Of all of the freeze-dried, thermostablized and off-the-shelf food items that she helped send into space, Vickie Kloeris' personal favorite was the cherry-blueberry cobbler.
A food scientist at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston for 34 years, Kloeris not only enjoyed the cobbler, but helped to develop it.
"During the shuttle program, we really weren't doing any product development. All we were doing was, if a product went away, we would find a commercial product to replace it," she said in an interview with collectSPACE.com. "It wasn't until we got into the International Space Station [program] that we finally got the funding to develop some products, and the first thing that came up was desserts."
More than just a desire to satisfy astronauts' sweet tooths, Kloeris and her team in the Space Food Systems Laboratory felt there were benefits to adding desserts to the crew members' menus.
"We really thought that, from the psychological perspective, having a dessert that you could warm up would be great. And they were; they were highly accepted."
Plus, the cherry-blueberry cobbler was just "really, really good."
