How to grow fresh food in space – the first on-orbit tasting of space-grown lettuce. According to Space.com:
For the first time, at least officially, the NASA astronauts on board the International Space Station have tasted the product, or more specifically, the produce, of their work.
Expedition 44 crewmembers Scott Kelly and Kjell Lindgren of NASA, together with Kimiya Yui of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) on Monday (Aug. 10) happily chomped on “Outredgeous” red romaine lettuce, which they freshly harvested from the orbiting lab’s Veggie plant growth system.
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Their space garden snack marked the first time NASA had cleared its astronauts to eat what they grew, following in the farming footsteps of earlier Russian cosmonauts, who first ate the leafy greens they cultivated aboard the space station more than a decade ago (whether U.S. astronauts unofficially partook in the previous harvests is not clear).
Before chomping down on the leaves, Kelly, Lindgren and Yui first cleaned the red romaine lettuce with citric acid-based sanitizing wipes. Mission Control gave them the go to eat half of the space bounty, setting aside the other half to be packaged and frozen on the station until it can be returned to Earth for scientific analysis.