Why is this NASA Culinary Challenge so important to NASA?
Food Physiology: The crew performed saliva collections on Tuesday (4/14/2020).  The Integrated Impact of Diet on Human Immune Response, the Gut Microbiota, and Nutritional Status During Adaptation to Spaceflight (Food Physiology) experiment is designed to characterize the key effects of an enhanced spaceflight diet on immune function, the gut microbiome, and nutritional status indicators. These factors are interlinked, but diet is the only one that can be easily and meaningfully altered on Earth or during flight. This investigation aims to document the effect of dietary improvements on human physiology and the ability of those improvements to enhance adaptation to spaceflight.​

Quote from Increment 61 astronauts on Phoebus HS (2019 Winner):
To the winning HUNCH team, Spice 2 Space 2.0:
Daysi, Amarianna, Mya, Travis, Iyana, Wesleigh, and Tierra,
 
Greetings from the International Space Station!  Thank you for the wonderful surprise Harvest Hash this holiday season!  We received it in advance of Christmas and anxiously waited to save it for a special occasion and had it on Christmas Day as part of a big brunch.  We loved it.  We were all speculating as to which herbs gave it the unique flavor and then found the ingredient list!  I think it was the fennel—one of my favorites.
 
Thank you and best wishes from orbit,
 
-Increment 61 of the ISS: Luca, Drew, Jessica, Oleg, Sasha, and Christina
 
Note – This is Private\Personal Mail, not for release to the media.
 

​​Quote from Expedition 59 astronauts on 2018 Culinary Winner:
“Thank you to all involved in this amazing program, and to the students for their efforts, creativity, and for nailing a really good dessert!
Please pass our huge THANK YOUS and WELL DONE to Decatur High School for their Orange-Blackberry Croissant Casserole. This was one of the best foods that we have had up here, we thoroughly enjoyed it and wished we had more! I would order this at a restaurant on Earth.” – Anne, Nick, Christina and David

The American Culinary Federation info

Click here to see astronaut review of 1st year Culinary winners

Due to the current issues that we are facing as a nation, we were not able to complete the culinary challenge in the normal fashion.  We will however have the 10 participating teams complete their paper and video and then the JSC food lab will help us determine our 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place winners for 2019-2020 school year.  Please see the scholarship page where we have both ACF and Sullivan University that are providing special awards for our winners and participants in this Culinary Challenge

Finalists have until May 11th to turn in both Paper and video (see Rubric Below)

top_10_finalist_adjusted_rubric.docx
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