 What does the narrator seem to think makes a good cook on a spacer?
] This was the endless problem of all spaceship cooks: He had to feed the men tomorrow on what they had eaten today! Food, on the other hand, is a challenge shipmen face three times a day, so central to their thoughts that a history of sea-faring can be read from a commissary list. Should any groundsman dispute the importance of belly-furniture in history—whether it be exterminating whales, or introducing syphilis to the Fiji Islanders, or settling the Australian littoral with cross-coves from Middlesex and Hampshire—he is referred to the hundred-and-first chapter of Moby Dick , a book spooled in the amusement tanks of all but the smallest spacers. I trust, however, that no Marsman will undertake to review this inventory of refreshment more than a week from groundfall. A catalogue of sides of beef and heads of Leyden cheese and ankers of good Geneva would prove heavy reading for a man condemned to snack on the Chlorella-spawn of cis-Martian space. Nimitz's men won their war on canned pork and beans. The Triton made her underwater periplus of Earth with a galley stocked with frozen pizza and concentrated apple-juice. The earliest men into the vacuum swallowed protein squeezings from aluminum tubes, and were glad enough to drop back to the groundsman's diet of steak and fried potatoes. Long before I was a boy in Med School, itching to look at black sky through a view-port, galley science had fulfilled the disgusting exordium of Isaiah 36:12, to feed the Slimeheads for breakfast today what was day-before-yesterday's table-scraps and jakes-water. The Ship's Cook, the man who accomplishes the daily miracle of turning offal into eatables, is in many ways the most vital man aboard a spacer. The Japanese vessel staggered to her pad at Piano West after a twenty-week drunk: the alien yeast had got into the stomach of every man aboard, where it fermented each subsequent bite he ate to a superior grade of sake .
 They are willing to be creative in addition to an attention to detail
 Someone who can get food out as fast and as consistently as possible  They can bring people together in conversations about food  They are willing to be creative in addition to an attention to detail  They are able to make meals to help the crewmates lose weight