Floating Food/Filming Knowledge: Creating Food Knowledge above the Clouds

Parabolic Dining

On February 11, 1971, NASA food experts from Houston’s Manned Spacecraft Center climbed aboard a KC-135 plane to undergo short periods of near weightlessness.¹ The KC-135 was unique in that it enabled researchers to test equipment under the rigors of a zero-gravity environment during a series of flights on parabolic paths. With Apollo 14 having just returned from the lunar surface, some of NASA’s engineers and scientists were already in full swing developing systems for what would become the first American space station, Skylab. NASA’s two experts aboard the KC-135 on that day were part of the effort and had packed a specially designed food tray, cutlery, dozens of food cans, and a camera for their flight. Their goal was to test these items’ practicality in weightlessness. Surviving footage (a 25-minute video) documents their effort: Food Testing for Skylab, February 11, 1971, at the National Archives at College Park, NARA 255-SE-71-034.

This wasn’t the only parabolic flight involving food. We can trace several such efforts that occurred over the years, both with scientists running the experiments on themselves and sometimes with astronauts testing their fare in the simulated weightlessness of a parabolic flight. And while the footage of cans and food smashing into each other while weightless certainly does have slapstick elements to it – something that isn’t lost on the scientists conducting the experiments – it also is part of a scientific effort to make space habitable for humanity. It’s an effort, however, that does not neatly fit into common historical narratives about the trajectory of food science and technology in the twentieth century. So just what were they doing up there? This blogpost aims to show that to answer this question, we’ll have to employ concepts from the history of knowledge to the field of historical food studies and the history of nutritional science. The blogpost, therefore, initially dives into NASA’s quest for a livable space station – Skylab – and then asks what we can learn from NASA’s archival material through the history of knowledge and which new avenues of questioning open up when the history of food is viewed as the history of food knowledge.

“Truly Live in Space”

NASA’s Skylab posed the chance to study the long-term effects of habitation in space on astronauts: “We already knew, of course, that man could exist in space and that he could work in space. […] But it was not until Skylab that we learned that man could truly live in space.”² As living in space necessarily means eating in space, NASA conducted several food-related experiments on Skylab. For example, a metabolic balance study aimed to measure the loss of bone mass during longer stays in zero gravity.³ Another question was whether well-defined or even fortified space food could become a therapeutic tool to combat the adverse effects of space like bone mass or muscle loss. While these experiments lay squarely inside the purview of nutritional science, NASA’s interest during the parabolic flight tests seems to have also extended to other types of knowledge of food and food consumption.

A principal reason for NASA’s interest in food consumption in weightlessness was safety. Floating crumbs and water droplets posed hazards to the spacecraft and its crew. Malfunctioning food cans and pouches with leaky seals threatened to unleash microbial contamination and spoilage. But for the Skylab Missions, at least, NASA also took living in space seriously and approached the topic holistically. Wishing to know how to live comfortably in space, NASA scientists devised a test regime that would research Skylab’s habitability.⁴ This habitability experiment specifically included the design of everything food-related aboard Skylab, from the individual meals and their packaging up to the galley and dining area of the space station. With help from famous industrial designer Raymond Loewy, NASA conceived of the experiment as a “demonstration of the operational feasibility of our best design judgments” instead of a “classical” experiment. The team sought to include the best possible design beforehand and then evaluate it during the missions through astronaut interviews, video and photographic footage, and questionnaires.⁵

Both series of experiments and their respective investigators clashed over food several times during Skylab’s design phase. While the nutritionists needed food and food intake to be as uniform as possible to track the astronauts’ metabolic balance, engineers and designers aimed to enhance comfort and habitability by varying the design of food packages and the galley area to make them appealing.⁶ However, researchers in both disciplines were interested in finding new ways to eat in space and in creating the most practical packages. This meant they not only had to design and test packages but also find the best ways to consume food out of them. They sought to acquire the tacit and embodied knowledge of preparing and eating food and explicate it through parabolic flights, making it accessible for alterations and redesign.

History of Food Knowledge

Concerning food, the history of science and technology has focused primarily on the history of physiology and nutrition and the industrialization of food production⁷ and has emphasized the “nutritional paradigm” of food science, in particular.⁸ This paradigm, which emerged in the nineteenth century, conceived of food as a mixture of substances like proteins and vitamins that performed different functions in the human body.⁹ Accordingly, the substance paradigm included a new science of nutrition whose practitioners claimed to be able to quantify the substance requirements of the human body, to localize deficits, and to optimize the body as a metabolic machine by adjusting substance consumption.¹⁰ New expert cultures emerged that were dedicated to research and development but also to the control and monitoring of food.¹¹ This perspective fruitfully presented a coherent narrative for food in the twentieth century. Yet, it is insufficient for explaining why NASA’s two scientists aboard the KC-135 were trying to catch food and its paraphernalia flying around during the brief periods of weightlessness the parabolic flight curve provided and why they were filming their efforts meticulously.

