Special Issue of the International Journal of Molecular and Physical Gastronomy

Guest Editors:
Volker Hessel (University of Adelaide, Australia); Eva Kemps (Flinders University, Australia); Sigfredo Fuentes (University of Melbourne, Australia), Ashraf Ismail (McGill University, Canada), Ian Fisk (U Nottingham, UK), Roisin Burke (TU Dublin, Ireland), Herve This (INRAE-AgroParisTech, France), Paulina Mata (Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, Portugal).

We invite submissions under the theme:

Delicious Dishes for Astronauts and Space Travellers:
Space Cook Challenge from ‘Plants For Space’

Long-term space exploration and habitation is on the horizon. Space research has started on the International Space Station (ISS), and new space stations are planned that can host tourists akin to a ‘space hotel’. It is high time to consider space-made and space-tailored dishes. Plant growth in space can look back on > 50 years’ experience with ‘space gardening’ at the ISS and its precursor stations. With the Mars mission becoming step by step a reality, astronauts need to be nourished with fresh food.
It is high time to replace the ‘deep frozen/thermostabilised-microwave food’ in space by a fine-dining dish for ‘space connoisseurs’!
Yet, growing plants and converting them to a food is one thing, designing a delicious dish is another. A ‘space salad’ kicked off the run for the ‘space menu card’ (https://doi.org/10.1021/acsfoodscitech.3c00396).

This Special Edition is an invitation for a “Space Cookbook Challenge”. Please propose your space dish answering the following questions and criteria, which are a guide towards a standardised format of structuring the information in the paper.
    • Why are you interested in ‘space cooking’?
    • Please characterise your proposed space dish: give it a name, specify composition, describe the preparation, and give justification along criteria*.
    • Outline a short cooking protocol for this dish
    • Justify the choice of food/crops. Have they been grown in space? Do they suit space? You may add meat to vegetarian food (delivered as payload).
    • A photo of your space dish is best to highlight your cookbook entry
    • A paragraph might comprise scientific benchmarking of this dish versus similar dishes on Earth and hypothesise how space cooking might be executed, under microgravity.
    • The instruction of authors of the journal have to be followed : see https://icmpg.hub.inrae.fr/Media/activite-en/journal/ijmpg-instructions-to-authors-comprehensive.pdf .

*Criteria for space dishes: full-nutrient provision (as ideal), zero-waste production (as ideal), sustainable grown (low planting area for the crops), meeting nutrition needs of astronauts, easy eatable under microgravity, easy digestible under microgravity, made from plants that were already grown in space, having optical appearance much different from Earth dishes (‘spacy’), having different palatability, with intense aroma (to compensate aroma masking in space), etc. Please define also your own criteria! What you deem to be relevant in space.

The Space Cookbook Challenge will award the 5 best space dishes. This contest may be administered and assessed by the Institute of Food Technologists Competitions or the Note by Note Contest (2025) within the theme 'Food for the Future'; or by both and consider the cumulative result.

The International Journal of Molecular and Physical Gastronomy is a scientific journal about molecular, physical and biological gastronomy. It is a diamond model, with double blind evaluation of each manuscript. Published articles are assigned a Digital Object Identifier (D.O.I.) and are made available through the open archive HAL (short for Hyper Articles en Ligne). Articles are open access documents under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Further details are available at
International Journal of Molecular and Physical Gastronomy: https://icmpg.hub.inrae.fr/international-activities-of-the-international-centre-of-molecular-gastronomy/journal-of-molecular-and-physical-gastronomy