Chapter 176: White Rice In The Paddy Fields
Does Xiang Chuan crave white rice? The answer is yes.
Even though her hometown is known as Rice Noodle Province, Xiang Chuan still maintains the habit of eating at least one bowl of rice every day, and the dishes from her hometown have heavy flavors, especially suitable to go with rice.
She believes that even northerners who enjoy good noodles cannot refuse a bowl of steaming white rice.
Modern crops are of extremely high quality, even beans stored in the botanical garden warehouse for a long time are all plump and full, so even without this visit activity, Xiang Chuan can be 100% sure that modern rice is no worse than those excellent varieties harvested from the black soil of the northeast.
The reason she has been unwilling to mention white rice is soy sauce.
In ancient times, rice was just a food to fill the stomach, and being able to eat a bite of white rice was thanking heaven and earth. By the era she was born in, white rice already required pairing with various dishes. Even if there were only two bowls at home, at least one would be used to make a salted egg steamed meat patty or hibiscus steamed egg.
The existence of dishes to go with rice allows the charm of rice to fully bloom.
And the essential seasoning for most of these dishes is soy sauce.
The soy sauce made by A Bite of China Club has just handed the recipe to Yue Xiang Group for large-scale production, which would take at least a year. Even if all the beans in the botanical garden were bought, how much soy sauce could be brewed? Moreover, a considerable portion of these beans needs to be planted agriculturally, leaving even fewer for brewing.
Whether family members or the gluttons from Class Eight Grade One who frequently raid the kitchen, after tasting the flavor of soy sauce, they all stared at the few vats of soy sauce from A Bite of China Club with glowing red eyes, forcing Xiang Chuan and the others from A Bite of China Club to strictly guard against this group of guys whose noses were even sharper than their ears.
If rice, this ultimate weapon, were brought out at such a time, Xiang Chuan is 100% sure that the information department club members in the class would find every way to crack the password to A Bite of China Club’s warehouse and claim the beef she has been braising these past few days for themselves.
So, cannot say it, absolutely cannot let slip at this time!
Xiang Chuan’s sudden silence instead aroused great interest from the students of Class Eight Grade One and Manager Wu standing on the periphery, but no matter how they begged her, Xiang Chuan absolutely refused to reveal another word.
The students of Class Eight Grade One knew that if Xiang Chuan had made up her mind not to say something, no amount of begging would help, so they returned defeated and began shifting their attention back to rice flower fish.
But Manager Wu is not easy to fool.
As the manager of the Staple Food Department, Wu Hongchang is not only thoroughly familiar with the rice and wheat planting technology of staple food crops, but also understands the relevant existing historical records about staple foods.
In the existing information from the History Research Institute, “rice” is mentioned countless times. Combined with modern commonly used terms like “eat rice” and “breakfast,” the Staple Food Department believes this originates from that word.
But what exactly this “rice” is remains undecided. After all, what is “rice”?
Based on the term “rice,” they speculate it is related to rice, which has the alias big rice, but how it is cooked remains a mystery.
Over time, this topic was shelved for a long time.
Until recently, Yue Xiang Group suddenly opened an eatery and put on the shelves a dazzling array of wheat flour foods, which made Manager Wu sit up abruptly.
His intuition told him: The day the mystery of “rice” is solved is not far away!
Facts prove Manager Wu’s intuition is accurate. The little girl standing in front of him, with a face pretending to be serious, just blurted out “rice,” nearly making Manager Wu jump up in excitement.
Seeing Xiang Chuan like this, Manager Wu naturally knew she had some unspoken difficulty.
Cannot rush, cannot rush. This little girl does not seem like someone who can resist the temptation of gourmet food; she might let it slip anytime.
Manager Wu calmed his overly fast heartbeat and cheerfully returned to the front of the group, leading the first-year high school students to continue visiting the rice paddy.
He felt that their Fourth Production Escort Ship—no, all Production Escort Ships’ Staple Food Departments—would usher in a brand new era—
Next, Manager Wu led the first-year high school students to a relatively small field.
This field was specially prepared for tourists and students visiting the fields. Visitors can pick a few mature rice grains for observation.
The class presidents leading the rice grain picking naturally did not hold back, and in no time, a small half of the rice grains in the small field were picked bare.
Although the number of first-year high school students at Nongda Affiliated High School is not considered large compared to the 60 or 70 students per class in the 21st century, each person only got three or four rice ears.
No doubt, the class presidents deliberately calculated the average number of grains per rice ear, because this is just an observation activity; the rice ears after observation will be collected and preserved for the livestock in animal husbandry as feed.
Giving human staple food to livestock as feed is a wasteful behavior for students whose family members mostly work in agriculture and food-related fields.
Even in the high-yield era 30,000 years later, the good habit of cherishing food is still engraved in everyone’s bones.
Opportunities to contact mature rice are rare, so everyone excitedly took photos or videos with the cameras on their mobile terminals.
Xiang Chuan looked at the four rice ears in her hand, picked up one, rubbed it, and the outer husk quickly fell off under her skilled rubbing, revealing the plump and crystal-clear white rice beneath the husk.
Just as she guessed, modern planting technology is advanced, and the quality and appearance of this rice are top-notch.
Crystal-clear rice grains, with a clear, white, and transparent color. If she is not mistaken, this is very likely the Wuchang rice from that major rice-producing province in the northeast region.
This made her admire the agriculturalists who preserved rice varieties back then: they actually selected the most famous rice at the time.
However, it also made her feel a bit disappointed, because her hometown used to mainly grow silk seedling rice, which did not survive.
Xiang Chuan somewhat irritably rubbed off the husks from the remaining three rice ears.
Looking at the four rice grains lying in her palm, Xiang Chuan was again stirred with some longing for rice.
Cannot eat rice, but chewing rice grains works too!
Xiang Chuan directly tossed the four rice grains into her mouth, startling Ouyang Yating and the others who had been watching her little actions.
They were not worried about pesticides or such; modern advanced planting technology no longer relies on outdated drugs like pesticides. The Agriculture Department has improved water quality, soil, fertilizer, and other technologies, all directly converted by material conversion technology, so the soil does not contain insects or excess bacteria.
Plus, insects and animals are strictly controlled by the nature reserve and do not appear in farmland, so naturally no pesticides are needed.
Therefore, modern vegetables, fruits, and rice grains can achieve the “pesticide-free green planting, rinse and eat” promoted by those green farms in the 21st century.
The reason the three were startled was that no one had ever thought of directly eating unprocessed rice ears!
Xiang Chuan: This rice has quite a texture when chewed; if I had known, I would have had the class president pick a few more handfuls.
