Chapter 201: The Concept Of Green Food
Wow!
Hearing this from Manager Heer, the students from Nongda Affiliated High School instantly had their eyes light up, especially the gluttons from Class Eight Grade One, who looked at the bright red tomatoes hanging in the field with eyes full of hunger. It was as if as soon as Manager Heer gave the order, they could rush over immediately and each grab a tomato to eat from both sides.
Manager Heer lived up to her role as manager; she quickly recovered from the taste impact brought by the tomato. She glanced around and saw the students sitting on the floating platform nearby, each with eyes gleaming. Did their expressions even need explaining what they were thinking?
She looked at the tomato field in front of her.
This field had a bountiful harvest this year, with tomatoes covering the ground in bright red, very enticing, and an impressive fruit hanging rate. Soon the AI-operated harvester would come and could harvest a whole container of large tomatoes without issue.
Logically speaking, letting the students pick some to taste fresh wouldn’t be a problem, but… who could guarantee they would be satisfied with just one tomato?
Manager Heer looked at the tomato in her hand, then at the students around her who were frantically swallowing their saliva, and unhesitatingly announced—
“Alright, we’ve finished visiting the tomato field. Next, let’s go see the cucumbers!”
How could this be—!
Amid the students’ chorus of wails, Manager Heer unhesitatingly used her authority to operate the floating platform to make the students follow, leaving them no room whatsoever.
At this moment, Xiang Chuan was quietly nibbling on the second tomato she had stealthily picked when Manager Heer wasn’t paying attention. Of course, her little action was immediately discovered by Ouyang Yating and the other two, but they didn’t make a fuss. Ainuo quietly took out a mini compressed laser cutter, cut the tomato that Xiang Chuan had bitten in half—the part Xiang Chuan had bitten went to her, and the remaining part was shared by the three A Bite of China Club members and the Class Eight Grade One crowd who came over sniffing the aroma.
After swallowing a small piece of tomato, the Class Eight Grade One crowd looked back at the tomato field behind them with even hotter gazes.
In response, Xiang Chuan finally couldn’t hold back and voiced what was on her mind: “If you all want to eat tomatoes so badly, can’t you just have the AI at home or go to the market yourselves to buy a few after going home?”
Modern food preservation technology and material conversion technology were what allowed the Twelfth Fleet to supply the average population consumption over thirty thousand years. Even from the production escort ship reduction draft, agricultural production capacity might even be in a state of surplus.
It shouldn’t be hard to even buy a tomato.
“You don’t get it! Tomatoes bought from the market don’t taste as good as ones picked fresh on the spot! Whether it’s chicken, fish, green vegetables, or tomatoes, they’re always better when cooked immediately after processing!”
Cultural Committee Member Mandy looked at Xiang Chuan with the eyes of someone gazing at an ignorant young person.
Class President Lu Daiqing, Labor Committee Member Fu Chengkai, and the other boys nodded in agreement nearby.
“Oh, so you guys like agritainment and green food stuff like that?” Xiang Chuan endured it for half a day before managing not to roll her eyes at him.
Tch, wasn’t this just the green food concept that 21st century people loved to pursue? Things like reclaiming land in the countryside or setting up sheds on rooftops to grow vegetables—she had seen plenty of that on short videos back when she was a corporate slave.
To be honest, it was healthy, sure, but way too unsuitable for corporate slaves. Corporate slaves either did 996 or 007, with an average of one rest day per week or even none, spending more time at the company than at home. Sometimes before deadlines, plenty of people just lived at the company outright. Where would they find time to tend to these vegetables? So most just honestly bought them from the market.
Only middle-aged and elderly people who had achieved time freedom and a certain degree of financial freedom would enjoy tinkering with that stuff—those with means grew their own, and those without occasionally went to the suburbs’ countryside for a few days to eat free-range chicken or vegetables grown by farm families themselves.
Originally, she thought that with biotechnology developed to the point of completely eliminating pests and pesticides in the modern era, residents shouldn’t think there was any difference between vegetables in the fields and those on market shelves, but unexpectedly, her own class had so many young people who championed the green vegetables concept.
Maybe it was that things nurtured by the land had a natural attraction to humans?
“Green food? What is that?”
Ainuo voiced the biggest doubt in everyone’s minds.
Hearing the new term, the Class Eight Grade One crowd gathered near the floating platform where the four A Bite of China Club members were, afraid to miss Xiang Chuan’s ancient knowledge mini-lesson.
“Just to be clear, this is just my general understanding, not a formal explanation.”
Xiang Chuan skillfully uttered this disclaimer she had already gotten a bit tired of repeating lately.
Mainly because, as Xiang Chuan pulled out more and more recipes and film and TV dramas, the probing questions from those around her had entered territories she couldn’t comprehend. For example, this morning during congee, Manager Wu’s question about the effects of congee water had almost hit Xiang Chuan’s knowledge blind spot.
