A nationwide culinary competition for NASA announced its top 10 finalists this week and two Alabama teams made the list.
The teams, from The Huntsville Center for Technology and Hewitt-Trussville High School, will compete in designing a dish to send to astronauts living on the International Space Station. The NASA HUNCH Culinary Challenge finals will take place later this month in Houston, Texas at the Johnson Space Center’s Space Food Systems Laboratory.
The Hewitt-Trussville team is competing with a butternut squash puree garnished with cinnamon Greek yogurt, and the Huntsville Center for Technology team has created a Mexican Rice Paella.
The Huntsville team wanted their Paella to be spicy because astronauts “lose their sense of taste in space,” said Karen Rodriguez, the culinary arts teacher at The Huntsville Center for Technology. “Because of the lack of gravity, they feel full all the time, so they don’t have big appetites.”
They’ve also added a bit of a psychological twist to their dish.
“We added a lot of color because that makes your brain think it tastes better,” said Rodriguez.
The teams had to meet the competition’s strict dietary and transportation-related guidelines:
• 300-500 calories per serving
• Total calories from fat must be under 30 percent
• 300 mg of sodium or less
• 8 gm of sugar or less
• 3 gm of fiber or more
• Food must process well for flight and for use in microgravity
The Alabama teams competed in the first round earlier this year at Huntsville’s Marshall Flight Center where their scores launched them to the top 10. A panel of scientists and astronauts will judge the finalists’ dishes in Houston later this month, and then the winning group’s dish will be prepared and flown to the International Space Station for real astronauts to enjoy.
The nationwide competition is part of a decade-long NASA program promoting science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) for high school students. Allison Westover of Houston’s Johnson Space Center decided to add a food component to the program.
She thought, “Why can’t we get a new kind of student, a culinary student, that can learn about the process you have to go through to get food ready for flight for the astronauts and make this a challenge?”
The winners of the competition will be announced in May.
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