Poor old space. Once it was the final frontier. Now, it seems, it is just an extraterrestrial wheelie bin for viral-video wannabes.
Apropos of nothing, two Swedish brothers recently piloted a doughnut into space by attaching it to a helium weather balloon and recording the whole thing with a GoPro camera. But it is far from the first example of food being propelled into the heavens.
There has been a cloud-bound can of Coors Light, a curry-house lamb chop sent into orbit by a novelist, a congealing pizza flung into the sky by an NYC electronic band, and a burger from a London delivery business that hoped to publicise its ability to deliver a meal by firing it in the opposite direction to all human life. Plus, there was a brewery that decided to create an imperial stout by shooting yeast into space.
What on earth (or rather, not on Earth) is going on? Do people think that facilitating food/drink space travel places them on an intergalactic pedestal? Immortalising their beer as the booze industry’s equivalent of Neil Armstrong? One small step for a can, one giant leap for … cankind?
If you really love a piece of food, surely you don’t spend time acquiring the technology to place it 20 miles from your mouth. Commentators seem to like it, though. According to Wired, “Space beer, if nothing else, is quite the conversation starter” and perhaps they are right. As long as those conversations are: “Remember when space was a place we liked to boldly go, rather than somewhere we riddled with booze and junk food until it looked like a high-season Magaluf pavement at 4am?” Or “WHY HAVE I JUST BEEN HIT IN THE FACE BY A PIZZA?!?”
Sadly, these PR stunts are yet to pioneer inter-planetary relations by attracting a race of workaholic alien binmen. Thus, it’s raining food and booze across planet Earth. In fact, the farmer who discovered the lamb chop and GoPro camera in his threshing machine was so annoyed, that the only way the author could retrieve it was by getting the police involved.
And here’s the thing. It turns out that while weather balloons can fly up to 22 miles high, that’s still 40 miles short of leaving Earth’s atmosphere. So when you watch a viral video of, for example, “the first burger in space”, it should really be called “a quite high-up burger”. Or warn you to, “Look out below!” With the exception of the imperial stout experiment, that is, which used a rocket to launch the yeast.
Take a lesson from Heston Blumenthal’s book. He has launched his own range of in-spacecraft food, creating English breakfast burgers and fusion curries with the help of schoolchildren who entered the Great British Space Dinner contest, for British astronauts to dine on while visiting the International Space Station later this year. Now that’s genuine space food. We guess it also makes him a gastronaut.
