A few days ago on the Facebook we had an interesting duscussion about the space foods. If you have good ideas about the space cooking techniques, best ingredients, solutions to the problems, please write them here.

The main problems:

~ The flavour of the foods is not the same in the space than on the Earth because of the microgravity.

~ We have to avoid the strong odors.

~ The steam and heat is dangerous in a closed space station

~ Easier to produce artificial and labfood in the space than fresh foods.

~ The meat production requires too much energy, oxygen, water and minerals, so better to think about just alternatives or a few labmeat to decorate the food (like sushi).

~ In microgravity we cannot use plate, bowl, spoon, fork and knife well.:)

Via centrafugal force, gravity can be easily replicated. This would also be essential for mitigating various health concerns with microgravity. It's almost assuredly going to feature in anything that has anything more than a temporary, short term habitation. Ships that are to travel vast distances or for long periods of time are likely to have gravity and microgravity areas.

It was my understanding food tasted different due to microgravity impacting oder dispersal, so surely strong oders would have the largest chance of retaining their "orginal" taste?

Heat should be dealt with from the environmental heat exchangers, as part of the normal life support operations. Steam is able to be dealt with - if you know you're going to make it, an extractor can pump that into a condensor in order to recover the water as it drains it of heat.

Before we've any sensible hope of having a population in space, we would require first to supply it with food and other essentials. Thusly it would make sense to first establish supply chains before habitation, and thusly orbital farms. Considering the amount of space in between the Earth and the moon, or even just the other side of the moon, containing sunlight that doesn't hit the Earth, it should be possible to establish more than enough orbital farms to supply us, and the Earth, and agricultural livestock.

In microgravity traditional instruments are not as easy to utilise, but not entirely useless. You can also take advantage of friction of viscous fluids creating surface adhesion, for sticking foods to bowls etc.