Making Pasta
"What kind of pasta do you feel like, Hana?"
"Tomato!"
I already knew how good tomato pasta was, so that was what I told Maru, and she went straight to the kitchen to hunt down the tomato sauce. The place was stocked with absolutely everything—so thoroughly that it called to mind the magic pocket on that robot from some anime.
"Want to make it together, Hana?"
"Yeah!"
Lolling around my room while I made Maru do all the cooking didn't sit right with me, so I stayed at her side and helped. Anywhere a flame might reach was strictly forbidden, of course—Maru had banned me from going near it—which meant all I could really do was fetch ingredients and hand over the various tools.
"Hana, could you bring me the pasta?"
She asked with an apron on, and she looked good in anything she wore. Come to think of it, I didn't think I'd seen a single plain-looking woman among the staff who worked in this office. Do they hire people based on their faces?
I scurried off, brought the pasta back, and handed it over. Maru opened the package and dropped the noodles into a pot of water at a rolling boil, and steam curled up in soft wisps.
I dragged a chair over, climbed onto it, and watched how pasta was made. The method was simple enough: put the noodles in boiling water, cook them through, drain them, and toss them with sauce. In a way it was as easy as instant ramen—practically a convenience food.
At a pasta place every single plate was outrageously expensive, but if you made it yourself, would one serving even come to three dollars? Order a single pasta at a restaurant and twenty or thirty dollars was the baseline. There was a difference in quality, of course, but having it at home now and then didn't seem half bad.
"Hana, hop down for a second."
Maru was about to dump the hot water, so I climbed off the chair and waited. If I slipped and got a pot of boiling water poured over me, I'd brown up and cook through just like the pasta.
She drained the water, tossed the noodles with tomato sauce, and the moment the pasta was finished a cry of delight burst out of me.
"Whoa!"
Coated in tomato sauce, it looked so good that the sight alone made my mouth water. Maru seemed pleased with her own cooking too. She broke into a bright smile and portioned the noodles onto separate plates. We could have eaten straight from the pot, but that wouldn't have set the mood at all.
"Have plenty, Hana."
She gave my plate a bigger helping than her own, and I was touched by the consideration. Well, of course—I was still growing, so it only made sense that I should eat more! I twirled the tomato pasta she'd made around my fork and popped a bite into my mouth.
"It's delicious!!!"
I said it to her with my eyes wide. The flavor was every bit as alive as something from a restaurant. The noodles were perfectly chewy, cooked just right, and the tomato sauce married with them into something downright magical.
Making it ourselves now and then, instead of going out, seemed like a fine choice. Of course, it wasn't me doing the hard work—it was Maru—so we couldn't do it too often.
I wanted to try cooking myself sometime! But the moment I so much as picked up a plastic knife they made a huge fuss and stopped me, so until I got a little older, actually cooking looked like a distant dream.
"Starlight Food already has the rice ready?"
The moment Section Chief Lee Hangyu heard that Starlight Food had rice prepared, he rounded up his staff and headed for the farm. He'd heard in passing that the crops they grew matured at an almost unnatural speed, but he hadn't imagined it would be this fast.
They hurried out, and a spectacular sight opened before them. Rice heavy with grain stretched on without end, and off to the side the farmers worked with bright faces. Not by hand, of course—they farmed with the help of agricultural machinery. Modern farming was mostly machines; very little of it still passed through human hands.
"You've already harvested this much?"
"I know. With the flooding all over the country, I heard there was no way to get rice at all, and yet they've managed to grow this much..."
Inside the vast warehouse, one-ton bulk bags for grain were stacked to the brim. Just the thought of all that unmilled rice piled so high drew a sigh of relief out of him. At the very least, he wouldn't have to take a public beating for failing to manage the rice supply.
With this much grain, they could easily hold out until the imports arrived. The households whose crops had been ruined had already received ample subsidies, so they would be able to resume farming properly next year. Then they could harvest rice normally again, and before long the warehouses would be filled once more with domestic grain.
In the end, the disaster had turned into a blessing in disguise. They'd cleared out the old rice all at once and could store fresh grain in its place. A typhoon that powerful had better not come again, of course. If another one like it struck, even Starlight Food wouldn't be able to handle the rice crisis that followed.
"Is the president not here?"
"No. She had a special engagement today and couldn't attend, so I'm afraid I'll have to explain in her place."
President Kim Sehee hadn't come out today because she was busy. That "business" consisted of meeting Hana and fussing over her, playing around together. The employee saw no need to tell the people from the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs any of that. There was simply no reason to.
While the Starlight Food staff and Section Chief Lee Hangyu from the ministry were still talking, forklifts rolled into the warehouse and began loading grain bags packed with rice onto trucks.
"I never heard that Starlight Food was such a large agricultural company. Looking at this scale, you might as well call it the biggest agribusiness in the country."
"That's right. It's the result of Chairman Kim Sehee expanding the company's investment. Lately our headcount has grown several dozen times over, and revenue has increased several hundredfold."
"That's truly remarkable."
Even for a company under the Starlight Guild, multiplying revenue several hundred times over was no easy feat. A firm that didn't even clear a hundred thousand dollars a year might shoot up like that if timing and luck lined up, but Starlight Food was already doing tens of millions in annual sales.
For a company like that to post several hundred times the revenue in less than a year was staggering enough to make a person think of cooked books. They weren't breaking any laws, of course, but the growth was so extraordinary that nothing else could properly explain it.
"Chief, we took a few of the ton-bags as samples and ran a check. They're excellent—plump, thick grains. Fresh rice you could eat the moment it's milled."
"Really? It's a genuine relief the quality isn't poor. Growing this fast, I was worried it would be the opposite."
By now the Starlight Food employees had gone, and Section Chief Lee Hangyu and his staff were looking around the warehouse on their own. They had to be confident, to leave an inspection unescorted all the way to the end. He held no ill will toward Starlight Food, so he had no intention of nitpicking—just a look around, and then he'd leave. There was nothing to be gained from picking a fight with them.
The tour confirmed it. The production process was sound, and so was the storage; there wasn't a single thing to fault. The warehouse itself gleamed, perhaps because it hadn't been standing long. No corrosion from age, no insects—nothing of the sort.
Even as they looked around, the forklifts kept busily shifting the ton-bags. Trucks loaded full pulled out one after another, each bound for its own destination, and the process never stopped. It was systematic and mechanical enough to call American corporate agriculture to mind.
"This... we may end up owing them another favor down the line, Chief."
Seeing how Starlight Food farmed, Lee Hangyu felt a knot of tension himself. If they could grow rice of this quality at such speed, farmers across the country might raise an outcry. Should Starlight Food keep expanding its farmland, the nation's rice might end up dependent on them.
Of course, Section Chief Lee Hangyu could only think that because he didn't know about the Twenty-Kilometer Rule. Had he known, he would have breathed something of a sigh of relief. At the very least, Starlight Food's rice would never blanket the entire country.
Even so, some degree of the market being eaten away by Starlight Food's rice was something they would simply have to accept.