Snacks Are Out of This World

It's one small step for pizza lovers, and one giant leap for hungry astronauts.

Five Chapman University food science students won NASA's 2003 food competition for their "Pizza Poppers," a snack food for future space travelers.

The aspiring cooks for the cosmos are Heather Pe, 21, of Placentia; Akua Kwakwa, 25, of Orange; Wan-Lin Chou, 26, of Fullerton; Pei-Chen Chen, 26, of Orange; and Gerrie Adams, 48, of Laguna Niguel. They created the snack as a final project for a product development course.

The prize doesn't include cash, or even a patent on their award winner, but they will get a trip to Chicago in July for the Institute of Food Technologists' annual meeting, and another to Houston in November, to present their treats to scientists at the Johnson Space Center.

"This is over the top," said Chou, a graduate student from Taiwan. "We're still a little in shock over all of it."

The crunchy snack, shaped like a bite-sized pizza slice, comes in three flavors: regular pizza, garlic, and hot and spicy. They are similar in consistency to flavored potato chips, but are baked, making them low in fat.

The students started first on an earthly version, taking their snack from concept to supermarket shelf, with an eye toward developing it for commercial giant ConAgra.

Then they modified the poppers for NASA's third annual competition, whose rules require that entries can be produced on the moon or Mars.

"It's quite a challenge to design a product that could have a market here on Earth and could also meet the criteria for a planetary outpost," said Anuradha Prakash, head of the food science and nutrition department at the university in Orange.

From powders and pastes to potatoes au gratin, space-age cuisine has come a long way. But each new product has to meet several challenges: It cannot contain chemical additives and must use a minimum of water, create little waste and be made with crops that can be grown in space environments. It also has to be crumb-free, leaving no particles to clog sensitive equipment or choke an astronaut.

Working evenings and weekends, the students tweaked their original formula to meet NASA's requirements.

They settled on Okara, a slightly sweet high-protein byproduct of soybean milk, to fold into wheat dough, leaving off seasonings so astronauts could add their own toppings, such as tomatoes and soy cheese.