The Alliance has a large population of people who rarely if ever set foot on a planetary surface. There are even more who travel so extensively they spend large amounts of time in space. This includes merchant crew, asteroid miners, active-duty Patrol personnel, people who live on orbital or deep-space habitats, and a hundred other professions or living situations. While long-term habitats, including larger starships, can afford the space for a good hydroponics or airponics setup, it simply isn’t practical for most people to have self-sustaining farms on board their starship or habitat.
So what do they eat? “Food” is the obvious answer, but not terribly helpful.
Short-term foodstuffs on smaller ships are simply carried as cargo. Alliance food preservation technology is advanced enough that properly prepared food can keep indefinitely. In some cases, “indefinitely” isn’t just a sales pitch, it’s an admission that the technique is new enough and its shelf life long enough that nobody actually knows how long it will keep beyond “yep, it’s still good.” Food science has progressed far enough that emergency or military rations can be quite compact. They haven’t quite figured out how to cram a full day’s worth of nutrition into a pill, but some of the better examples can feed a human for a day on a package the size of a big candy bar. Combine these, and a decent amount of food can be crammed into a conveniently small container.
Any Alliance starship intended for long-term occupancy will include a life sustainer capable of not just recycling air indefinitely, but also process organic waste into edible food. Most spacers consider use of the term “food” quite liberal in this case. What comes out of the food processor is a cake of bland, crumbly, dry nutrient mix. It will sustain a creature of the species for which it was produced (a setting on the system allows multi-species support; it’s mostly software), but the baseline isn’t terribly appetizing. Depending on how the system is set, these ration cakes can have a shelf life anywhere from several days to a few decades; they trade flavor for longer storage.
Better models and after-market attachments will add flavorings and improve the texture, and some top-end units will produce “food” that will almost pass for actual food. Even the best systems will only make something on par with low-quality instant meals though. In this case, “low quality” means dollar store grade.
While people do get used to eating it, and some spacers even grow to enjoy it, most people supplement it heavily with other food. If they’re lucky, this supplementation consists largely of someone effectively treating it like tofu by cooking it with seasonings, freeze-dried meat and vegetables, and maybe a sauce. Any ship’s cook worth his salt knows how to modify the output settings to produce something like dough and make it into noodles. If they aren’t lucky, it means a hearty meal of 80-90% ration cake (maybe flavored and seasoned properly) with a small side of something else. Another common trick is to crumble up half a serving of ration cake and add it to a half portion of a better-tasting meal to stretch it without sacrificing too much flavor and texture; almost every spacer knows to keep a few jars of soup base powder handy for exactly this reason.
One of the first things any starship crew will do upon embarking at a port is send someone out with a grocery list. Supplying starship crews with supplemental foodstuffs is a major trade in any starport that sees any but the lightest interplanetary traffic. The array of food available is amazing in larger starports, with some foodstuffs coming from the other end of the Alliance; exotic foods are a thriving trade across the explored portion of the Triangulum Galaxy. Ship’s cooks and other supply personnel will often place an order with a bulk supplier as soon as they defold so they can have a shipping container waiting for them. They’ll also go out in person (usually with a few assistants for the heavy lifting) to hit the exotic grocers, traders, liquor stores, and similar places of business.
The bulk food stores are thoroughly inspected before being taken on board. Because the container will be accessible from within the ship, it’s a favorite hiding spot for stowaways and nefarious cargoes the crew wants nothing to do with. It’s also a favorite hiding spot for nefarious cargoes the supply department absolutely wants something to do with.
Luckily for these supply chain specialists, ration cakes are an accepted bulk good on most planets. Even on relatively civilized worlds people like them for emergency supplies, while frontier world homesteaders buy them as a staple to stretch their other food stocks or in case of disaster. Because of this, most supply chain personnel will have the system produce dense, near-flavorless bricks that will last decades, switching to more palatable as needed. They can then trade these bricks to bulk suppliers, who in turn have plenty of customers looking for a bland, flexible foodstuff that could potentially outlive them on a shelf at room temperature.
Some small starships outfitted for long voyages have aquaria installed on them. These aquaria contain small fish, crustaceans, and other fast-breeding edible species along with aquatic plants to keep the fish themselves fed. The ready supply of fish and edible seaweed can go a long way toward staving off boredom once the stockpile of more palatable preserved food runs out and the crew are back to eating ration cakes from the life support system.
A common meal for crews of such ships is the “spaceman po’boy.” Flour, yeast, and salt all keep nearly forever, so fresh bread is readily available aboard ship. Most crews have a pretty nice stash of condiments, so those are covered, and the aquarium supplies the rest. A typical spaceman po’boy is a fresh-baked hoagie roll, a scoop of fresh steamed or boiled shrimp or similar sea bug from the aquarium, and whatever condiments they have at hand. When available, they add some greenery like lettuce, onions, or thinly sliced radishes. Small hydroponics setups are also a semi-standard feature on ships like these to allow a small crop of salad and sandwich fixings.
Other common additions are small rodent habitats for similar reasons. Such creatures being scavengers, they are quite capable of surviving and in fact thriving on ration cakes, especially if the ship’s cook tweaks the settings for their biologies. Lizards are another common form of livestock; some people really like a nice lizard burger.