When I was an astronaut, I was always relying on rehydrated cauliflower to get me through those cold space nights. Fry up that cauliflower with some silly string and random things from the spice rack, and you’ve got some good space eating right there.

There was the one trip where they forgot to load the dehydrated cauliflower into storage. We didn’t find out until the first meal in space where we had no choice but to eat small bits of metal. And yes, the stories are true: that was the inspiration for my Cauliflower Regeneration Vortex.

Here’s how it came to be. I started with Thagrelot’s Theorem, that in any cubic meter of space in the universe there’s at least a 99.9% chance that it contains one or more cauliflower molecules. Although it hadn’t been proven at this point, it sounded plausible to us. I then had to figure out a way to collect and combine these theoretical molecules into actual bits of cauliflower. That’s where the vortex comes in: one mole of anticauliflower suspended in a superconducting plasma tank creates enough of a cauli-gravitational force to suck cauliflower molecules from up to 100 kilometers away.

Once the molecules have been gathered by the vortex (this takes about 3 days), the 100 watt Easy Bake Oven is able to make them coalesce into a solid block of cauliflower. This can be eaten as is, or it can be carved into a more traditional-looking puffy cauliflower form.

And that’s why I don’t need to pack cauliflower whenever I go into outer space these days. Thank you Regeneration Vortex. And thank you to its brilliant inventor, me. My life wouldn’t be the same without me.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 27th, 2005 at 6:22 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.