Chris Hadfield and some incredibly floating Canadian space food

Uploaded on March 11, 2013

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Chris Hadfield and some incredibly floating Canadian space food

2013-03-11 - During today's video downlink with students from Airdie, Edmonton, Chris Hadfield describes how taste changes in weightlessness and then shares a package of Canadian food brought to the Station on board SpaceX's Dragon. (Credits: Canadian Space Agency, NASA)

Question: I'm Miranda, and I'm just wondering, does the food taste the same in orbit as it does on Earth?

Cdr Chris Hadfield: Miranda, at first, no. And it's not because of the food. It's because when you first get to space, gravity of course is not pushing the blood to your feet anymore, you know, because you're basically weightless. So your body has learned over your whole lifetime to squeeze the blood up to your head so you don't faint. And that's kind of fighting, because normally your body has to work against gravity, and it doesn't recognize immediately there's no gravity. So your body keeps squeezing the blood up to your head, but no gravity to push it back down again. So your head sort of inflates like someone was squeezing the bottom of a balloon. And so your head fills up with fluid, and your sinuses fill up. And so when you first get to space, within a little while, you're all clogged up and sinus plugged up. So you can't even taste your food. And that lasts several days till your body finally gets to equilibrium. And then the food tastes about the same.

And I have Canadian food right here that folks were nice enough to send up to me, which just came up on the Dragon spaceship recently. But I have a lot of nice food. I have Canadian maple cookies, I have a smoked salmon pate, some Canadian chocolate. Look at this, a tube - a tube - of maple syrup, which is a real treat up here. Really high quality maple syrup. And if I'm not too far away from you guys from Saskatchewan, I have some buffalo jerky right here, cranberry flavoured buffalo jerky. And we even have something from the east coast here with a blueberry granola bar.

So we have lots of food. It keeps us healthy, it tastes good, and it also - it's a really important social time of the day when you can get together, talk about what everybody's doing, and relax and really try and share the human part of being in space. Food's good up here.

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