Since 1783, when the first passenger balloon was launched, the history of food has included the challenge of preparing and serving food while airborne. Foss offers a historical look at how meals have been prepared and consumed, in wartime and peacetime, during air travel in vehicles ranging from balloons to zeppelins, from airplanes to spacecraft. Drawing on archives and interviews, Foss includes photographs, diagrams, and menus depicting the fabulous and the rudimentary, everything from gourmet meals to snacks. As air travel evolved from a luxury for adventurers, with meals to match, to fairly mundane, crowded journeys offering peanuts, inventors and airlines have struggled with the dangers of maintaining safety and hygiene thousands of miles in the air. Foss offers details behind the technology and culinary arts in flights from the 1928 Lufthansa flight that first offered hot meals to the Hindenburg in 1936 to the food technology, including Tang, that grew out of the space-exploration programs. This fascinating book includes recipes the airlines collected and adapted for home use.

Booklist

Food in the Air and Space and Food at Sea, the second and third titles in Ken Albala’s 'Food on the Go' series, trace the surprising, sometimes humorous, histories of food prepared for long-distance air, space, and ocean voyages. Foss and Spalding both bring unique perspectives to these works. Foss is a culinary historian whose areas of expertise are beverages and the history of immigrant contributions to California cuisine, while Spalding is a consultant for historic programs, a maritime historian, and a musician. Each well-researched book follows a chronological sequence that clearly shows how the food prepared and served on watercraft, aircraft, and spacecraft developed in conjunction with the vehicles themselves, as well as the advancement of nutrition studies, technology, military science, and the tourism industry. Food in the Air and Space includes special chapters on the design of food trays and servings for airlines, the effects of altitude changes on taste, airline food represented in popular culture, space food commercialization on Earth, and the challenges of cooking in space. . . .Summing Up: Recommended. General, undergraduate, and professional culinary history collections.

Choice Reviews

Richard Foss' Food in The Air and Space: The Surprising History of Food and Drink in The Skies explores the fascinating history of culinary fare off the earth, the adventures, the mechanics of in air cooking, and serving, and the characters who pursued good food and drink in the air. . . .The book is well illustrated with posters, menus, maps, and photographs of "stewardesses" and pilots in their kitchens. . . .Food in The Air and Space would make a great gift for anyone interested in flight - especially a younger person thinking about a career. It's more than just a history of the food - it's a book full of fun facts about the history of aviation - the characters, the stories, and, of course, the cooking.

Super Chef

From the soil to the plate, the story of food is a fascinating, and at times unpalatable journey. An often overlooked aspect of the gastronomical journey has also grown from the ground, but much higher than our tables, up into the atmosphere on balloons to commercial airlines and beyond into Earth orbit and even to the moon, where simple plates become irrelevant. Many of us now fly around the world and either enjoy, or complain about the meals we eat in that journey. In Food in the Air and Space Richard Foss reveals the surprising and at times challenging developments over the past century in the quest to make food palatable in the air and beyond.

David J. Shayler, FBIS, Astronautical Historian, Astro Info Service, Ltd, UK

Richard Foss invites us on a food journey, one many of us have made, and yet forgotten about: What we eat while flying. The trials and tribulations of humanity’s struggle to fly are matched only by one other quest: what’s for dinner? With verve and wit, Foss uncovers many nuggets of information that describe how a most basic human activity becomes a logistical nightmare in flight and in space.

Where flight was cause for celebration, the appropriate menu was always available, only on the ground. On the other hand, entertaining passengers on board with food became a whole new challenge that also helped airlines brand themselves. And just when one thought that a measly peanut was just that, Foss notes how it became as much part of a marketing identity as a fine “Côte du Rhône.”

Readers will derive a new understanding and appreciation for how hard it actually is to develop a proper airline menu. And our admiration for astronauts and cosmonauts should increase when considering what they were told to ingest to survive in space! Jaded travellers as much as casual ones will find Foss’ survey quite informative, and might want to add their experiences to it. It is an enjoyable descriptive survey on a long discussed, yet rarely researched topic.

Guillaume de Syon, professor of history, Albright College

Whatever you might want to know about the history of eating in flight Richard Foss has the answers. Foss is particularly strong on the relationship between technology and food and food and the airlines’ commercial priorities. The research underpinning the text is impressive. While starts with eighteenth-century balloon flight and ends with space travel, the focus of the book is commercial aviation. A valuable contribution to the history of airline food, a genre of cuisine that most of us frequently experience but know very little about.

William Rubel, food historian