When Americans go to Space, they now eat a varied menu of food, including beef enchiladas, lasagne, and sweet-and-sour pork on their space missions. NASA has said space food must be easy to prepare and eat, and usually has lower fat, fewer calories and less salt.
But the Chinese astronauts have a slightly different menu...
Chinese menu from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/...
A selection of dishes from the Chinese Astronaut menu (2009 mission)
Day One: Lotus root porridge, crispy tofu with spring onions, braised yellow croaker fish, pork ribs with seaweed, spinach with minced garlic.
Day Two: Spicy pig skin, braised duck neck, hairy crab with ginger, chicken liver with chilli, pine nuts with sweetcorn, three-flavour soup.
Day Three: Poached egg in fermented rice soup, Harbin sausage, Huajiang dog, baby cuttlefish casserole, eel with green pepper, spicy beans with dried tofu.
Did you see Day Three? Huajiang dog! OMG, I kid you not. I thought that some poor Chinese might eat dog, but I did not consider it a mainstay type meal for the Chinese!
Yang Liwei, the 44-year-old military pilot who commanded the Shenzhou Five mission in 2003, revealed the menu on-board the spacecraft in his autobiography, The Nine Levels between Heaven and Earth
He listed a menu including braised chicken, steamed fish and dog meat from Huajiang county in Guangdong, which is famed for its nutritional benefits in China.
A local proverb in the south of China is that "Huajiang dog is better for you than ginseng", referring to the medicinal root that plays a vital role in traditional Chinese medicine.
He added that the diet had been specially drawn up for the astronauts by Chinese nutritionists and that the food had been purchased from special suppliers in Beijing. Dog is widely eaten in northern China, where it is believed to help battle the winter cold. The menu was still in use last year, when Chinese astronauts conducted their first ever spacewalk.
The story also mentions that the revelation of dog on the menu has drawn complaints from animal rights activists.
"Yang Liwei is a role model for so many young people and he is one of China's greatest heroes," said Jill Robinson, the founder of Animals Asia. "We hope that he might recognise dogs as the heroes they are too: they found survivors after the Sichuan earthquake and protected people from potential terrorists during the Olympic games. Surely they deserve more."
Dogs are pets and vital to communities across the world. I hope people across the world continue to send the complaints to the Chinese officials.