Fruit Cake In Space — How A Holiday Staple Helped Feed Some Of The First Astronauts

Once upon a time, fruitcake was seen as a serious status symbol. To have any kind of cake at all, let alone a cake with all sorts of exotic fruit in it, was proof you were doing pretty well for yourself. (That's why fruitcake was traditionally served at society weddings, including John F. Kennedy's marriage to Jacqueline Bouvier.) Today, however, it's mostly known as that dense cake you occasionally get gifted at Christmas — which, depending on your taste, you might not enjoy. Perhaps you even think you wouldn't eat it unless you were adrift in the cold vacuum of space, which is pretty funny because American astronauts once did exactly that.

Back in the 1970s and 1980s, NASA ran a bunch of experiments on the viability of fruitcake as an emergency ration for astronauts. Fruitcake may not be the most appetizing dessert in the world, but it has a few qualities that made it a promising option for this purpose. Not only is it nutritionally dense with plenty of carbs and sugars in addition to the fruit, but as anyone with a brick of fruitcake taking up space on their counter can tell you, it lasts for ages. After testing, astronauts offered a ringing endorsement, declaring fruitcake "acceptable." Houston, we have dessert!

Now, we don't want to oversell the quality of this fruitcake or anything. Although it was taken up on Apollo 11 (the first mission to land on the moon), these were small, dense little squares of cake more closely resembling modern energy bars than anything so indulgent as a full-on dessert. That didn't stop reports delightedly referring to the fruitcake these astronauts were given, with recipes even being published in the newspapers. (The fruits in this particular fruitcake were pineapple, water cherries, and raisins.)

Still, it was acceptable enough to be sent up on future missions, with the crew of Apollo 17 and the space station Skylab both carrying squares of fruitcake. Today, astronauts eat plenty of specially-prepared food (although they don't really eat astronaut ice cream) which doesn't usually include fruitcake. That said, the same questions of nutrition and sustainability drive NASA food czars to this day — which goes to show that, for all the advances we've made over the past 50 years, some things never change. (And yes, astronauts still drink Tang.)