ThinksMarkedly wrote:Relax wrote:Uh, Honor in early books complains about Hydroponics reports. Hydroponics section on the ship is growing FRESH food...
So, No, they have not figured out how to keep food tasting fresh with perfect nutrition in the Honorverses time. If that was the case, there would not be a hydroponics section onboard a spaceship.
Actually, no, this doesn't imply that they cook the fresh food. Hydroponics is growing foodstuff, sure, but how that is processed into meals is an unknown factor. They still need biomass to make food somehow and the HV doesn't seem to have perfected the technique of creating food from C, H, O, N, P and other substrate atoms. Complex organic chains are still required.
However, I'm neither saying that they simply process the biomass into a fine paste and make meals from that. There's a psychological effect here and keeping the crew fed with fresh food may help with crew morale. There's a lot of grey area in-between.
Aboard ships, crew members don't cook for themselves and there are no individual kitchens. That's what stewards are for. Maybe some of the highest-ranked officers aboard (CO and flag) have dedicated areas for themselves, all others share pantries and food preparation areas ("kitchens"), according to rank.
Pretty sure same passage talks about Hydroponics techs. Today we are getting more and more machines which automatically pick fruit for instance. I see zero reason this would stop as it is pretty much algorithms for a computer to determine was is a ripe fruit/vegetable and what is not.
Yes, food has to be processed. Today most food is processed in machines when in large restaurants or big facilities for distribution. The only exception are fresh salads and even that uses machines in processing facilities, so I see zero reason why this would be any different in the future. This aspect of the HV also has to do with the great resizing. It was around this time the books completely dropped any mention of hydroponics as all the ships drastically reduced in Volume.