 What is the narrator's profession?
It's true that Woman remains a topic of thoughtful study, but discussion can never replace practice in an art. 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. 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. Cooking aboard a spacer is a job combining the more frustrating tensions of biochemistry, applied mycology, high-speed farming, dietetics and sewage engineering. This isn't just a paragraph from the Spacer Union Contract. By allowing a colony of Chlorella algae to work over our used air, water and other effluvia, though, three tons of metabolites would see us through from Brady Station to Piano West and back. Each molecule of oxygen would be conversant with the alveoli of every man aboard by the end of our trip. Though I'm signed aboard as Ship's Surgeon, I seldom lift a knife in space. My employment is more in the nature of TS-card-puncher extraordinary. My duties are to serve as wailing-wall, morale officer, guardian of the medicinal whiskey and frustrator of mutual murder. Generally the man aboard who'd serve as the most popular murder-victim is the Cook. If the Prussians had a Marine Corps, Winkelmann would have done splendidly as Drill Instructor for their boot camp. "You are a spacer and a Ship's Cook, not a suburban Hausfrau with the vapors," Winkelmann said.
 doctor
 astronaut  doctor  sailor  cook