Food and Life Support Cost

[whartung]

Emirates airlines serves some pretty good fare and it's all prepared on the ground. I could see there being companies that have the technology to do this as a general service in a future like Traveller.

10 Days in space is completely different from 10 hours over the Atlantic.

The ground based kitchen can create meals, and those can be kept in warmers on the plane and still maintain some reasonable level of quality, and can then be readily assembled by the staff on the plane (plated, given a roll and butter, a small, chilled salad, etc.).

On a 10 day trip the Steward is either cooking, or sticking pre-made meals in to the microwave.

If they're nuking meals, they're either frozen or simply refrigerated until prepared (vs the "canned in a baggie" food that makes up a modern MRE).

If you look at a crab boat (everything I know about crab fishing I got from watching "Deadliest Catch"), they have a galley, they cook their food, and they have on-sea times similar to the travel times for a starship (a week or weeks at sea).

They cook and feed up 6, 7, up to 10 people. A commercial passenger ferrying starship might have more variety, or better presentation than a crab boat, but the basics are the same. Burners, cooked food. There's no reason a Steward can't be a part time cook for a small ship.

Prepare the meal ingredients in advance: pre-cut, pre-measured, etc. Crews can buy these meals from local Starport kitchen companies. They just need to cook the food (rather than just heat it up).

For example, you can buy a prepared frozen turkey breast, throw it in the oven, frozen, and 2+hrs later - "fresh turkey". Easy. Whip up some stuffing mix and dried potatoes. Boom. Turkey dinner.

 

[Enoki]

10 Days in space is completely different from 10 hours over the Atlantic.

The ground based kitchen can create meals, and those can be kept in warmers on the plane and still maintain some reasonable level of quality, and can then be readily assembled by the staff on the plane (plated, given a roll and butter, a small, chilled salad, etc.).

On a 10 day trip the Steward is either cooking, or sticking pre-made meals in to the microwave.

If they're nuking meals, they're either frozen or simply refrigerated until prepared (vs the "canned in a baggie" food that makes up a modern MRE).

If you look at a crab boat (everything I know about crab fishing I got from watching "Deadliest Catch"), they have a galley, they cook their food, and they have on-sea times similar to the travel times for a starship (a week or weeks at sea).

They cook and feed up 6, 7, up to 10 people. A commercial passenger ferrying starship might have more variety, or better presentation than a crab boat, but the basics are the same. Burners, cooked food. There's no reason a Steward can't be a part time cook for a small ship.

Prepare the meal ingredients in advance: pre-cut, pre-measured, etc. Crews can buy these meals from local Starport kitchen companies. They just need to cook the food (rather than just heat it up).

For example, you can buy a prepared frozen turkey breast, throw it in the oven, frozen, and 2+hrs later - "fresh turkey". Easy. Whip up some stuffing mix and dried potatoes. Boom. Turkey dinner.

This ignores even what's available today in terms of easy to prepare / ready to eat foods.
For example, you could have salad mixes bagged and ready to serve. The steward takes a bag out, proportions it, and serves a salad course to passengers that was pre-made.

Irradiation of food makes for long storage life and eliminates the need for refrigeration in many cases.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_irradiation

So, you could easily have access to pre-made meals that are ready to cook and of very high quality that don't need significant or complex storage means.

There are frozen foods today that equal or exceed the quality of many make it yourself products too.
So, there are plenty of ways to have pre-prepared meals that would cover a say two week period aboard a ship. I'd think the bigger lines would actually have a whole system of ground based kitchens and plants that make up these meals for ships to use. They could be loaded aboard in standardized containers reducing the cost and labor aboard ship for serving meals.
For smaller ships there likely would be vendors they could work with in many starports who sell the same sort of thing along with say, specialized products to larger lines that simply don't want the hassle of making them up but do want the variety for their passengers.

 

[Condottiere]

There'd be a great market for certified digestible precooked meals, possibly with health warnings for former inhabitants of specific planets.

 

[whartung]

I'd think the bigger lines would actually have a whole system of ground based kitchens and plants that make up these meals for ships to use.

As soon as the ship is big enough to support a full time kitchen staff (i.e. a cook and, perhaps, a part time porter as bus person/dish washer), then you may as well just start with fresh ingredients and cook the food straight, with no need to prepare anything. Grab the 1kg package of Paprika and go to work.

All of the food preparation initiatives are there simply to save time, and lower the barrier to entry (i.e. skill of the preparer). But they don't save that much time overall. Yea, for me, I'd rather come home and be eating in 20 minutes vs an hour. But it doesn't take much for a specialized cook to become viable and save money on food.

