The Fireworks Party!
"Nom! Nom!"
With several barbecue grills going at once, I wandered from one to the next, cadging meat wherever I went. The staff seemed quietly hopeful that I would stop by; every time I arrived, a heap of freshly grilled meat was already waiting. I made the rounds until I found myself back where Bora was, my stomach on the verge of bursting.
I had simply eaten far too much. Never in my life had I tasted beef so springy, so good. I couldn't help marveling at how anyone selling meat like this had raised their cattle to draw out a flavor this astonishing.
The employees were just as stunned, and that was saying something. They had already sampled the foods I made, so their standards for delicious sat higher than most people's. Honestly, the staff working the office on my floor probably ate better day to day than anyone else at Starlight Foods.
Maru had told me that out in the entertainment world, the strawberries I grew were so scarce people couldn't get them even when they wanted to. Rumor had it that a girl group who treated weight management like a matter of life and death had taken one taste of my strawberries, abandoned their diets entirely, and finished every last one.
"Is this that beef everyone's been raving about lately? It's seriously delicious."
"They say it's from cattle fed on the rice straw Starlight Foods sells. I knew it. There's not a single thing our Hana makes that's worth throwing away. Look at this. If they hadn't fed it straw from Starlight Foods, this would've been perfectly ordinary beef."
"The Choi Ranch people were so grateful they sold us a whole cow at a discount. It's that special beef you can't even buy these days, no matter how hard you try. I hear beef shops all over the country are beside themselves, desperate to get cattle from Choi Ranch."
The media loved to advertise beef with beautiful marbling and a tender bite, but when ordinary people actually sat down to eat it, the meat was rarely special enough for them to taste any subtle difference. More than a few finished the meal, glanced at the receipt, and regretted every bite. This beef was different. It was different from the moment it hit the grill—the juices welled and bubbled over the meat until they nearly spilled.
Drop a piece into your mouth and you barely had to chew. It melted away like ice cream. Beef was supposed to have a little chew to it. This didn't.
"Yahoo!"
Once I had eaten until my belly was drum-tight, a pleasant drowsiness settled over me. Even so, I couldn't miss the highlight of the festival. On any ordinary day I would have told Maru I was sleepy and gone straight to bed.
I watched them prepare to set off the fireworks. Everyone else seemed to have had their fill of meat as well; they chatted among themselves while helping with the setup. Nestled in Maru's arms, I grew more restless by the second, wishing the fireworks would burst already.
"It's starting, Hana!"
The setup looked finished. One of the men from the office touched a flame to the fuse, and the fireworks began to go off. I couldn't help gasping at the blossoms they stitched across the sky.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
I tipped my head back. Fireworks of every color exploded overhead, and the shower of light was a feast for the eyes. Around me, people were filming the spectacle on their phones. I simply stayed in Maru's arms and watched them bloom.
"Hana, look at this!"
Maru brought me a firework of my own. Shaped like a pair of chopsticks, it caught from the bottom once lit and burned slowly upward, glittering as it went. I waved it this way and that, and wherever I swung it the sparkler traced a bright arc through the dark, spraying light the way children do when they whirl fire in the old midwinter games.
After the last firework had gone off, the afterglow lingered with me. To think I could watch a display this beautiful with my own eyes! Of course it wasn't on the scale of a government festival, with fireworks bursting by the hundred. This was only something the company had put on, after all.
Even so, they had bought plenty and prepared with care, and the quality seemed better than the fireworks at most events. A sharp smell of gunpowder hung thick over the ground—the aftermath of the show.
Once everything was over, I got to exercise a child's privilege: skipping the cleanup and heading straight home. No one even thought of stopping me. They probably hadn't considered putting me to work in the first place, because I wasn't an adult. I was a child.
In moments like this, being a kid was wonderful. I went home smiling. Maru came up with me and didn't have to work either, all thanks to me. How good was that?
"Father! Look at this!"
The son of Choi Ranch spoke as he took in the rice straw piled high before them. The straw from Starlight Foods had worked so well that they'd had no choice but to order a year's supply. Word was already spreading, little by little, about what the straw could do, so they had taken delivery of a full year's worth before competition drove the price up.
Choi Ranch ranked among the larger operations in the country, and the sight of wrapped silage bales stacked across those wide fields was nothing short of spectacular. Anyone looking at them might have thought someone had piled up hundreds of giant marshmallows. It was striking enough that cars passing on the road would pull over now and then just to photograph the ranch's fields.
Chances to see silage bales stacked that tightly were rare. Most places spread them out, each bale set well apart from the next.
"Look at all this straw piled up. I feel full just seeing it!"
Choi Ranch's father cried out in delight at the sight. He didn't need to tear open every bale one by one to know the straw inside was top grade. It was obvious at a glance. Starlight Foods was hardly some small company that would ship inferior straw.
"Just sorting all of this is going to take weeks, isn't it?"
Hauling the bales out to the fields with equipment had been finished in a slapdash rush. Unwrapping each one and putting the straw in order was another matter entirely; he couldn't even guess how long it would take. A full day's work probably wouldn't be enough.
"However long it takes, isn't it remarkable that we can move this much product at all? Just last year we were drowning in the red."
Until last year, Choi Ranch had been teetering between losses and breaking even. Beef prices had been wildly unstable, and feed costs had shot up because of the war between Russia and Ukraine.
War wasn't something you could simply brace for and be done with, so the ranch had had no choice but to swallow the loss. After they switched to the rice straw Starlight Foods produced, though, they couldn't sell cattle fast enough to meet the demand.
Feed costs had fallen to seventy or eighty percent of what they had been, while the price they received for cattle heading out the gate was climbing into the stratosphere. Buyers came in person and all but begged for animals. It was a strange feeling, watching people who had once held all the power plead like that.
All they had done was change a single feed, and the whole situation had turned upside down. If someone had told him this story last year, he would never have believed it. The son of Choi Ranch began taking the mountain of silage bales apart one by one. It was brutal labor, the kind that called for heavy equipment.
Still, knowing that the straw inside those bales cost only seventy or eighty percent of the feed they used to buy gave him real strength for the work. Other ranches would be buying soon enough, but because they had locked in their supply early, sales had surged.
Choi Ranch hadn't been especially close with its old suppliers, and there had been no loyalty discount to speak of, so they had been able to switch feed without hesitation. Other ranches, though, had long-standing ties with their dealers, and a real fear of abandoning feed they already knew for something new. It would probably be a while before the rest of the industry made the change.
"You did deliver that beef Starlight Research Institute asked for last time, didn't you?"
His father spoke as he took up a plow. The son nodded.
"Of course, Father. The person who makes the straw our ranch uses—I sent the very best cut we had. They'll be moved when they taste it, don't you think? Even I was shocked."
Curious just how good it had to be to earn that kind of fuss, the son had gone, not long ago, to the shop that butchered their own cattle and tried the beef himself. After that, all the carrying-on made perfect sense. Having eaten beef that delicious, it would have been stranger not to make a fuss.