What is it about food and outer space?
Those things don’t normally go together, at least in my mind. When I do associate them, I usually think of freeze-dried stuff in tubes, or Tom Hanks staring disconsolately at a frozen hot dog in “Apollo 13.”
But a couple of news items are making me rethink that relationship. The first is that Boston Beer Co., brewers of Samuel Adams, are about to market a beer called “Space Craft,” which will use hops that have been in outer space. Sixty-six pounds of hops apparently made it onto the maiden flight of SpaceX, a private chartered space flight service, on Sept. 15. They will be featured in Space Craft, which will go on sale in selected markets starting Nov. 16.
The second is that Kraft Heinz has apparently figured out how to grow tomatoes on Mars. Well, not really on Mars, which has yet to be visited by humans. A team of “astrobiologists” at the Florida Institute of Technology created an environment at that school’s Aldrin Space Institute where the soil, temperature and other aspects supposedly mimic those of Mars. They grew tomatoes there and made the result into Heinz “Marz Edition” ketchup. (Not available to the general public.)
These are just marketing novelties. It’s not like these people know something about the future of the planet that the rest of us don’t, right?
Right?
