A canned-bacon sandwich that cost $2.8 million? What kind of nonsense is this? Turns out the price tag seems just a tad more justified when it’s revealed that the sandwich was made for SPACE.
According to The Mirror, the sandwich was for Tim Peake, an astronaut who’s currently at the International Space Station. That $2.8 million is for the cost of fuel that it took to get the sandwich to him. Heston Blumenthal, who is a Michelin-starred chef, designed it. He decided to can the dish, because of food-safety concerns, as well as to preserve the taste and texture. The whole process of making this sandwich took two years.
In a long article for The Guardian, Blumenthal described the red tape that the sandwich had to cut through:
“Space food is very, very controlled,” says Blumenthal. “All this red tape! You’ve got to get [each dish] past the UK Space Agency. Then the European Space Agency. Then NASA. And the people in these organizations who are involved with food, they’re… they’re engineers.” Not chefs, he means. Not gourmands. “They consider food to be fuel, basically. A lot of freeze-dried stuff. Tins. Pouches. I was shown these packets from the ISS [International Space Station] with big Russian writing on the front. Stuff that looked like you shouldn’t be putting it in your body at all.”
Eater reports that Blumenthal also sent up a red Thai curry, beef stew with truffles, Alaskan salmon, and apple crumble for Peake. Oh, the perks of being in space.
(Via Mirror)
