Space potatoes and a green cheese burger

3/6/2007

Forget french fries. The time has come for space fries.
Boldly going where no spud has gone before, Chinese space potatoes are now the latest culinary fad to hit the country's ultra-trendy city of Shanghai.
Slightly sweet and purple in color, the potatoes, named Purple Orchid Three, have been bred from seeds that mutated while being carried aboard a Chinese spacecraft.
Grower Haikou Purple Orchid Co. Ltd. is promoting them as a unique food option, and restaurants in the city recently offered them for Valentine's Day dinners, served crispy fried, or in salads, desserts and even iced drinks.
Are we alone in the universe? Is there life on other planets? China doesn’t care. Their ambitious new space program claims to have produced a number of mutated fruits and vegetables, simply by exposing seeds to space radiation, capsule pressure and weightlessness.
Chinese agricultural experts say plants grown from such seeds can be hardier, more nutritious and produce higher yields, although many scientists say similar effects could be achieved in ordinary labs, right here on Earth.
As delicious as a big sweet, purple potato might be, the idea of eating mutant space food is sure to scare people.
Space mutates everything. That’s why there are so few normal astronauts around today. Their time in outer space has left them broken, and a little goofy. Think about it.
Old astronauts should be celebrities, but you never see or hear from them. It’s as if they have all been hidden away from the public eye. Maybe flying into space far enough to see this beautiful, blue marble out your driver’s side window is too profound an experience for the human brain to handle. Maybe they have all snapped like twigs.
Astronauts probably return home speaking gibberish, hopelessly addicted to Tang and sleeping upside-down.
Maybe they have elevated blood sugar and are turning purple. It’s hard to say. If an ex-astronaut moves in next door to you and starts bringing home large sacks of purple potatoes, watch him closely—and lock up your Tang.
Personally, I would be happy to try a big side order of purple space fries, with salt from one of Jupiter’s moons, and a man-in-the-moon double green-cheese burger.
The basic chemistry is the same, and no amount of cabin pressure or weightlessness is going to change that. The only difference is in the presentation, and purple isn’t the colour most people immediately associate with good food. Grapes yes, but eggplant? Forget about it.
I hope the Chinanauts keep going with their mutant space food experiments. It has far more useful applications than trying to determine the gas around Uranus, or how many billions of years ago star 0U812 exploded.
Perhaps they will blast turnips with enough radiation to actually make them taste like food. Get dandelions to taste more like popcorn, and you will conquer world hunger. Top fast food chains have enough money to try mutating more than fries. Maybe that’s what happened to Grimace.
I would even try green eggs and ham. I would eat them with some toast and jam. I would eat them Sam I am.