 What was the author's purpose on including a section about Hatcher's feedings?
Whatever it was, he had no business in it; for five minutes before he had been spaceborne, on the Long Jump from Earth to the thriving colonies circling Betelgeuse Nine. How to explain a set of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire? Item, a short time ago—subjectively it seemed to be minutes—he had been aboard the Jodrell Bank with nothing more on his mind than completing his check-sighting and meeting one of the female passengers for coffee. Someone was watching Herrell McCray, with the clinical fascination of a biochemist observing the wigglings of paramecia in a new antibiotic—and with the prayerful emotions of a starving, shipwrecked, sailor, watching the inward bobbing drift of a wave-born cask that may contain food. Suppose you call him "Hatcher" (and suppose you call it a "him.") Hatcher was not exactly male, because his race had no true males; but it did have females and he was certainly not that. Hatcher, like McCray, was an adventurous soul, young, able, well-learned in the technical sciences of his culture. Both enjoyed games—McCray baseball, poker and three-dimensional chess; Hatcher a number of sports which defy human description. Hatcher's principal task at this moment was to run the "probe team" which had McCray under observation, and he was more than a little excited. Hatcher ordered silence, studying the specimen from Earth. Hatcher hurried through the halls of the great buried structure in which he worked, toward the place where the supervising council of all probes would be in permanent session. Hatcher identified himself and gave a quick, concise report: "The subject recovered consciousness a short time ago and began to inspect his enclosure. We've made the place homey for him—" actually, what he said was more like, we've warmed the biophysical nuances of his enclosure —"and tried to guess his needs; and we're frightening him half to death. The council room was like a tableau in a museum until the councillor spoke again, each council member poised over his locus-point, his members drifting about him. It was just like the council to put the screws on; they had a reputation for demanding results at any cost—even at the cost of destroying the only thing you had that would make results possible. Not even Hatcher had quite got over the revolting physical differences between the Earthman and his own people.
 To further elaborate how different Hatcher and his kind are from a human.
 To give insight on Hatcher's personality.  To show that McCray will have to feed like Hatcher if he does not return to Jodrell Bank because there is no human food where he is.  To further elaborate how different Hatcher and his kind are from a human.  To show how grotesque his feeding process is.