Applying a history of knowledge approach in this context allows us to better understand how food was created, circulated, and consumed in Western societies.¹² In recent years, scholars in the field have focused on alternative areas of food expertise like food technology, microbiology, and packaging technology.¹³ In such accounts, modern food comes to be understood as resulting from a nuanced interweaving of artifacts and scientific practices in which different areas of expertise, knowledge, and skills interact, sometimes working together and sometimes in competition. NASA’s quest for space food is a good example of the types of knowledge that melded in the creation of modern food. Under political pressure due to the space race, and challenged by the weightlessness of space, NASA needed to establish new and complementary forms of knowledge, such as a distinctive engineering expertise that enabled sterile production processes and food packaging materials that could withstand space travel.¹⁴ Extensive bacteriological research was conducted to ensure that food remained safe with an almost infinite shelf life on longer missions. Furthermore, comprehensive organoleptic knowledge and practices emerged that made implicit taste knowledge explicit and became indispensable to producing standardized foods.¹⁵ Looking at NASA and its space nutrition efforts, one gleans a nuanced picture of institutional research that, in its interconnections and culinary creativity, hints at knowledge that was previously touched on only tangentially in the historiography of food. From the moment NASA scientists started to train cameras on themselves, they started to generate new knowledge and new cultural techniques around food that went well beyond their initial interest in the material composition of food.

The NASA scientists interested in diverse forms of food-related knowledge, archival files show, encountered epistemic challenges that made the project of gathering nutritional knowledge difficult. NASA experts had trouble analyzing the rheological properties of food, the hand movements required to open plastic packaging, or even questions of habitability – like the influence of food on the feeling of being at home – because these features were hard to transpose into traditional scientific procedures. The teachability and learnability of physical food practices were at issue just as much as the standardization and communication of sensory impressions of taste.¹⁶ At this point, cameras and parabolic flights became essential epistemic tools. NASA’s scientists and engineers prepared written documentation referring to film recordings made during food trials, test flights, and product evaluations; this documentation and the recordings alluded to served as a storage medium but also as a communication channel and teaching tool,¹⁷ becoming a fundamental part of the expert discourse on food within NASA. Film recordings of tests made during experimental parabolic flights made it possible for NASA scientists to observe aspects of cultural techniques of eating that had previously eluded documentation.¹⁸ They also serve as evidence of NASA’s self-reflection and self-documentation and provide a view of the activities of food scientists as well as of NASA’s self-perception, documentation interests, and storage techniques.¹⁹ Beyond that, the films offer a glimpse into often-overlooked aspects of food development in the twentieth century. Besides demonstrating the nutritional and physiological knowledge that took center stage in the remaking of food in the last century, the NASA films show different media techniques for generating, exemplifying, and storing this knowledge.

Cinematic Traces of Knowledge not Yet Known

Sometimes, the films hint at food knowledge that is hidden together with its carriers. Women were always part of the scientific staff that worked on food at NASA. However, compared to their male counterparts, they lacked visibility (with Rita Rapp being an exception). Most of NASA’s food research documentation was written by men – even though Rita Rapp assembled the whole archival collection on NASA’s food program in Houston. Nevertheless, footage from a taste test with prospective Skylab astronauts from August 1971 brings the women of NASA’s food science department into view. Here, we can see them preparing space food, calculating caloric intake and acceptability ratings, and, tellingly, waiting on the male program members. While the men sit at a long table, eating and discussing space food, it is the women who do most of the work, prepping in the kitchen, bringing new dishes and beverages, filling out forms, and measuring food.²⁰ Only the camera captured their role in the creation of new food knowledge. Moreover, the films sometimes hint at food knowledge that had not yet been articulated but, in hindsight, had begun to “float” into view: if we return to the first movie, we note that the longer the two NASA scientists remained aboard the KC-135, the more opened cans they had to store in large trash bags – with only limited success. Emptied cans, food packages, and crumbs floated around constantly because the loosely fixed trash bag was unable to secure them properly while the strapped-in scientists tried to capture and contain them all. NASA’s propensity to utilize multiple layers of food packaging elicited difficulties for NASA’s scientists and astronauts as they could not contain all the food and package waste. This experience, in turn, presaged a peculiar type of food knowledge that had not yet been fully articulated but became more and more important during the late twentieth century: What could one do with the abundance of food waste and empty food packages that modern consumer society created?

Alwin J. Cubasch is a research associate at the Cluster of Excellency – Matters of Activity at the Humboldt University of Berlin and a PhD candidate at the University of Innsbruck. His research interests are space history, history of nutrition and food technology, and environmental history. His work as member of the Filtering research group focuses on the history and future of filtering technologies and their impacts on environments. A recent publication is his monograph on automated food dispensers at the turn of the century, Zu Gast im Automaten: Gastrotechnik im Berlin der Jahrhundertwende (Muenster: Waxmann, 2023).

