 How did Bailey achieve the meal that tasted like barbeque?
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. 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 . Cooking aboard a spacer is a job combining the more frustrating tensions of biochemistry, applied mycology, high-speed farming, dietetics and sewage engineering. It's the Cook's responsibility to see that each man aboard gets each day no less than five pounds of water, two pounds of oxygen, and one-and-a-half pounds of dry food. 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. The algae—dried by the Cook, bleached with methyl alcohol to kill the smell and make the residue more digestible, disguised and seasoned in a hundred ways—served as a sort of meat-and-potatoes that never quite wore out. Bailey tried to feed us by groundside standards. For dessert, he served a fudge compounded from the dextrose-paste of the carbohydrate recycler. How Bailey had constructed those synthetic lettuces I can only guess: the hours spent preparing a green Chlorella paste, rolling and drying and shaping each artificial leaf, the fitting together of nine heads like crisp, three-dimensional jigsaw puzzles. Bailey stared across the dining-cubby toward Winkelmann, silently imploring the Captain's ratification of his masterpiece. You understand me, Belly-Robber?" Bailey, his hands fisted at his sides, nodded.
 He added the Captain's entrails
 He added the Captain's entrails  He allowed the chlorella to ferment longer  He used actual pork products  He added his own refuse