Sweet-and-Sour Pork Is Meant to Be Sauced
Badabada—!
I was the first to break into a run. The cafeteria was spotless and surprisingly sleek; someone had clearly redone the interior, because the whole room gleamed. The old lunchroom hadn't exactly been filthy, but the years had left their mark—rust in the corners, dark stains along the edges. All of that was gone.
"Ooh!"
I pulled chopsticks and a spoon from the utensil bin set out for us. Those had been replaced too. They shone so brightly that, held up under the fluorescent lights, they threw the glare straight back. The old chopsticks had been warped and never quite matched. With these, that worry didn't exist.
"Hana, slow down~!"
"You're going to fall!"
Jiyu and Yumi came chasing after me, so I eased my pace, then picked up a tray. The trays were new as well, nothing like the ones we'd had before. Tray in hand, I headed for the servers.
"Eat plenty~."
Staff in hairnets and masks portioned out sensible servings. The main dish was jajangmyeon—noodles in black-bean sauce—with sweet-and-sour pork and yellow pickled radish alongside, plus a drink, as if to say we'd be thirsty. I took my lunch with a thoroughly satisfied look.
"Where should we sit?"
That was always one of the hardest questions. Fortunately the whole school didn't eat at once, so plenty of seats were still open. I picked a reasonable spot, and the moment I sat down, Jiyu and Yumi settled in around me.
"This looks amazing!"
"Me too, me too! After nothing but packed lunches, getting real cafeteria food is making me emotional!"
The two of them seemed to nurse a genuine grudge against lunchboxes. I couldn't say I cared all that much. Either way, I tuned them out and worked the jajangmyeon through with my chopsticks. The sauce looked delicious, and the smell alone was already a passing grade.
This was nothing like the jajangmyeon from an ordinary Chinese restaurant. Those places had been slipping for years. I'd heard the work was so grueling that cooks simply didn't want to do Chinese cuisine anymore, which probably explained why I hadn't had a truly good bowl of black-bean noodles in ages. The plate in front of me, though, looked like it might be worth getting my hopes up.
Once the sauce was folded through just right, I lifted a generous mouthful of noodles. My eyes flew wide.
"It's good!"
Jiyu and Yumi watched me eat, then followed suit—and came away with exactly the same reaction.
"No way. For real!"
"This is a hundred times better than that dried-out fish we had last time!"
"A hundred? Please. A thousand, easy!"
They looked thoroughly pleased, and so was I. School lunches with flavor like this were rare. Cook for a crowd the size of a cafeteria and quality usually had no choice but to suffer. It was the same reason mess-hall food at a training camp tasted like nothing: once you had to turn out that much rice and that many side dishes, flavor was the first thing you sacrificed. What I'd just eaten blew that common sense apart. At this level, they could charge money, sell it outside, and still compete.
The jajangmyeon, then, had more than earned a passing mark. I shifted my attention to the sweet-and-sour pork, which had come out already coated in sauce. For someone like me—firmly in the camp that wanted the sauce soaked all the way through, not a little dish on the side for dipping—it was excellent. A cafeteria could never have managed the dipping style anyway. That would take sauce cups, and in a lunchroom packed with people, sauce cups were impossible. So they'd stir-fried the pork in the sauce and sent it out like this. I set the theory aside, lifted my chopsticks, and turned a few pieces over. On looks alone, it passed.
Looks, though, meant nothing if the taste fell flat. The world was full of pretty, flashy food, and just as full of pretty, flashy food that tasted like a letdown.
I took a bite of the sweet-and-sour pork.
"Ohhh!"
The soundtrack of a famous anime started playing in my head. For an instant, it felt as if the world had stopped. That was how good it was. The batter shattered crisp under my teeth, and the meat inside was juicy. Sweet-and-sour pork usually came with a coating that was too thick, or with meat that didn't taste like much of anything. This one was an entirely different story.
"Jiyu, Yumi, try the sweet-and-sour pork! It's seriously good."
The moment I started carrying on, they moved the chopsticks they'd been using on the noodles over to the pork—and gave me the same reaction I'd had.
"For real!"
"Just like Hana said, it's actually delicious!"
Our first school lunch was outstanding. If they kept serving food at this level, I was confident I could eat in the cafeteria every single day without missing one. The old lunches had been bad often enough that I'd ended up throwing myself on the mercy of the snack shop.
The move into ranching had not been a blind leap. Kim Sehee made the decision only after watching beef from the Kim Ranch explode in popularity. Shops that carried it, she heard, already had a full month of customer reservations stacked up. She had tried it herself. It melted on the tongue—a different dimension from any other hanwoo, Korea's native beef. As someone who ate beef more than anything else, she could taste the difference better than most.
Ordinary people had no idea why the meat was so good. Kim Sehee did. The rice straw that came off Starlight Rice was, for cattle, nothing short of miraculous. She had spent long enough at Hana's side that failing to grasp even that much would have made her a spy.
Livestock were usually raised on formulated feed and other commercial rations. Once cattle got a taste of compound feed, they barely touched rice straw at all, as if they knew perfectly well how little flavor it had. The straw from Starlight Rice was different. The animals fought one another for the chance to eat it first. Watching them scrabble like children over an unbearably good meal, Kim Sehee couldn't help but laugh. Even creatures without a human sense of reason loved the plants Hana made. Of course the meat of cattle raised on that straw tasted extraordinary.
Raising cattle was expensive. A calf ran, on average, from three million to three and a half million won, and the statistics put the feed bill at four to five million won.
If Starlight Foods stepped into ranching, the arithmetic changed completely. The feed would be nearly free. Set against any other livestock farm, they could raise a cow without paying for feed at all. Not entirely free, of course—producing the straw, fermenting it, and hauling it still cost money. Even so, it was far cheaper than buying feed outright.
After the rice was milled, some of the leftover straw was sold on to farms, but on Kim Sehee's orders most of it was being gathered and held aside.
She had wrestled with the choice at the start. Sell the straw to livestock operations, or raise the cattle herself and feed it to them? In the end she decided to enter the ranching business. Selling beef from cattle she had raised herself looked like much the better profit. Simply supplying feed to the industry, she suspected, would never get her where she wanted to go. If the goal was to move beef directly into the American market, raising the cattle herself would be far more practical.
"Finding the right land is turning into a project of its own."
"We do already have land the company purchased, but..."
"That land was bought for farming. If we're raising cattle, we buy land suited to ranching. Not that."
"You're right, Chairman."
What they already owned was ground that made crops easy, not ground fit for cattle. The plants that came from Hana's own body took no damage from pests or blight, and they shot up even in the most barren soil. Finding new farmland had been simple because of it. There was no need to hunt for fertile earth or a spot with good sun. Transportation, and as much plantable acreage as possible—that was the whole checklist.
Cattle were different. They had to be raised in facilities built for the purpose.
"We'll keep looking. In a country as big as Korea, there has to be land where we can raise cattle."
Kim Sehee was wearing out her shoes across Gyeonggi Province with the specialists at her side, and she was already considering other regions as well. There was no particular reason the cattle had to be in Seoul or Gyeonggi. Hana's crops grew only within a certain distance of her, and that set a hard limit. Cattle came with no such constraint.