber. Then, you lower the pressure- to be scientific, they say to .6 atmsopheres I think. Maybe it is .06, but what do you really care? Very low pressure. Then, raise the temperature just a little. What happens? The water, which is frozen and seperated from the food, suddenly changes- but it can’t become a liquid. So it becomes a gas, and leaves the food slowly.

  After doing this for days, the food becomes almost totally dry. If you dry food in heat, it is only 90-95% dry… if you do it this way, it is almost completely, totally dry. AND- the food is exactly the same as it was before it was dried.

  So, add water, and guess what? It tastes the same as it did before. Even if you add water 100 years later, so long as you kept it sealed in an air-tight bag so no NEW water could get at it.

  This sort of food is actually available for us normal people, such as hikers or people worried about natural disasters. You can store lots of it, and then if an emergency happens or you are hiking- you add boiling water to it, and it turns into normal food. Or, if you are like me and enjoy the cool idea of eating ‘dry’ strawberries that still taste like real strawberries or something, just eat it dry.

  -Patrick

  
  

  • 10:22 am
  • 1 Comment