Space Food Sticks... Wha?

Pretty cool, these individually wrapped tubes of, I guess, space food. Each little stick came on like a Slim Jim made from a stale peanut butter flavor Power Bar, which come to think of it is essentially what Space Food Sticks were -- an early version of the modern energy bar. They were actually pretty nasty when you get right down to it, but the packaging was smart -- the metallic wrapping had just enough weight to it that you needed your teeth to wrestle it open, and the foil was a cool metallic silver on the inside. It really did seem possible that these things were made and packaged for actual astronauts. The outer space angle also let Pillsbury, the makers of Space Food Sticks get away with, or even benefit from, the patently synthetic nature of the food in the stick. It tasted weird, smelled weird, and felt weird in your mouth, but that was okay -- space is weird. Our mom was reluctant to buy them, and when she did we gobbled them up in a day or two. I think Space Food Sticks was a main reason for Mom's abrupt buy-in to the health-food fad that swept the nation in the mid-seventies.

-- Rick M.