© flickr.com/tonibone Fifty years after we figured out how to keep astronauts’ food from making them sick, the time has come to commit to keeping the rest of us as safe.
Once you've made the decision to encase a few men in a metal pod and shoot the vessel into space, what you don't want is to have something they eat make them sick. Astronauts in space already have suppressed immune systems, and the added complications of food poisoning and its attendant symptoms - dehydration, diarrhea - when both water and privacy are limited likely goes without saying. That's why, in the late 1950s, just as NASA was embarking on the era of manned space flight, the agency went to its food supplier, Pillsbury, with a request: ensure that the food we're feeding astronauts won't have enough bacteria and other contaminants to make our astronauts sick. Pillsbury came through, crafting a science-based system that, for the first time, examined step-by-step how food was made, rather than the final product, with a focus on the riskiest ingredients and processes. By 1959, the problem of food-sickened astronauts was effectively kicked.
