Artemis Astronauts Explain Why Nutella Tastes Different In Space (And So Does Everything Else)

Last month, in a truly historic moment for mankind, NASA launched its Artemis II mission to achieve the once unthinkable: it sent Nutella around the Moon. Yes, the beloved hazelnut cocoa spread, widely used in countries around the world that aren’t the U.S., has now traveled further from the Earth than any human being. Well, except for Artemis II’s four crew: Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen. NASA needed somebody to actually eat the Nutella!

Here’s the wild thing: while these astronauts may have had Nutella, they didn’t actually taste Nutella. On a recent interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, he jokingly asked if the spread was any different in space and got a more involved answer than he might have expected. “Everything tastes different,” pilot Victor Glover explained. “Mainly because you don’t have the difference in potential. Warm things don’t create rising air, so, you know, you don’t get to smell your coffee.”

Since smell is deeply tied to taste, when you sniff the inviting aroma of a well cooked meal, you’re priming your mouth for a great time. But that very smell is rising up to you, which is accelerated if it’s hot. In microgravity, there’s no up or down or anything else. Everything just floats around in any direction. That means heat and/or smell can’t “rise” in a conventional sense. It can just hang in place in a sort of bubble.

Without the normal smell, you won’t get the normal taste, either. But don’t worry: it gets weirder! Because your body fluids get in the way in space, too.

Gravity! We so take it for granted, don’t we? As it turns out, so do our bodies. Our whole circulation system is designed on the assumption that fluids will get pulled down. When an astronaut gets into space, one of the first things that happens is that their face gets all puffy because their sinuses get congested. Basically, they get cold symptoms, except without an actual cold. This is called “fluid shift.” When NASA talks about the grandeur of its missions, it tends to skip over this part. Of course, when your nasal passages are all blocked, you can’t smell, and everything tastes really bland.

Lastly, it’s also the case that four people were confined to a small spacecraft without showers for nine days. In other words, there may have been, uh, other smells competing with Nutella (and all the other food). Combined with how hard it is for aroma to move around in microgravity, and it’s possible that the taste buds were reacting to something very different from hazelnut. I encourage you not to think about this any further.

For all these reasons, astronauts have for decades tried to spice up their meals, literally. Hot sauce, chili, soy sauce, anything to give their struggling tongues some help. But what of Nutella? Glover did offer future astronauts a ray of hope: apparently, Nutella on a tortilla was “one of the things that maybe tasted the most like it did on Earth.” This was apparently in part due to the prowess of mission specialist Jeremy Hansen, who demonstrated skills with a knife that should probably be considered mission-critical from now on.