Wealthy people sometimes choose to eat "real" food but it is VERY costly. There are high end ag businesses that cater to these wealthy.
It's a valid view of the future and in many senses, one that is very Traveller considering it's very 1960s sci-fi based. During that period, it was commonly supposed that all foods would be made from basic nutritional stocks that is then colored, textured, and flavored.
I believe that pretty much all survival food would be of this variety. A lot of cheaper foodstuffs would be of this variety as well, perhaps filling much of the "fast food" niche as well as food for the lower classes.
However, I choose to believe that people in the far future, like people today, actually prefer to eat "real food." This would be fed by snobbery in the middle classes (to differentiate themselves from the lower classes) and a desire to ape their social betters. In addition, since the dire predictions of the 1960s and 1970s, the ability of agriculture to produce fresh foods for humans has increased. With the addition of cheap fusion and anti-grav, I envision vast networks of orbital farms, where conditions can be controlled precisely and many factors that make agriculture less productive on planetary surfaces could be eliminated (weather, pests, seasons, etc.); monocultures are not a bad thing when there's literally no parasites or diseases to infect fish/crops/beef/whatever. Terrestrial farming IMTU has completely collapsed on most worlds of TL12 because orbital farms are so much more productive and cheaper after their high set-up costs (and can be kept in use for centuries to pay off their capital invest costs due to the Imperium's reliable / overbuilt Vilani technology).
To liven up these tables even further, there's regional specialties. These being foods that are exported over parsecs yet are sold at prices that are not beyond the reach the middle class (due to economies of mass demand) and are a valid driver of an interstellar economy. The Third Imperium would deliberately foster such marketing to help create the network of trade interdependence that holds the Imperium together. Of course, the rich would want even more exclusive products to differentiate themselves from the middle class. This would also explain part of what these low-tech worlds are exporting to the rest of the Imperium that isn't just ores and so on (which you'd think would be exhausted by about 1100).
To get all these products to market requires increasingly advanced food preservation. I've never really thought about it in terms of costs like Rancke desires, but only in broad strokes. I figure that Imperial food preservation actually happens in three "branches":
Reconstitution, Preservation Chemicals, and Preservation Fields. I won't get into Reconstitution since it isn't really food preservation but food creation.
Preservation Chemicals
TL9 introduces the insanity an item whose implications are poorly explored in Traveller: The Fast Drug. It's probably only going to take a few days for someone in the food preservation industry to realize the benefits of the Fast Drug in food preservation. In fact, it's likely that the Fast Drug is a human-safe derivative of a chemical used in for food preservation.
You don't need to go through the huge expense and unavoidable side-effects of sterilization of foodstuffs if you can just prevent the microorganisms from doing anything. It's better than killing them because if you kill them, other chemical reactions occur. They've tried this with refrigeration and freezing for years. Derivatives of the Fast Drug let you do this at whatever temperature you desire. You're not really concerned if the microorganisms are safe and happy with these preservation Fast Drugs; you just want them to stop from doing anything for as long as possible with as little alteration of the desirable qualities of the food, and you want it to be safe for humans.
At TL9, I'd imagine the process is already pretty cheap, however the method of delivery of the chemicals (probably soaking in a bath) and the nature of the chemicals probably do leave a characteristic odor or alteration of the qualities of the preserved item. It's not as bad as freezing, and it keeps for months, however.
TL10-11, The delivery methods become better so it's cheaper. There's slight improvements to the chemicals, mostly involving the cost.
TL11-12, The chemicals begin to break down into (hopefully) non-reactive compounds as they're used up. The flavors of the chemicals become much less pronounced and the delivery systems mature so that they're less intrusive.
TL13-14, The Preservation Field comes into use. This does not actually destroy the Chemical market until TL15. Until then, they work hand-in-hand for the long-term preservation of foodstuffs. By TL14, the technology is fully matured with a variety of chemicals that can be tailored for effect; packagers choose the suite of chemicals that have the least effect on the foodstuff while keeping it preserved for the desired period time. It might be possible to put in a kind of Fast Drug that is totally unreactive with the human body (as well as our flora) into something like whole milk, so that it can be preserved at room temperature in sealed containers for decades with no effect on the taste.
Preservation Fields
I've always imagined around TL13 you have people who start to look into other applications ... Nuclear Damper technology. No seriously, Nuclear Damper technology. It's invented at TL12, so by TL13 I'd imagine it's mature (and cheap enough) so that interested parties can get the proper paperwork to have their own Nuclear Dampers to tinker with. There's a lot of implied science regarding mastering of subatomic and atomic forces that goes into Nuclear Dampers. I figure some of that would be applicable to food preservation, creating a field tailored to greatly retarding the atomic processes that go into enzyme action (which along with micro-organisms are the two pillars of food decay). Of course, it's also quite effective at turning living things into dead things (by blocking basic atomic interactions necessary for life) so be careful.
Unlike Preservation Chemicals, it has the marketing advantage of being "non-physically intrusive" and can be claimed to "leave no residues behind." Of course, some people still don't like it because they don't like "lethal radiation" in their foods.
At TL13, it's probably experimental and stupidly expensive so only the rich would have access to it. It'd be heavy, be a fairly large drain on the power plant, and it's suppression effect wouldn't be great. With a foodstuff in great enough demand, it might actually make Jump-2 Far Traders economical to run - you need to get the stuff to the destination as quickly as possible and the money return might be good enough with luxury foods to warrant it.
By TL14 the cost comes down, it becomes a lot more reliable, and the suppression effect is much more effective. It might get built into a standard-dimension shipping container (fed off of a ship's fusion reactor). It'd probably preserve things at a very fresh level for months on end.
TL15 all of the important parameters continue to improve, but now it can keep things effectively indefinitely provided a trickle of power is fed to the device.
Somewhere down the road perhaps this technology will replace Low Berths as actual biological stasis might be possible, I put this beyond the standard Tech Tree, simply because Low Berths are part of Traveller.
