Freeze-Dried Thanksgiving Dinner In Space Not As Depressing As It Sounds

By  Jen Sabella

A lot of people have to work on Thanksgiving. There are grocery store clerks who are there for you when you forget the thyme, the Best Buy employees who have to deal with your pre-Black Friday holiday shopping nonsense, and the astronauts aboard the International Space Station who are studying how chilling in space impacts the human body.

Freeze-fried food packets are the name of the game in the Space Station, and Thanksgiving day is no different. It sounds sad, but based on the adorable photos and videos NASA tweeted out Thursday, everyone was super into it.

NASA astronauts Joseph M. Acaba and Mark T. Vande Hei introduced the American holiday tradition to Italian astronaut Paolo Nespoli and Russian cosmonaut Sergey Ryazanskiy. The crew had a normal work day, but shared the feast at their "microgravity table" in the evening—as they orbited at an altitude of 250 miles above Earth.

Here they are getting stoked about the menu, which included mashed potatoes, turkey, cornbread dressing, candied yams, apple cider and some sort of "cranapple" dessert, all dehydrated, all presumably delicious:

Though the dehydrated space food looks like it would be unappealing, the cornbread dressing recipe NASA shared Thursday looked like the real deal—except, you know, drier:

They also got to sample lettuce that was harvested in space, which makes me feel inferior for my inability to keep my backyard kale alive.

Space.com reports the crew has Friday off, and the work they did on Thanksgiving wasn't as bad as dealing with frenzied home cooks or holiday bargain hunters: They were unpacking a cargo craft filled with freeze-dried pizza and holiday care packages from their families (and presumably other important scientific matters).

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