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Culture<br>The Miso That Went to Space

By Tamara MC<br>Jul 11, 2026

Graphic by Adam Dixon

Artist and researcher Maggie Coblentz fermented miso in orbit, chasing a deeper question: What makes a miso a miso—or a person a person—away from Earth?

Right before Maggie Coblentz’s miso experiment was supposed to launch to the International Space Station (ISS), someone opened the package. It was giving off a smell, and no one handling it realized it was food.<br>Read Next

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“They were concerned, like, there’s something growing inside your experiment,” Coblentz says. “And I got this urgent call, like, what’s up with your experiment? And they almost didn’t let it on the rocket.” Coblentz had to explain—fast.<br>“I had to basically give a safety protocol, which I loved. It was almost like an aroma safety protocol that was like, it’s supposed to smell nutty. You might smell a bit acidic, and that’s all within the range of normal, but if you start to smell it more in this direction, then maybe something weird is happening. So, yeah, maybe now on the NASA safety card, they have some tasting notes.”<br>For four years at MIT’s Media Lab, Coblentz specialized in space food research. “My goal was never to make astronauts healthy,” she says. “I hope they’re healthy, but I also trust that there are professional people who are making sure they get their nutrients. I was having this sideline conversation. Why does food matter? How does space food reflect what humans are eating on Earth?”<br>What she was really after was a design question: Why is an astronaut fed like a machine? Space food became her way of seeing Earth’s own eating from the outside, a place where “everything is stripped down to the most fundamental thing.”<br>Industrial Design to Space Food<br>While Coblentz was getting her master’s in industrial design from the Rhode Island School of Design, a lifelong love of cooking began to feed into her design work (literally). It began, she says, as “this seed of an idea.” School was a chance to stretch her imagination and think about whatever she wanted, “without the prospect of actually having to make work out of it.”<br>While researching her two-year thesis—a project on space food itself—Coblentz began collaborating with the Space Exploration Initiative at MIT’s Media Lab, a program that unites artists, designers, scientists, and engineers to prototype and fly experiments to space. She stayed on after graduating, and it led to a job there, “very much to my surprise.”<br>“I was suddenly working in space exploration, next to people who’ve been dreaming about being a space engineer their whole life. That was not my journey,” Coblentz says. “I wasn’t an aspiring astronaut. I just kind of landed in this niche place as a specialist, and then my world opened up.”<br>What Space Food Actually Is<br>When people think of space food, they might picture astronaut ice cream, the chalky novelty from museum gift shops. Real space food is closer to camping food. In the past, astronauts relied on canned food, typically shaped like a tuna can but heavier. But because launch costs scale with weight, the freeze-dried kind eventually won out, as it is lighter and longer-lasting.<br>Space food travels as bricks or sponges of dried matter, rehydrated at a station on the ISS where the water has a startling provenance, reclaimed from human perspiration and urine. “It’s quite an impressive system to recycle and regenerate water,” Coblentz says. “But maybe not so palatable.” You warm the water, rehydrate the pouch, cut it open with scissors, and eat straight from the package.<br>The menu runs the gamut from scrambled eggs that look like a yellow sponge to chicken teriyaki, chili, and tortillas that double as plates. Bread, with its crumbs, rarely makes the trip. “You can’t have food flyaways in space,” Coblentz says. Crews grow plants, too, though she frames those experiments as being about mental well-being and “the act of caretaking.”

Before a long mission, an astronaut undergoes medical exams and works with a nutritionist, choosing from a fixed set of meals. A few store-bought favorites can come along if they clear approval, though not, say, a case of blueberries. Once everyone is aboard, roles sort themselves out as in any shared house. Someone usually ends up tracking the food and making sure everyone’s getting what they need. Coblentz says it’s less about who signed up for what role and more about how small groups naturally divide labor when they’re living in close quarters for months at a time. “People are people.”<br>As more countries reach orbit, the menu has widened. The European Space Agency and the cosmonauts keep their own menus; astronauts barter and trade among themselves. NASA’s is the most tightly controlled system, a standardized set of about 200 items,...