Target Pillar: Astronauts, Training, and Life in Orbit

Last Updated: August 8, 2026 Author: Sarah Mitchell

Introduction

The image most people carry of “astronaut food” is decades out of date — gray paste squeezed from a tube, or the novelty freeze-dried ice cream sold at science museum gift shops. Actual current ISS food bears almost no resemblance to that image. Today’s astronauts choose from over 100 menu items including fish, pasta, meat, and chocolate brownies, with meals that can be personalized to individual preference.[^1] Space food has quietly become one of the more sophisticated, closely studied parts of modern spaceflight — not just for nutrition, but because NASA has learned the hard way that how astronauts eat affects their psychology just as much as their physiology.

How Space Food Actually Gets Made

NASA’s Space Food Systems Laboratory at Johnson Space Center, along with the Space Food Research Facility in College Station, Texas, handles production and development for all NASA food — covering the ISS, the Orion crew vehicle, and Commercial Crew missions.[^2] The lab produces freeze-dried food and packages beverage powders, cookies, candy, and other dried goods that astronauts choose from for their menus. Beverages start as powder in a sealed pouch with a one-way valve; water gets injected directly into the sealed pouch once on orbit, since pouring liquid in microgravity obviously doesn’t work the way it does on a countertop.[^2]

A separate category — heat-stabilized pouch meals, similar in concept to military MREs but engineered specifically around astronaut nutritional needs — covers dishes that don’t work well freeze-dried.[^2] NASA is explicit that food isn’t just required to be nutritious; it also has to actually be appetizing, because a food system astronauts don’t want to eat doesn’t help anyone regardless of its nutritional profile.[^2]

What a Typical Day of Eating Looks Like

ISS crew members follow a standard structure of three meals plus a snack per day, with food stored pantry-style so astronauts choose what to eat rather than following a fixed daily menu.[^3] Caloric needs vary by individual — astronauts typically consume between 1,900 and 3,200 calories daily depending on their weight, sex, and specific physiological needs, with dietitians tracking intake and making recommendations to ensure nutritional requirements are actually being met.[^3]

Roughly 75% of what an astronaut eats comes from a standard shared menu, with the remaining 25% made up of “preference containers” — personal favorite items selected specifically for that individual.[^4] This mix matters more than it might sound: NASA research tracking food acceptability across 6-month and 1-year ISS missions found that astronauts tend to gravitate toward personal favorites early in a mission and stick with them, rather than exploring the full available variety — a pattern researchers flagged as a real consideration for future deep-space missions, where pre-positioned food and limited resupply mean personal preference can’t always be accommodated the way it can on the regularly-resupplied ISS.[^5]

The Foods Astronauts Actually Request

Some ISS menu items have become genuinely famous among the astronaut corps. Shrimp cocktail is consistently one of the most requested items — astronauts describe its spicy kick as cutting through the dulled sense of taste that’s a well-documented side effect of living in microgravity, where fluid shift toward the head congests sinuses in a way similar to a mild, permanent head cold.[^6] It’s reportedly popular enough that it’s been informally used as a bargaining chip between crewmates trading chores.[^6]

Comfort food matters too. Astronaut Kjell Lindgren has described teriyaki beef as his go-to meal specifically after spacewalks — a detail that speaks to food’s role beyond simple nutrition. As Lindgren put it, food aboard the ISS is about the physical, psychological, and social all at once, giving the crew a shared reason to gather, a boost to morale, and a comforting sense of routine in an environment that otherwise offers very little of Earth’s normal rhythm.[^6]

Low sodium is a deliberate, mission-wide design choice, not a preference — astronaut diets are kept low-sodium specifically to help protect bone health during extended time in microgravity, where bone density loss is already an ongoing physiological concern (covered in more depth in our guide to what extended spaceflight does to the human body).[^7]

Fresh Food: The Rare, Prized Exception

Because the ISS receives regular cargo resupply missions, crew members do get occasional fresh fruits and vegetables — genuinely fresh produce, not freeze-dried or shelf-stable substitutes — though it has to be eaten within just a few days of arrival before it spoils.[^8] This is a meaningful contrast with missions that don’t have regular resupply access, like the Artemis II lunar mission, where the Orion capsule has no refrigerator at all, meaning every item on the menu must be either shelf-stable ready-to-eat food (granola, cookies, nuts) or freeze-dried and rehydratable (mac and cheese, shrimp curry with rice).[^9]

NASA has also experimented directly with growing food in orbit — the Veg-01 experiment successfully grew red romaine lettuce aboard the ISS, harvested by astronaut Steve Swanson during Expedition 40.[^10] Yields from these experiments have generally run lower than equivalent ground-grown crops, an outcome researchers attribute partly to microgravity affecting how oxygen and water reach plant roots evenly.[^10] As one food researcher has pointed out, growing a few token tomatoes for the psychological and dietary variety benefit is a very different engineering challenge than growing a field’s worth of food large enough to actually reduce a mission’s dependence on resupply.[^10]

International Flavor: Not Just American Food

The ISS hosts crews from multiple countries, and the food system reflects that. JAXA, Japan’s space agency, maintains its own space food program, developing Japanese dishes that have become popular with astronauts from other nations aboard the station, not just Japanese crew members.[^11] Like NASA’s program, JAXA calculates daily caloric requirements individually based on each astronaut’s age, sex, and body weight, and explicitly frames food’s role as covering nutrition, stress reduction, morale, and performance together rather than treating nutrition as a separate concern from psychological wellbeing.[^11]

Frequently Asked Questions

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Sources

1. BBC Sky at Night Magazine — What Astronauts Eat in Space
2. NASA — Space Food Systems
3. Canadian Space Agency — Eating in Space
4. Astronaut Foods — What Do Astronauts Eat in Space?
5. NASA Technical Reports Server — Food Acceptability and Selection by Astronauts on ISS Missions
6. Astronaut Foods — What Do Astronauts Eat in Space? (Lindgren, shrimp cocktail)
7. National Geographic — What Will Future Astronauts Eat in Space?
8. Reader’s Digest — What the Artemis II Astronauts Are Eating
9. Reader’s Digest — What the Artemis II Astronauts Are Eating (Orion menu)
10. BBC Sky at Night Magazine — Veg-01 and Growing Food in Space
11. JAXA Human Spaceflight Technology Directorate — Food in Space

Note on methodology: figures and quotes above are drawn from NASA, CSA, and JAXA published materials, NASA’s peer-reviewed technical reports, and direct astronaut interviews as of mid-2026. Specific menu items and food system details evolve as new research and missions add data — consult NASA’s Space Food Systems page directly for the current program status.