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On Christmas Day in 1968, the three-man Apollo 8 crew of Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders found a surprise in their food locker: a specially packed Christmas dinner wrapped in foil and decorated with red and green ribbons. Something as simple as a \u201chome-cooked meal,\u201d or as close as NASA could get for a spaceflight at the time, greatly improved the crew\u2019s morale and appetite. More importantly, the meal marked a turning point in space food history.<\/p>\n
On their way to the Moon, the Apollo 8 crew was not very hungry. Food scientist Malcolm Smith later documented just how little the crew ate. Borman ate the least of the three, eating only 881 calories on day two, which concerned flight surgeon Chuck Berry. Most of the food, Borman later explained, was \u201cunappetizing.\u201d The crew ate few of the compressed, bite-sized items, and when they rehydrated their meals, the food took on the flavor of their wrappings instead of the actual food in the container. \u201cIf that doesn\u2019t sound like a rousing endorsement, it isn\u2019t,\u201d he told viewers watching the Apollo 8 crew in space ahead of their surprise meal. As Anders demonstrated to the television audience how the astronauts prepared a meal and ate in space, Borman announced his wish, that folks back on Earth would \u201chave better Christmas dinners\u201d than the one the flight crew would be consuming that day.1<\/sup><\/p>\n Frank Borman<\/p>\n Apollo 8 Astronaut<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Over the 1960s, there were many complaints about the food from astronauts and others working at the Manned Spacecraft Center (now NASA\u2019s Johnson Space Center). After evaluating the food that the Apollo 8 crew would be consuming onboard their upcoming flight, Apollo 9 astronaut Jim McDivitt penciled a note to the food lab about his in-flight preferences. Using the back of the Apollo 8 crew menu, he directed them to decrease the number of compressed bite-sized items \u201cto a bare minimum\u201d and to include more meat and potato items. \u201cI get awfully hungry,\u201d he wrote, \u201cand I\u2019m afraid I\u2019m going to starve to death on that menu.\u201d2<\/sup><\/p>\n In 1969, Rita Rapp, a physiologist who led the Apollo Food System team, asked Donald Arabian, head of the Mission Evaluation Room, to evaluate a four-day food supply used for the Apollo missions. Arabian identified himself as someone who \u201cwould eat almost anything. \u2026 you might say [I am] somewhat of a human garbage can.\u201d But even he found the food lacked the flavor, aroma, appearance, texture, and taste he was accustomed to. At the end of his four-day assessment he concluded that \u201cthe pleasures of eating were lost to the point where interest in eating was essentially curtailed.\u201d3<\/sup><\/p>\n Apollo 8 commander Frank Borman concurred with Arabian\u2019s assessment of the Apollo food. The one item Borman enjoyed? It was the contents of the Christmas meal wrapped in ribbons: turkey and gravy. The Christmas dinner was so delicious that the crew contacted Houston to inform them of their good fortune. \u201cIt appears that we did a great injustice to the food people,\u201d Lovell told capsule communicator (CAPCOM) Mike Collins. \u201cJust after our TV show, Santa Claus brought us a TV dinner each; it was delicious. Turkey and gravy, cranberry sauce, grape punch; [it was] outstanding.\u201d In response, Collins expressed delight in hearing the good news but shared that the flight control team was not as lucky. Instead, they were \u201ceating cold coffee and baloney sandwiches.\u201d4<\/sup><\/p>\n The Apollo 8 meal was a \u201cbreakthrough.\u201d Until that mission, the food choices for Apollo crews were limited to freeze dried foods that required water to be added before they could be consumed, and ready-to-eat compressed foods formed into cubes. Most space food was highly processed. On this mission NASA introduced the \u201cwetpack\u201d: a thermostabilized package of turkey and gravy that retained its normal water content and could be eaten with a spoon. Astronauts had consumed thermostabilized pureed food on the Project Mercury missions in the early 1960s, but never chunks of meat like turkey. For the Project Gemini and Apollo 7 spaceflights, astronauts used their fingers to pop bite-sized cubes of food into their mouths and zero-G feeder tubes to consume rehydrated food. The inclusion of the wetpack for the Apollo 8 crew was years in the making. The U.S. Army Natick Labs in Massachusetts developed the packaging, and the U.S. Air Force conducted numerous parabolic flights to test eating from the package with a spoon.5<\/sup><\/p>\n Smith called the meal a real \u201cmorale booster.\u201d He noted several reasons for its appeal: the new packaging allowed the astronauts to see and smell the turkey and gravy; the meat\u2019s texture and flavor were not altered by adding water from the spacecraft or the rehydration process; and finally, the crew did not have to go through the process of adding water, kneading the package, and then waiting to consume their meal. Smith concluded that the Christmas dinner demonstrated \u201cthe importance of the methods of presentation and serving of food.\u201d Eating from a spoon instead of the zero-G feeder improved the inflight feeding experience, mimicking the way people eat on Earth: using utensils, not squirting pureed food out of a pouch into their mouths. Using a spoon also simplified eating and meal preparation. NASA added more wetpacks onboard Apollo 9, and the crew experimented eating other foods, including a rehydrated meal item, with the spoon.6<\/sup><\/p>\n Food was one of the few creature comforts the crew had on the Apollo 8 flight, and this meal demonstrated the psychological importance of being able to smell, taste, and see the turkey prior to consuming their meal, something that was lacking in the first four days of the flight. Seeing appetizing food triggers hunger and encourages eating. In other words, if food looks and smells good, then it must taste good. Little things like this improvement to the Apollo Food System made a huge difference to the crews who simply wanted some of the same eating experiences in orbit and on the Moon that they enjoyed on Earth.<\/p>\n Footnotes<\/strong><\/p>\n [1] Apollo 8 Mission Commentary, Dec. 25, 1968, p. 543, Apollo 8 Technical Debriefing, Jan. 2, 1969, 078-15, Apollo Series, University of Houston-Clear Lake, Houston, Texas (hereafter UHCL); Malcolm C. Smith to Director of Medical Research and Operations, \u201cNutrient consumption on Apollo VII and VIII,\u201d Jan. 13, 1969, Rita Rapp Papers, Box 1, UHCL.<\/p>\n [2] Jim McDivitt food evaluation form, n.d., Box 17, Rapp Papers, UHCL.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n [3] Donald Arabian to Rapp, \u201cEvaluation of four-day food supply,\u201d May 8, 1969, Box 17, Rapp Papers, UHCL.<\/p>\n [4] Apollo 8 Mission Commentary, Dec. 25, 1968, p. 545.<\/p>\n [5] Malcolm Smith, \u201cThe Apollo Food Program,\u201d in Aerospace Food Technology<\/em>, NASA SP-202 (Washington, DC: 1970), pp. 5\u20138; Whirlpool Corporation, \u201cSpace Food Systems: Mercury through Apollo,\u201d Dec. 1970, Box 9, Rapp Papers, UHCL.<\/p>\n [6] Smith, \u201cThe Apollo Food Program,\u201d pp. 7\u20138; Smith to the Record, \u201cChristmas Dinner for Apollo VIII,\u201d Jan. 10, 1969, Box 1, Rapp Papers, UHCL; Smith et al, \u201cApollo Food Technology,\u201d in Biomedical Results of Apollo<\/em>, NASA SP-368 (Washington, DC: NASA, 1975), p. 456.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n