The first amenity of groundside existence to be abandoned was decent food. 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. He can make morale or foment a mutiny. His power is paramount. Slimeheads remember the H. M. S. _Ajax_ fiasco, for example, in which a galleyman leveled his Chlorella tanks with heavy water from the ship's shielding. Four officers and twenty-one Other Ranks were rescued from the _Ajax_ in deep space, half dead from deuterium poisoning. We think of the _Benjo Maru_ incident, too, caused by a Ship's Cook who allowed his algaeal staff-of-life to become contaminated with a fast-growing _Saccharomycodes_ yeast. 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_. And for a third footnote to the ancient observation, "God sends food, and the Devil sends cooks," Marsmen will recall what happened aboard my ship the _Charles Partlow Sale_.
The _Sale_ blasted off from Brady Station in the middle of August, due in at Piano West in early May. In no special hurry, we were taking the low-energy route to Mars, a pathway about as long in time as the human period of gestation. Our cargo consisted mostly of Tien-Shen fir seedlings and some tons of an arctic grass-seed--these to be planted in the _maria_ to squeeze out the native blue bugberry vines. We had aboard the Registry minimum of six men and three officers. Ship's Surgeon was myself, Paul Vilanova. Our Captain was Willy Winkelmann, the hardest man in space and very likely the fattest. Ship's Cook was Robert Bailey.
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. This isn't just a paragraph from the Spacer Union Contract. It's a statement of the least fuel a man can run on.