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1. National Archives at College Park (NARA) 255-SE-71-034. ↩︎
2. Richard S. Johnston and Lawrence F. Dietlein, “Introduction,” Proceedings of The Skylab Life Sciences Symposium 1, August 27–29, 1974. Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, JSC-09275 NASA TM X-58154, November 1974. ↩︎
3. Inflight medical requirements imposed by M070,” October 16, 1968, Box 1, Folder 2, Food Systems (R. Rapp Files), Center Series. JSC History Collection, University of Houston-Clear Lake Archives. ↩︎
4. Apollo Applications Program, Experiment M-487 Habitability/Crew Quarters – Initial Guidelines, C.C. Johnson, Manned Spacecraft Center, Houston, May 1969, Central Correspondence, 1963–1974, Engineering and Development Directorate. Spacecraft Design Division, Box 5, Habitability Folder, Record Group 255; National Archives at Fort Worth, TX. ↩
5. Ibid. ↩︎
6. Alwin J. Cubasch and Julia-Katharina Neier, “Negotiating Future Foods: Cultural Practices and Nutritional Knowledge in NASA’s Space Food Research Programs,” in Proceedings of the Dublin Gastronomy Symposium 2020 – Food and Disruption, Technological University Dublin (2020), 49–60. ↩︎
7. For a more detailed version of the following argument, see Alwin Cubasch, Zu Gast im Automaten: Gastrotechnik im Berlin der Jahrhundertwende (Münster, 2023). ↩︎
8. Uwe Spiekermann, Künstliche Kost: Ernährung in Deutschland, 1840 bis heute (Göttingen, 2018). ↩︎
9. Heiko Stoff, “Vitaminisierung und Vitaminbestimmung. Ernährungsphysiologische Forschung im Nationalsozialismus,” Dresdener Beiträge zur Geschichte der Technikwissenschaften 32 (2008): 59–93. ↩︎
10. Elizabeth Neswald, David F. Smith, and Ulrike Thoms, eds., Setting Nutritional Standards: Theory, Policies, Practices (Martlesham, 2017); Maria Osietzki, “Körpermaschinen und Dampfmaschinen: Vom Wandel der Physiologie und des Körpers unter dem Einfluss von Industrialisierung und Thermodynamik,” in Physiologie und industrielle Gesellschaft: Studien zur Verwissenschaftlichung des Körpers im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, ed. P. Sarasín and J. Tanner (Frankfurt, 1998), 313–47. ↩︎
11. Rima D. Apple, Vitamania – Vitamins in American Culture (New Brunswick, 1996); Uwe Spiekermann, “Die gescheiterte Neugestaltung der Alltagskost: Nähr- und Eiweißpräparate im späten Kaiserreich,” TG Technikgeschichte 78, no. 3 (2011): 187–210; Vera Hierholzer, Nahrung nach Norm: Regulierung von Nahrungsmittelqualität in der Industrialisierung 1871–1914 (Göttingen, 2010); Karin Zachmann and Per Østby, “Food, Technology, and Trust: An Introduction,” History and Technology 27, no. 1 (2011): 1–10; Uwe Spiekermann, “Warenwelten – Die Normierung der Nahrungsmittel in Deutschland 1850–1930,” in Essen und Trinken in der Moderne, ed. Ruth-E. Mohrmann (Münster, 2006), 99–124. ↩︎
12. Philipp Sarasin, “Was ist Wissensgeschichte?” Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur (IASL) 36, no. 1 (2011): 159–72. ↩︎
13. Anastacia Marx de Salcedo, Combat-Ready Kitchen: How the US Military Shapes the Way You Eat (London, 2015); Hannah F. LeBlanc, “Nutrition for National Defense: American Food Science In World War II and The Cold War,” PhD diss., Stanford University, 2019. ↩︎
14. J. Ross-Nazzal, “‘From Farm To Fork’: How Space Food Standards Impacted The Food Industry And Changed Food Safety Standards,” in Societal Impact of Spaceflight, ed. S. J. Dick and R. D. Launius, 219–36 (Washington, DC, 2007). ↩︎
15. Nadia Berenstein, “Flavor Added: The Sciences of Flavor and the Industrialization of Taste in America,” PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2018. ↩︎
16. Erhard Schüttpelz, “Körpertechniken,” Zeitschrift für Medien und Kulturforschung, no. 1 (2010): 101–20. ↩︎
17. See, for example, Paul C. Rambaut, Charles T. Bourland, Norman D. Heidelbaugh, Clayton S. Huber, and Malcolm C. Smith Jr., “Some Flow Properties of Foods in Null-Gravity,” Food Technology 26 (1972): 48–63; Skylab Food Tests, Walter Cunningham to C. C. Johnson, Manned Spacecraft Center, August 5, 1970, Central Correspondence, 1963–1974, Engineering and Development Directorate. Spacecraft Design Division, Box 5, Food System 1970 Folder, Record Group 255; National Archives at Fort Worth, TX.
18. Sybille Krämer and Horst Bredekamp, “Kultur, Technik, Kulturtechnik: Wider die Diskursivierung der Kultur,” in Bild, Schrift, Zahl, ed. Sybille Krämer and Horst Bredekamp, 11–22. (Paderborn, 2009), 18; Tim Ingold, Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture (London, 2013). ↩︎
19. Jennifer K. Levasseur, Through Astronaut Eyes: Photographing Early Human Spaceflight (West Lafayette, 2020). ↩︎
20. NARA 255-S-05464. ↩︎

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