Borscht by tube? Space menu served up to mark Soviet achievements

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/13/soviet-space-food-moscow

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It costs $50m or more to go up into space as a tourist , but if you don’t have that kind of money now you can at least try the food they serve up there.

To mark cosmonautics day – Russia’s annual celebration of Yuri Gagarin’s 1961 trip into space on 12 April – a vending machine at the country’s exhibition centre is now selling space food.

Situated in the Cosmos pavilion at the VDNKh centre in Moscow, visitors have the chance to try a three-course cosmonaut dinner which has been freeze-dried and then squeezed into a tube.

The starter is either borscht (beetroot soup), schchi (cabbage soup) or rassolnik (pickled cucumber soup), the second course is lamb or pork, and then dessert: cottage cheese with fruit puree – apricot, blackberry or sea buckthorn. Each tube costs 300 roubles (£4).

The food is produced by Space Food Laboratory, which says it uses the same technology as once pioneered by the Soviet space industry, and employs a space food pioneer as a consultant.

“This sort of food was constantly used by Soviet astronauts,”says Yury Cherkasov, development director at the company. “There are strict regulations on what can be added to the food. No conservatives, no colouring, no additives. In short, it is incredibly natural food.”

“Astronauts needed food that could be kept for months on end without going off,” says Andrei Vedernikov, general director of the company. The tubes last up to 18 months, he added.

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“We want to preserve the Soviet process of making space food,” says Cherkasov. “The aim of the company is to show and educate people about the Soviet space program.”

The laboratory has big plans, aiming to have five vending machines up in the Cosmos pavilion and tens more in the Moscow planetarium and museums .

Vedernikov hopes the vending machines could go in duty free zones in airports, be used in extreme sports and eventually go abroad – he was also interested in which other national dishes might taste good in a tube.

Marianna Hunt contributed to this story