What effects could congee have? Easy to digest, suitable for patients when sick—that was the extent of Xiang Chuan’s cognition about congee’s effects.
As a native 21st century corporate slave, how would she know all those whys and wherefores? Even if Geegle on her terminal knew, she couldn’t just pull out her terminal in public and search it up directly, right? That would probably have the information turbulence processing office coming to arrest her that very day, and her rest of her life would be confined to the government-designated plot of land. She wanted to lie flat, sure, but that didn’t mean she was willing to sacrifice her freedom.
So now, when explaining things sometimes based only on Xiang Chuan’s superficial cognition, she would add this phrase to layer on some protection.
Of course, those asking her wouldn’t mind Xiang Chuan’s shallow cognition of ancient knowledge too much. After all, with such a long time gap, Xiang Chuan had only come into contact with parts related to food and entertainment, not to mention she was just a student. Even if they later got the ancient information texts Xiang Chuan provided, issues involving ancient chemistry or physics professional knowledge would require adults like Xiang Weiguo and Manager Wu a long time to figure out. If even knowledgeable adults were like that, then Xiang Chuan, directly facing one ancient recipe after another, could only know the what without knowing the why.
After layering on the protection, Xiang Chuan began explaining the content and rise of green food and agritainment.
In her impression, the rise of agritainment was inseparable from urban development. During the period when car engines often belched black smoke, urban air pollution drove many wealthy city dwellers to the countryside to breathe fresh air.
Later, with agricultural development, to expand planting area and increase yields, many common everyday vegetables and staple foods started using pesticides and chemical fertilizers. This made dishes on people’s dining tables more abundant while also stimulating the pursuit of higher-quality diets.
Some people chose higher-end restaurants, pursuing expensive dishes only the rich could afford, while others went the opposite way. At that time, a notion emerged: natural is the most expensive.
So where were those natural vegetables and grains? Of course, in the countryside!
As more people went to the countryside to eat, farm families emerged in rural areas specifically to host city folk.
The market sniffed out the business opportunity and began successively launching various so-called “pesticide-free, fertilizer-free grown” green foods, priced higher than ordinary mechanized planting vegetables and staple grains.
“But logically, vegetables grown with fertilizer should be the more reasonable and efficient planting method, right? Why didn’t the ancient people back then look favorably on it?”
Qing Ke, sitting right next to Cultural Committee Member Mandy, raised her hand and asked.
“From our modern perspective, fertilizer is definitely better, because our fertilizer is actually completely converted from bio-fertilizer—harmless, preserves soil fertility, and maximizes the inherent flavor of fruits and vegetables.”
Xiang Chuan said, leaning on the edge of the floating platform, looking at the surrounding fields full of plump fruit, thinking that if her parents, who had farmed their whole lives, saw this scene, they would probably be moved to tears.
“But ancient chemical fertilizers were literal chemical fertilizers, using synthetically produced ones. Although they promoted fruit and vegetable growth, they had a certain impact on their inherent flavor—just like—” She shook the tomato in her hand that she hadn’t finished eating. “Take this tomato as an example: if grown with ancient chemical fertilizer, it might still look plump and red on the outside, but the taste would be greatly discounted. Based on the ancient records I’ve seen, I can boldly speculate that at that time, whether in aroma or sweet-sour flavor, the tomatoes had less than half the taste of what we have now.”
This wasn’t speculation, but Xiang Chuan’s actual experience—of course, she could never say that aloud. After all, modern agriculture was so advanced; where could she find 21st century fertilizer-boosted tomatoes to prove the taste difference between the two?
Even so, just Xiang Chuan’s subjective speculation on the flavor comparison between ancient and modern mainstream vegetables was an eye-opener for the first-year high school students, refreshing their cognition of ancient times once again.
Originally, from the ancient gourmet foods Xiang Chuan had shown one by one, ancient food culture seemed very rich, which definitely meant they, like now, were in a peaceful era without food shortages. Who would have thought they faced such a “dire straits” predicament.
Fortunately, the agricultural scientists who led the Twelfth Fleet had left data and samples of bio-fertilizer. Fortunately, these precious data and samples survived the Dark Virus Crisis. Fortunately, there was the great scientists’ invention of material conversion technology, allowing them thirty thousand years later, even with gourmet food culture almost completely lost, to still eat the original flavor fruits and vegetables that ancient people coveted.
Xiang Chuan felt the same gratitude as them, because modern food had already become so unpalatable that if even the raw material vegetables and staple grains were disappointing in taste, she would really consider reopening the issue.
The protagonists in novels who transmigrated to ancient times could choose to trek far into forests or other areas to find crop seeds, but her fleet had flown away from Earth for twenty thousand years—where could she find wild crops?
Nature reserve? Forget it; every weed inside was probably under the fleet’s control. What could she find there? Finding a few wild vegetables like during the previous field training would already be a big harvest.