Which is all amusing since the primary cost of "prepared" food is the labor, not the materials. Which is why portion control in the marketplace is basically gone, as making the portions larger adds pennies to the fixed cost of the meal, but gives better value. There's a place by me that serves 4 egg omelettes. It's the "normal size", so everything is huge. Which is fine if you shop at restaurant and don't mind taking home and eating day old omelette (not for me, thanks), but most humans rarely need portions that big.

However, simply at a level of scale and service, it doesn't take long to where a single person can't readily service the passengers on the starship (at least not well), so may as well make that new extra person a part time cook, provide better food and dining (and charge more for it) at the same time.

But, anyway, the overall point is that there's no reason a starship can not provide mostly fresh foods for daily dining. Leave the Spam and MREs in the Ships Locker.

 

[kilemall]

Fair point. I was thinking maybe some ultrasonic solution, or some other way of removing grime from threads. Not too much thought behind the "hmmmm" beyond wondering if there was a more efficient way with a little technical nudge. But as there are shotguns in space, so might there be soapsuds.

Fabrics might also deal with dirt and mess more effectively, something like everything is dirt/water/grime/stain repellent, and sweat and effluvium from the human wearers just pools into little sweatbags that get thrown away and replaced, and that's considered cleaning.


I'm always looking for creating odd phrases that are based on everyday events yet shockingly point out different technologies, like 'did you water the lamps'.


So something like asking the steward 'did you bag my clothes' or 'John Henry Worthington! your sweatbags are filthy! go back in and change them out right now!'.


Another one I got to thinking about with the fresh food thing- with biotech engineered plants, you could have fast growing plants that thrive in say a refrigerator with grow lamps inside. Does a little bit of air scrubbing although not like the hyperalgae tanks, but produces fresh veggies/herbs constantly. Open the fridge, harvest what you need or out to ripen a day, no problem the fridge plants will grow another one tomorrow and will already be chilled and preserved for a few days.


Which leads to a new 'we're not in Kansas anymore' phrase- 'steward, this is the captain, I need you to prune the refrigerator a little more, I just got a complaint'.


If you want to 'go there', you could also have fresh meat growing in the fridge from the carniculturator (which is below the ice cube maker and above the crisper). Meat harvested from an animal might be an exotic or frontier sort of thing to do, as rare as having a buffalo steak is now.

 

[Spenser TR]

Fabrics might also deal with dirt and mess more effectively, something like everything is dirt/water/grime/stain repellent, and sweat and effluvium from the human wearers just pools into little sweatbags that get thrown away and replaced, and that's considered cleaning.

Side topic: I would read the heck out of a fan-made supplement called "T-shirts of the Imperium" that detailed some ideas about clothing function in the Far Future.

Also hmmmmmm.

 

[Timerover51]

You might have vendors making up packaged meals for serving at Class A and Class B star ports, and maybe at Class C, but you are not going to have them at Class D or E, and most definitely will not have them at Class X star ports. Your crew and passengers are still going to have to eat. Relying on a lot of pre-made meals may or may not work, and thinking that all a Steward needs to do is put a pre-made meal into a microwave or oven basically makes the skill of Steward pretty meaningless.

Based on a report on operational rations down by the Natick Research and Development Laboratories in Natick, Massachusetts, which handles ration and meal development for the Armed Forces, two cooks can prepare a meal for 100 men in two to three hours from scratch, with additional people needed for clean up. Your Gunners have Kitchen Police duties. Note, in World War 2, Navy cooks typically had assisting the anti-aircraft gun crews as their battle stations, with one cook's assistance winning the Navy Cross at Pearl Harbor for taking over the gun when the gunner did not show up.

You will need three cubic feet of refrigerator and freezer space per man per month for fresh and frozen foods. A cubic meter is slightly over 35 cubic feet, so having enough space for about 12 persons. Having talked with the maitre d' of various cruise ships, the cruise ships always have a two week supply of food onboard in case of having to divert due to hurricanes, following a first-in first-out policy. I would go with having star ships carry a one month supply of food for all crew and potential passengers, following first-in first-out, and replenishing as needed. This would allow for surprises in the course of jumping. If you are on an Agricultural planet, and prices are really cheap for non-perishable items like flour and canned fruits and vegetables, you might want to have room to stock up for a couple of monthw to cut your costs.

There have been some very good run-downs of possible life support costs so far, over and above food.