Day 26: Sweet potatoes in space. Is okra next?

Sweet potato cuttings fared well aboard the space shuttle Columbia.

Since I’ve been back in the South, I’ve noticed certain regional peculiarities about food. I’d remembered from growing up in North Carolina that pork — specifically barbecue — was big here. There’s something too about fried cuisine: fried pickles, fried mac and cheese, fried brownies and fried Snickers candy bars are all likely to pop up at social gatherings and county fairs.

Also, many Southerners are dedicated fans of sweet potatoes. So much that some researchers at Alabama’s Tuskegee University, along with their colleagues at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, apparently decided that — if at all possible — astronauts simply must have tasty tubers in space. Well, the astronauts are in luck.

Sweet potato cuttings have flown aboard the space shuttle Columbia, and they grew just as well as control cuttings back on Earth.

Desmond G. Mortley, from Tuskegee University’s Center for Food Production and Environmental Systems for Human Exploration of Space, and his colleagues sent sweet potato cuttings on a five-day mission aboard the space shuttle Columbia, and compared their success to ground-based cuttings at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The study findings were published last May in the Journal of American Society for Horticultural Science.

For whatever reason, the press release on the findings wasn’t issued until today. The gentleman who answered the phone at the American Society for Horticultural Science, where the journal is published, said it just took a while to get the word out. Fashionably late, I suppose. Anyhow, seeds of several crops have been grown in microgravity, but this was the first test for plants grown from cuttings. Cuttings grow roots faster than seeds, and sweet potato cuttings regenerate very easily. This made them ideal for the study. (Ah, so it wasn’t just a Southern culinary concern.)

The sweet potatoes grown in microgravity aboard the shuttle displayed similar root growth to those that stayed behind on Earth — but the microgravity roots tended to grow haphazardly and sometimes perpendicular to the cuttings. The number of roots was almost the same in both samples, but the roots grew longer in space.

The authors say the study was a success because it shows that stem cuttings — at least those started in normal gravity conditions — can regenerate roots in microgravity.

“This suggests that the space flight environment has no negative effect on the ability of vegetative cuttings to form roots and that use of cuttings should be an acceptable means for propagating sweetpotato for future space applications,” they wrote.

Mortley and his colleagues say the next step will be to experiment over longer space missions, to test root cuttings’ ability to grow full-fledged plants. I’m going to suggest that NASA includes a deep fryer in the payload for the next mission. Sweet potato fries would go a long way toward lifting astronauts’ spirits, I think, and it could someday open the door for fried okra. Accomplish that, and I’m thinking the Deep South will be in hog heaven.