Taking the slow food life to space, Italian style

Spare a thought for those far from home this Christmas season - not least Italy's first woman in space, Samantha Cristoforetti, one of the six astronauts orbiting the Earth at 7,690km/h in the International Space Station (ISS).

While Cristoforetti will miss out on her traditional family meal, she will have the consolation of cutting-edge cuisine prepared especially for her in a pristine factory on the edge of Turin.

The pre-packed dishes were produced at a small aerospace engineering firm, Argotec, and have been the subject of almost as much experimentation as the spacecraft's pressurised modules, robotic arms and solar arrays.

The company's association with space food stems from its involvement in astronaut training, and began "as a bit of joke", managing director, David Avino said. His firm was helping to train Luca Parmitano, the Italian astronaut on the first mission to be run by the country's space agency, ASI.

"He wanted to take up some dishes that were typical of Italy," Avino said. It was only after Argotec embarked on their preparation that he realised what he had let himself in for.

Special meals could only justify their place in the payload if they helped to boost morale. To do that, they had to be significantly better than the standard astronauts' fare produced by the US and Russian space agencies. But making luxury cuisine for astronauts is no easy matter.