Too Many Uses
The moment word came flying in from the research institute, Kim Sehee tore off at a run and came back with Hana's cherry tomatoes.
Kim Seyoung, whose business was cosmetics, had nothing to gain from them. Kim Sehee, who oversaw food, was bound up with the cherry tomatoes in every way that mattered.
Cultivation already seemed well underway, and the crop was abundant. Dozens hung from a single stem, and even with the evidence right in front of her, she could hardly believe it. On some branches the fruit had clustered so thickly that the limbs had snapped under their own weight.
"This is the new crop out of the Starlight Research Institute, isn't it?"
"Yes. What we're even supposed to call a plant that looks like a cherry tomato... Ever since the gates appeared, an awful lot of strange things have been turning up."
"Still, can a cherry tomato no bigger than a quarter really put out a thousand calories? I can already see the scientists leaping out of their chairs, shouting that it's impossible."
One of the researchers took a cherry tomato from the desk and sliced it cleanly in two. The inside was cherry tomato through and through. Nothing extra had been packed in.
"It cuts so easily. Doesn't look like there's any additional filling inside."
"Judging by the outside alone, it's an ordinary cherry tomato."
Kim Sangtae, head of food development at Starlight Food, picked one up.
"No matter how I look at it, I can't believe a cherry tomato this size is a thousand calories..."
He studied it with open wonder, then popped it into his mouth. The institute had already finished every safety check, so tasting it himself was faster than shuffling through paperwork.
The moment he bit down, his eyes went wide. It was far better than any ordinary tomato—juice bursting across his tongue, the fruit's own flavor coming through all the clearer.
"This is incredibly good."
"Isn't it? Your average cherry tomato couldn't even hold a candle to this."
"You ought to try one."
Not every researcher in the room liked tomatoes.
"Tomatoes are a little..."
"I don't understand it. People will happily eat ketchup, or anything with tomato sauce in it, and then turn up their noses at the fruit itself."
Once his superior fixed him with that look, one researcher—nothing more than an ordinary company man—had no choice but to eat a cherry tomato with tears in his eyes.
It was not the taste of an ordinary cherry tomato. He had forced it down, and yet, to his own surprise, he found it delicious.
"This is actually good...?"
"See? I told you it tastes a little different from the usual ones."
Hana's cherry tomatoes had become a flavor anyone could enjoy, young or old. After one or two, though, the researchers clutched their stomachs as if they were already full.
"I feel stuffed off just one of these."
"Ugh. I shouldn't have eaten two. I'm skipping dinner and going straight to bed."
Everyone who had eaten them complained of fullness. Kim Sangtae, after a single tomato, felt the same.
"One of these is enough to fill you up. As a food product, I'm not sure that's a virtue."
If the calories in each piece ran too high, people simply couldn't eat them in quantity. For a food business that lived on volume and thin margins, it was a poor trait. Kim Sangtae saw it differently.
"That's true, but wouldn't this be ideal for soldiers, or for patients who have trouble eating?"
"And for the hunters clearing gates, it'd be perfect, wouldn't it?"
Among the hardships of a gate raid, meals ranked near the top. A safe meal was hard to come by on the far side of a gate, so hunters often packed combat rations through gritted teeth. Cooking in the field was no simple matter. Most raids lasted more than two days, and there was no helping that. People without mana couldn't cross a gate at all, which meant civilians couldn't bring food in either.
A single piece packed with calories was good news for anyone who struggled to eat, or who was trapped in circumstances that made eating difficult. These cherry tomatoes could be sold in an entirely different direction.
A cherry tomato with that many calories was hardly welcome news for Starlight Food, which needed to move a great deal of product. But turn the idea around just a little, and the picture changed.
These cherry tomatoes made excellent rations. They held most of the nutrients a human body required, so a single tomato could stand as a complete food. They could go into the combat rations soldiers lived on, and they could be a blessing for patients fighting illness. Severe sickness stole the appetite, and hospital food was notoriously tasteless to begin with.
Rather than putting them on the open market first, the company distributed them on a trial basis through Starlight Guild affiliates. The response was positive. The warmest reception of all came from the hospitals.
The medical staff had been skeptical when they first laid eyes on Hana's cherry tomatoes. One bite, and they were full of praise.
"If this nutritional analysis is accurate, these cherry tomatoes could be the finest possible diet for patients."
"If a single one fills you up like this, we might not even need hospital meals anymore."
"Still, there's the pleasure of eating to consider..."
"Come now. Patients locked in a fight with their illness don't even have the strength for a proper meal."
The tomatoes were so small, though, that a person couldn't live on them alone forever. A month of nothing but cherry tomatoes might be manageable, but past that a nutritional imbalance could set in. Not that anyone would drop dead on the spot. The research was still incomplete, yet if someone ate only these, they could hold out comfortably for a year.
"For critically ill patients with no appetite, this is the best food there is."
"Exactly. They don't have the strength for a full meal, but one of these would be more than enough."
The strongest response came from patients with stomach cancer, and from those who had undergone surgery to remove part of the stomach because of illness.
Once the stomach was resected, the weight fell away fast. People who had been through it tended to assume the remaining stomach would stretch again, at least to some degree. They told themselves that even if they couldn't eat as they once had, they could still eat. Reality was otherwise.
Nine out of ten people who underwent a gastrectomy had no choice but to lose weight. In severe cases they dropped dozens of kilos without any particular exercise at all, simply because even a little food left them bloated and full.
"I really didn't want to touch the hospital food. This stuff saved me."
"Same here. The weight I lost after the surgery actually came back."
Some people welcomed losing weight, but for anyone laid up in a hospital it was a bad sign. Failing to hold the weight you needed meant the body itself was not in good shape.
There was another place, though, that responded every bit as warmly as the hospitals.
"No, seriously. I've been thinking about this lately. Why is our Starlight Guild rolling out so many new products all of a sudden?"
Decades had passed since the gates appeared, and one might have thought every byproduct worth finding had already been found. Most of them had long since had their effects fully explained. For a while, new goods had been at a standstill. Lately, fresh things had been turning up all the time.
"Senior, if you just look at it, it seems like an ordinary cherry tomato. Are we really fine heading out without packing any food?"
The junior was stuffing his pack for a gate raid. Checking your weapons and bringing something to eat and drink was only common sense. And yet this senior of his meant to go with nothing but one large bottle of water and a few cherry tomatoes. From where the junior stood, it made no sense at all.
"Senior, don't you dare ask me for food once we're inside the gate."
"Relax. Eat one of these and you'll change your mind."
"Come on. You think a cherry tomato the size of a coin is going to fill anybody up? It won't even touch the sides."
"These pack more calories than they look. More than all the food you're bringing."
"I have no intention of being a test subject for some new product our guild cooked up, Senior."
"Would you look at this guy. Eat one, then decide."
Watching his senior drop dozens of cherry tomatoes into a single plastic bag, the junior let out a long, silent sigh. The man would definitely come begging for food later, so he resolved to pack far more rice than usual.
And so they set out to clear the gate, and the junior spent the whole raid watching his senior, waiting for the moment he would ask to share a meal.
He'll hold out for a day, if only to save face. He'll probably come asking sometime tomorrow afternoon...
Afternoon passed. The raid ended. The senior still looked perfectly fine. If anything, his stomach seemed to stick out a little more than it had when they entered the gate.