11 January 2005
Tastybite
As you may know, I'm a fan of certain space foods. One of my long-time favorites is Tastybite. These are Indian and Thai convenience foods with a two-year shelf life. They make convenient microwaveable office-lunches, dinner for an overnight backpacking trip, or in my former life, a staple of my mountain cabin pantry.
At the grocery store, a TastyBite can cost $4 or so. But if you order them directly from tastybite.com, they're only $2.29–$3.29 each, depending on whether they include rice. The Web site also offers Indian breads that generally aren't available at the grocery store.
Incidentally, the last time I ordered a huge load of Tastybites was the first week of September 2001. They sent me an email a couple of weeks later explaining that the office where they coordinate their shipping was in the WTC, all the paperwork had been destroyed, and my order would be delayed. Boo hoo, eh? But I was actually kinda bummed, because at that point I was pretty eager to complete my apocalypse-resistant mountain pantry.
I finally got around to ordering a new cache, and today my 33-pound box of Tastybites arrived. For about $80, I have 24 self-contained space-lunches and 25 pieces of chickpea-flour roti—about $3.33 per lunch with bread.
This time, two things were different since my last order:
- The self-contained space-meals now come with their own disposable Gladware-style plastic boxes. These will soon pile up in my kitchen and on my desk!
- For some reason (the holidays, I suppose), Tastybite sent me a sack of gifts: some ornaments, coasters, placemats, and a set of small thingies that you can float on vegetable oil in wine glasses to form little oil lamps. The coasters and placemats are actually kinda nice. Tastybite loves me!
That's the space food report! What space foods do you eat?