Before a long mission, an astronaut undergoes medical exams and works with a nutritionist, choosing from a fixed set of meals. A few store-bought favorites can come along if they clear approval, though not, say, a case of blueberries. Once everyone is aboard, roles sort themselves out as in any shared house. Someone usually ends up tracking the food and making sure everyone’s getting what they need. Coblentz says it’s less about who signed up for what role and more about how small groups naturally divide labor when they’re living in close quarters for months at a time. “People are people.”
As more countries reach orbit, the menu has widened. The European Space Agency and the cosmonauts keep their own menus; astronauts barter and trade among themselves. NASA’s is the most tightly controlled system, a standardized set of about 200 items, developed, repackaged, and safety-tested in-house at its own food labs.
JAXA’s menu impressed Coblentz most. The Japanese agency even put out a manga-style comic book about its space food, and its lineup ran livelier, with dishes created by outside universities, companies, and student groups—down to items like soy-glazed eel.
The first Korean astronaut flew with kimchi engineered specially for the trip. Because kimchi is a live ferment, Korean scientists spent years and millions of dollars taming it for orbit. They irradiated it to kill the bacteria that give it its tang, cut its smell by up to half, and stabilized it so a sealed bag wouldn’t keep fermenting and burst near the spacecraft’s equipment. Coblentz notes that the significant amount spent to send kimchi into orbit reflects how much a government putting its national dish into orbit is a statement of cultural presence.
Into the Field
Soylent, the meal-replacement drink that caught on in Silicon Valley around 2013, was an early entry point for Coblentz’s research. Its marketing stuck with her: ads of office workers too busy to eat, one of them “an astronaut sitting at a desk typing.” The pitch sold an odd fantasy: people on Earth living on engineered food, as if fresh produce and home cooking weren’t options. The same logic shapes space food, built on military rations that train the astronaut’s body to be “militant” and leave Earth’s food culture behind. Coblentz’s own research pushed the other way. She wasn’t chasing nutrition, which NASA had already covered; she wanted to know whether food could carry culture and identity into orbit rather than stripping them away.
The same instinct eventually pulled her off the desk and into the field. Svalbard is among the northernmost places people live year-round, an archipelago in the Arctic Ocean roughly 1,300 kilometers from the North Pole. Its remoteness suggests bare survival, but Coblentz found the opposite. Svalbard has a well-stocked grocery store, and the research stations, where scientists live and work while doing fieldwork, are fully equipped. The lone explorer surviving in the wilderness is a myth, she says; the reality is communities working together. She has seen it firsthand at Arctic research stations: someone had hauled a raclette maker all the way from France, the Italians filled a suitcase with Parmesan, and others brought coffee from home.
Coblentz wanted to do more than imagine how astronauts ate. “I was writing about it and doing some science experiments, but I couldn’t really put it into practice,” she says, and her work, as an artist and researcher, is “very embodied.” It was in 2021, while still with the Space Exploration Initiative, that she set up the field school on Svalbard, where scientists and artists could live and where she could bake bread, ferment yogurt, make sauces, and watch how it fed back into their work. She was based there until 2023.
One night, over a station dinner, a visiting MIT researcher asked Coblentz whether she planned to write up the evening. She found the question funny. “For me, this is the output. You’re eating. This is the publication, in a way,” she says, while granting the logic behind it: “The academic mindset is, if you didn’t write about it, it didn’t happen.” Letting people ask their own questions in the field makes room “for something that wasn’t coming from you.”
Thirty Days on the ISS
If engineered food promised efficiency, Coblentz’s miso promised the opposite: a set of living questions. Coblentz sent a miso to ferment on the International Space Station, not to feed anyone but to ask what an Earth food becomes when it grows up somewhere else. Most coverage stopped at the finding that miso tastes nuttier in space; she wanted the underlying question.
“Why does it matter that miso tastes nuttier in space?” Coblentz asks. “What does that actually mean for the future of food, or for the future of the human gut microbiome?” To her, fermentation is a relationship: in a sealed habitat, the environment shapes the people, the people shape the environment, and both shape the food. “Everything is shaping one another via microbes,” she says, and in food, that exchange “just happens to express itself through flavor.”
Miso is a living, fermenting food, and getting it to orbit took coordination. Other such foods had already flown to the station completed; this was the first time the fermentation itself occurred in space. The miso flew through Voyager, one of the operators that helps researchers send experiments up, packed into a box about the size of a microwave that MIT engineers had fitted with sensors and a GoPro to photograph the surface and track the mold day by day. Every part had to clear a safety review, the kind that asks “Does it leak? Is it flammable?”
The miso cleared, barely, and launched in March 2020, just before COVID lockdowns.