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Food is happiness. It is a marker of humanity, culture and what makes life worth living. The rituals and act of eating brings together communities and becomes a vessel for communication and joy. Why is it then, that space food is so sad. For someone earthbound like myself, my impression of space food is dry, crumbly dehydrated ice cream, unidentified paste in tubes and bags of power velcroed to a sad plastic school lunch tray. There is no fun or culture of joy in these foods. How then can we make space food not only worth eating, but experiencing?
The Candy-scope is here to make space food fun. Earthbound cuisine is bound by gravity and the pull of a table. In zero-g, no such limits exist. Why tether food down when you can dance with it? New rituals of eating and enjoyment are choreographed in space as the candy-scope is simultaneously played with and consumed.
The purpose of this experiment is to deploy a candy dessert that can be spun to hold itself in place in a zero-gravity environment. Modeled after a traditional gyroscope toy, the aim is for spinning pieces to harness the stabilizing effects of the conservation of angular momentum. Outer candy rings surround a spinning inner core, set off by a twirl of the fingers. As the sweet is consumed, hopefully, the balance of the edible gyroscope begins to change, inducing a changing flight pattern. This oscillating, and moving vessel of sweets will form new rituals of consumption as the flier circles the candy gyroscope eating and changing the flight path of the dessert as they do so. Food and eating are no longer tethered to a table, a plate, or a sticky velcro tray, but instead invites fliers into a new choreography of eating.
The outer ring, the inner spinning rings, and the cage are made of isomalt pieces, with Skittles and starburst sweets attached to the outer ring for ease of changing weight distribution during flight. 3 thin wire and metal tube pieces hold the dessert mechanism together, akin to a lollipop stick, allowing a place for the flier to hold and spin the dessert before consumption.
- The candy gyroscope would be taken and first, the inner ring will be spun. Then the outer ring can be spun using the two outer wire handles with a twist of the fingers.
- Pieces of candy would be plucked off at the discretion of the flier in order to unbalance the mechanism. Eaten if desired.
Corinna Siu
2023