r/science • u/Science_News Science News • 1d ago
Astronomy Fermenting miso in orbit reveals how space can affect a food’s taste
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/ferment-miso-orbit-space-food-taste-iss86
u/Science_News Science News 1d ago
Fermenting foods in space could provide a new culinary frontier.
When fermented aboard the International Space Station, the Japanese condiment miso tasted nuttier than two earthbound versions, researchers report April 2 in iScience. The finding not only reveals that fermentation is possible for a food orbiting Earth, it also characterizes a space environment’s influence on a food.
Astronauts usually munch on freeze-dried foods void of most microbes, says industrial designer and researcher Maggie Coblentz of MIT’s Space Exploration Initiative. “Fermentation is a really exciting way to open that up, so to invite a diverse community of microbes that will interact with one another and also preserve food while growing and enhancing flavor.”
Read more here and the research article here00450-X?utm_campaign=Press%20Package&utm_medium=email&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-_ejGmbJ09p1uvJxr0RpKpIfrXgl3V-I8O73UbL9INbhpHlaPaI4gatM5u2j3II3qgnF-PdBtgnGZvmZzF5jNu7yGUnQn_UDmczOuWOKXxHm9zgtos&_hsmi=353971423&utm_content=353971423&utm_source=hs_email).
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u/No-Function3409 1d ago
Didn't they look at growth of bacteria and viruses in space and find it went crazy dangerous?
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u/Spaghett8 1d ago
Not crazy dangerous… yet.
But they did show alarmingly quick adaptation. Like for example, becoming resistant to radiation, becoming more virulent, and a few specimens even straight up being able to survive in outer space.
That hasn’t stopped them from continuing their tests.
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u/Demigod787 1d ago
Gravity is of less consequence to microscopic organism compared to nuclear forces.
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u/slide_potentiometer 1d ago
Sounds like a promotional exercise to me. It shows that miso can be fermented in space, but without controlling other variables (temperature, humidity, air pressure and gas balances, etc) they can't necessarily pin any effect on the unique space effects like microgravity or radiation.
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u/Stolehtreb 1d ago
What would this be promoting? I would imagine they are aware of the variables they can’t control. This gives them a baseline for what they can control for in an earth-based experiment to see if the result is the same when all is equal other than gravity. Then if it isn’t, they could continue to see what effect of gravity is affecting the difference. Idk, it’s interesting to me in a non-promotional sense.
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u/dctucker 1d ago
What would this be promoting?
could provide a new culinary frontier
The sentence in isolation is ambiguous. It could imply "expanding the frontier for feeding astronauts" or it could imply "expanding the commercial frontier for fermentation" which sounds a lot like what the bougie space-tourism industry markets.
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u/StonePrism 1d ago
Yes lord knows how much MIT and NASA researchers love commidifying science. They can't get enough of it. Maybe read the article so that the sentence isn't in isolation, idk.
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u/dctucker 1d ago
Maybe read the article
I did read the article, which in fact was not written by anyone at NASA or MIT. The first sentence doesn't get explained directly. It goes on to say that astronaut food usually lacks microbes which is more in line with the first interpretation, but it goes on to say the process produces a "unique taste of space" which sounds a bit fluffy.
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u/I_heart_canada_jk 1d ago
I didn’t read the article—did they suggest that it was the ‘weightlessness’ or chemical composition of the capsule that made the difference in taste? Another suggested it could even be psychological but I bet with a number of humans living in a sticky tube for months at a time alters fermentation a bit, no?
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u/Musole 1d ago
There’s an argument to be made about the psychological influence of tasting or fermenting food and space or just consuming food in space. I think there is already a slight bias that food is gonna taste different in space as opposed to on Earth so it could be that people are imagining that they are tasting it nuttier I don’t know just speculating here
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u/fall3nang3l 1d ago
People say cocktails and various hum drum foods taste better when vacationing.
A common drink of bottom shelf spirits imbibed while taking in a sunset on a beach in the Caribbean may very well subjectively taste better than the same drink in your garage when there's a blizzard outside and your wife won't return your calls because she's "with a friend".
Hypothetically.
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u/nermalstretch 1d ago
Taste is subjective, this proves nothing. Tomato juice tastes better on a plane for unexpected reasons.
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u/sonostreet 20h ago
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