Sushi in space doesn’t look like a good idea

By Trevor Mogg Published June 16, 2025

While the quality of astronauts’ space food has definitely gotten better over the years, it seems that there’s still plenty of room for improvement when it comes to sushi.

From his current home aboard the International Space Station (ISS), NASA astronaut Jonny Kim has just shared a photo showing what he described as “space sushi.” 

To be frank, the dish features the kind of presentation that would probably trigger a spontaneous combustion event in any highly skilled sushi chef who laid eyes on it, though Kim insisted that it was actually OK.

“Space sushi isn’t quite the same as the fresh stuff on the ground, but it’s not bad!” the astronaut wrote in a post on X, which also included a photo of the culinary calamity.

Kim added: “We had a crew celebration recently and one of our crewmates expressed how much they missed sushi (as do I). So we collected and pitched in our personal supplies of fish, spam and rice, coupled with a dash of gochujang and wasabi, which made for a great meal.”

Whichever crewmate said they were missing sushi, after this meal we’re pretty sure they’re still missing sushi.

The best sushi can include fine cuts of salmon and tuna, smooth slices of yellowtail, the sweetest shrimp, tender scallops, shiny spheres of salmon roe, and tasty layers of carefully cooked egg. But all we have here is spam and some unidentifiable brown stuff. Face with this, it’s possible that some of the astronauts went for the thermo-stabilized pork liver paté instead.

It’s actually not the first time that astronauts have eaten sushi in space. In 2010, for example, Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi, wearing a chef’s hat, prepared hand-rolled sushi during a stay aboard the ISS. According to a video of the event, the procedure was a little different than back on terra firma, with clumps of sticky rice floating about in microgravity conditions before being encased inside the seaweed sheet.

While a lot of astronaut food these days still comes in pouches and needs to be rehydrated, regular cargo runs bring special treats for crewmembers to enjoy, while recent science projects have successfully grown fresh produce, including salad items, in microgravity conditions.