Home Work: Who Invented Tang?
field reports from my book The Secret History of Home Economics
On Feb. 20, 1962, orbiting high above Nigeria in Friendship 7, John Glenn consumed the first U.S. space snack. Here’s a pop quiz for that anniversary, multiple answers allowed. Home economists invented:
a) the Rice Krispie treat
b) the Toll House cookie
c) the hard-shell taco
and/or
d) Tang
OK, back to our astronomical scene. For that first meal, Glenn squeezed applesauce into his mouth from a metal toothpaste-style tube through a valve in his helmet. He may also have eaten puréed beef with vegetables or swallowed a malt tablet; reports vary. Glenn wasn’t hungry—who could be, for tube food—and he didn’t need the nourishment on the relatively short trip, but Air Force/NASA dietitian Bea Finkelstein wanted to test eating in space, a project she had been working on since before the U.S. government launched the Mercury program.
Space food, mocked today, was an engineering problem complicated by human nature. The military already knew that rations had to taste good or people would just stop eating, putting the mission at risk. Even just plain isolation made people very weird about food, Finkelstein found: everything from fixated to territorial to not hungry at all. Eaten alone in the dark, as in a single-person space capsule, ham on rye tasted like chicken on white. Then there were physiological unknowns: Would digestion work properly in zero gravity? Would astronauts get space-sick? How much of various nutrients, to the microgram, did humans need? Finally add the daunting engineering issues of weightlessness, waste, the cost of every ounce. A crumb could be deadly: Floating around, it could easily clog a key apparatus such as the astronaut’s breathing system.
Air Force/NASA dietitian Bea Finkelstein
Finkelstein tested ice cream sludges, oregano-seasoned pea purée, tomato blended with rosemary and thyme, baked chicken, first in Ohio and then at Cape Canaveral. The astronauts called her lab “Bea’s Diner,” and one of their wives complained that her husband now talked incessantly not about Mom’s cooking but “the way Bea fixes it.”
Gus Grissom (facing camera) and Gordo Cooper (to the right) eat at "Bea's Diner" at Cape Canaveral
Where did Tang come in? It addressed an additional requirement. Early space suits did not have, shall we say, rear escape hatches. So the food eaten before and in-flight had to be what the scientists delicately called “low-residue.” Fruit juice had pulp, which caused problems. Tang did not.
Contrary to popular belief, NASA did not invent Tang. A chemist (not a home economist) at General Foods, William A. Mitchell, developed the orange-flavored beverage powder for in the late 1950s. It didn’t exactly fly off the shelves. But General Foods, which already supplied the military, sold some to NASA, which packaged the powder in a vacuum-sealed pouch to be injected with water and slurped.
Glenn did not consume Tang on that first flight, but astronauts did eventually drink it. General Foods leapt to advertise the NASA connection, at which point Tang’s sales rocketed into the stratosphere.
Meanwhile, Finkelstein’s team made rapid progress. Later in 1962, astronaut Wally Schirra not only squoodged tube food but consumed juice (that’s what the news said; it might have been Tang), coffee and brownie bites. Finkelstein encapsulated the baked goods in hydroxypropyl methyl cellulose skins and wrapped them in polyethylene so they would remain unspoiled and crumb-free for up to six months.
But did a home economist invent Tang after all? The Wikipedia page of Doris Howes Calloway, an Army nutritionist who began working on space food at Menlo Park in 1961, says her work on freeze-drying orange juice led to Tang.
Because I despise misinformation (and possibly enjoy being a killjoy), I have run a few “home economists invented X” claims down their associated rabbit holes. And in this case, I can confidently tell you that (d) is not a correct answer on today’s pop quiz.
The Wikipedia claim seems to come from a misreading of a University of California website and a fundamental misunderstanding of Tang. Calloway didn’t go to Menlo Park until four years A.T., after Tang. And Tang is … I’m sorry if I’m disappointing you here … not dehydrated juice. It is created from sweeteners, flavoring, vitamins, thickeners, etc. Former Kraft archivist Becky Haglund Tousey confirmed, “Tang as it was introduced in 1957 was not invented by Calloway.”
As for the rest of the quiz, Ruth Wakefield earned a home economics degree and worked as a teacher before opening the Toll House Inn; home economists Mildred Ghrist Day and Malitta Jensen developed the Rice Krispie Treat in the Kellogg’s test kitchen.
Next up: Did Fabiola Cabeza de Baca Gilbert invent the hard-shell taco?
Recipe of the Month
By the time Mitchell developed Tang (excuse me, TANG), most corporate home economists worked not in labs but in marketing and customer service, where they wrote all those recipes for magazine ads and the back of the box, to encourage extended use of a product. Some recipes became so popular that no one realizes they came from a single creator—the food equivalent of “Happy Birthday.” That might be the case with the General Foods home economists’ ca. 1960 invention Hot Spiced Tea, a.k.a. Russian Tea, now a Southern classic endorsed by no less than über–Southern lady Reese Witherspoon. Here’s the original.
1-1/3 c. Tang
1/2 c. sugar (or, uh, to taste?)
1/2 c. instant tea powder (lemon-flavored if you like)
1 t. cinnamon
1/2 t. ground clove
Combine and store in tightly covered jar. To serve, put 1 rounded tsp. of mix in a mug, fill with boiling water and stir to dissolve. For 1 qt. tea, use 1/2 c. mix. Yield: 24 servings. Or you can try Ferna Mae Jones’ Tang-ier, sweeter version with 2 c. Tang and 1 c. sugar.
Mitchell also created Cool Whip, quick-set JELL-O and Pop Rocks.
Incidentally, although my mother worked at General Foods, if I have ever had Tang it was at a friend’s house during childhood and I don’t remember it at all.
If you are the person who told me they saw an early space glove in a museum display with “Department of Home Economics” in tiny letters on the case, please, please email. I think you should be able to share this post at this link. Read about television tips, baby pigs and more in the Home Work archives.
Header photo: "New Mexico. Mrs. Fidel Romero Proudly Exhibits Her Canned Food. 1946." U.S. National Archives via Wikimedia. Bea Finkelstein and Bea's Diner, U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory, with clarification from Kevin Rusnak. Space food sample sign: still from "Food for Space Travelers," 1966.
Sources: The Associated Press, "Glenn Had Space Snack by Tube," The New York Times, Feb. 20, 1962. "Transcript of Glenn's News Conference Relating His Experiences on Orbital Flight," The New York Times, Feb. 24, 1962. "Astronaut Schirra Enjoys 'Out-of-This-World' Food," The Science News-Letter, Oct. 13, 1962. Beatrice Finkelstein, "Current Research for Space Travel Nutrition and Food Technology," The Journal of Home Economics, Nov. 1962. Mary Hoyt, American Women of the Space Age, Atheneum, 1966. Robert Z. Pearlman, "Space Food: From Squeeze Tubes to Celebrity Chefs," Space, Nov. 23, 2006. Carolyn M. Goldstein, Creating Consumers: Home Economists in Twentieth-Century America, University of North Carolina Press, 2012. Tom Longden, "From the Archives: Love Rice Krispie Treats? You Have an Iowan to Thank," Des Moines Register, Sept. 21, 2017. Matt Blitz, "How NASA Made Tang Cool," Food & Wine, May 18, 2017. Sam Roberts, "Overlooked No More: Ruth Wakefield, Who Invented the Chocolate Chip Cookie," The New York Times, Mar. 24, 2018. Email correspondence with Becky Haglund Tousey, Feb. 19, 2020.
Written content © 2020 Danielle Dreilinger. All rights reserved.