Players Invade Cyberpunk-Chapter 696 - 224: What Kind of Life Do You Want to Choose
Food
This word with a long and colorful history often leaves the first impression of a table full of stir-fried dishes or noodles for the people of Tokyo University, with each having its own distinctive sweet, sour, bitter, spicy, and salty taste.
For the Europeans, it's a display of flourishing diversity and singular prominence, with Hans' favorites like roasted pork knuckles, beer, and sausages; old Paris' baked snails and creamy soups, and Italy's pasta and pizza.
In short, because of the different local conditions and breeding conditions, the food development systems of each place also differ. Ultimately, it's for consumption, no matter what seasoning or ingredients you use, fulfilling the needs of the stomach and mouth is the purpose of the chefs' existence.
It is an indispensable bright spot in the cultural history, greatly representing the people's longing for a better life at that time.
However, within all countries' food cooking development history, there emerged a freak. This freak's food system from the start was also uniquely flavored, not yet considered unpalatable, and even once flourished due to the spices and menus brought by the great voyages.
Until the arrival of the Industrial Revolution completely disrupted this situation, turning that freak's cuisine into Europe's dark culinary world.
This dark culinary world is actually just an insignificant microcosm of the Victorian dark industrial era.
The establishment of numerous factories caused a massive rural population to be driven into cities, entering factory work, originally multiplying the urban population several dozen times, with the ratio of urban to rural populations reaching 4:1.
Moreover, in that era of the most brutal and bloody growth of capital, workers had to work for a dozen hours every day with no holidays, no weekends, and no time to go home to cook or develop so-called gourmet foods.
And to make workers finish their meals quickly, saving time for work, everything was simplified and made fast, and British cuisine moved from the original sweet-and-sour pan-fried cod, oatmeal milk porridge, and beef pies swiftly towards pan-fried cod and fish and chips.
As canned goods and the subsequent world wars came, they thoroughly annihilated the last glimmer of the British native cuisine.
At that time, workers' lunch was merely a few slices of buttered bread, a meat can and milk, assembly-line workers eating canned goods produced on the assembly line, and then becoming a machine on the assembly line.
Originally lacking farmers, the United Kingdom's food was highly reliant on overseas shipping, and the two world wars directly collapsed 70% of the UK's food supply, British chefs no longer had the ability and energy to develop any gourmet cuisine, everyone just ate potatoes and cod. After all, compared to other things, at least these two you could still eat.
British cuisine announced its death.
By 2076, the announcement of death was no longer limited to just British cuisine, an agricultural environment of despair, embargo levels on the sea comparable to world wars.
More extreme protein blocks and vegetable pastes replaced fried chicken, chips, and fried fish, these gelatinous pastes cost less than 0.5 Orokin, allowing a homeless person to barely survive a day, the cost being a terrible taste and a plastic flavor, making you feel like you've eaten shit.
And a bit upwards was not much better, qualified assembly lines only produced one kind of product, a flood of pre-made dishes filled the stomachs of cyber era people, no matter how many times you ate, it's always the same taste, but you have to eat it because it's cheap and the only food you can afford, and naturally, those artificial meats couldn't give you much variety.
In this era, mixing sausages and rice and frying is considered remarkable cooking.
As for the snacks sold by street vendors, you'd be surprised to find every ball-shaped meat on the skewers is surprisingly similar, the counters of several mobile vendors displaying the same few things over and over, the vendors wearing chef hats but might not even know how to use a spatula.
It turned from what we eat today to what we can eat today, at least in the United States, cuisine officially entered desertification.
Until the arrival of a group of people.
After the initial novelty of artificial food passed, with daily game time extended, the players gradually became dissatisfied with these monotonous foods.
They didn't understand why the fish in artificial meat only had a few kinds like salmon and cod, why pork only had tenderloin, beef only had American sirloin, few varieties, and not tasty.
Where was my pork belly? Where was my pork knuckle? Where was my beef brisket? What the hell do I eat hot pot without beef tripe?
Moreover, the most severe thing was the lack of vegetables, making everything feel greasy.
In the game stores, the cans players previously ignored were also occasionally bought by old players for tasting, used as a rare treat for the taste buds.
Someone tried to pioneer near Stone Ridge Mountain, but the soil pollution by chemical waste made even shrubs and weeds hard to survive, let alone the pampered vegetables?
Moreover, players didn't even have clean water, if they bought real water for farming, the vegetables would certainly be priced sky-high.
Until the water source resumed flowing, they saw new hope.
Industrialized base cultivation is difficult yet simple.
The difficulty lies in the level of industrial technology and energy supply.
Indoor farming consumes a terrifying amount of electricity.
However, industrial technology in 2076 is no longer an issue.
The power generation efficiency of the Big Sur Water Plant was already ample, let alone it had second and third phases, and even a sea connection project, ensuring future electricity would be inexhaustible.
