Chapter 111 - Simple Rations (Continued)

The relief rations, to facilitate preservation, were thoroughly dehydrated, making them extremely hard. To eat them, people usually had to break them with a hammer and then eat them with water. It was almost impossible to swallow without water. More often, they were mixed with some vegetables and cooked into a paste.

The relief ration was essentially a simplified version of an individual combat ration. Its taste and nutrition could not compare to ordinary military ready-to-eat food. In particular, its hard, rough texture and strange taste meant that, apart from starving refugees, almost no one praised it. Si Kaide, who had to subsist on relief rations for a week during a business trip due to a logistical error, once commented very harshly: a person could live on the Grassland series for half a year, and live for seven days without eating, but could only live for three days on relief rations alone. During the continental campaign, the relief ration earned the nickname “molar-grinding brick.”

Some effort was made to improve the taste of the relief rations. In the months after the rations were developed, the R&D team, imitating modern instant noodles, developed various flavors such as cumin, spicy, mala, seafood, and scallion by adding various spices and seasonings. Of course, the change in flavor did not actually increase appetite much. Apart from hungry people, ordinary soldiers and laborers still gave them poor reviews. As Dongmen Chuiyu, who had eaten all the ready-to-eat foods, both produced and unproduced, during their development, said: for a hungry person, a variety of flavors cannot fill an empty stomach; for a person who can eat normally, no amount of complex seasoning can make relief rations delicious.

From the beginning of the “Engine Operation” to transport refugees until the end of the continental campaign, a total of over ten million portions of various relief rations were produced, saving millions of refugees from starvation. These rations were wrapped in oiled paper and neatly stacked in standard twenty-liter wooden boxes—these boxes were identical to those used for ammunition, so they were usually painted in red and yellow to distinguish them. Later, the imperial armies on campaigns would sometimes carry some to stabilize public morale or as payment to civilian laborers. During this period, the relief rations were printed with the conspicuous bold words: “A Gift from the Council of Elders and the People of the Empire.”

The shelf life of the relief rations was set at three years. In reality, in a relatively low-temperature and dry environment, some batches produced later under better processing conditions were still safe to eat after twenty years of storage. Of course, these rations had become extremely hard and almost impossible to chew. They had to be boiled with a large amount of water into a paste to be eaten. Due to its durability, in some remote outposts on the empire’s frontiers with long supply lines, trading posts deep in the wilderness, and research stations, relief rations were tightly sealed and used as internal non-load-bearing walls in some rooms, serving as a final emergency reserve. This measure saved the lives of many soldiers and exploration personnel on duty in remote locations, allowing them to hold out against barbarian sieges until relief forces arrived.

“Because the relief rations are very hard and difficult to eat, expired relief rations that no one has eaten often appear in military and Planning Department warehouses. The usual disposal method is to hand them over to the agricultural department to be ground up for raising earthworms. However, some of the better-preserved ones are picked out, and some soldiers in their leisure time would carve the relief rations into various handicrafts or small daily necessities with their bayonets. For example, the pipe you see here was made by Admiral Shi Zhiqi of the Marine Corps himself using a relief ration. In addition, General Pan Da of the Engineers has a collection of relief ration pipes from every year since the relief ration was introduced. Please see, these are the private collections donated by Elder Pan to our museum. They have different smells, such as the seafood flavor of the fifth year of the Holy Era, the cumin and mala flavors of the sixth year, and the coconut flavor of the seventh year. As for the eighth year, due to the expansion of the fertilizer plant’s production capacity in the previous year, which led to a bumper harvest of potatoes and sweet potatoes and subsequently boosted the livestock industry, particles of salted beef were added—this was unprecedented at the time. We can still see whole particles of salted beef on the surface of the pipe. Therefore, the pipe made from the eighth-year relief ration is also known as the ‘bumper harvest pipe’…”

—Explanatory text for the relief ration pipe from the Imperial Military Museum narrator

The people of Lin’gao, both Guihua and natives, now all knew that the Australians were about to launch a large-scale operation.

This was not an unfounded rumor. Anyone with even a slight understanding of the “Australians’” or “Kun thieves’” way of doing things knew that the bustling scene at the food factory of the Ministry of Light Industry was an ominous sign.

In the new factory building of the food factory on the banks of the Wenlan River, relief rations were being mass-produced, and the output of grassland dry rations had also increased by a factor of three. Starting from March, the food factory’s task was to produce 100,000 portions of No. 1 relief rations and 20,000 portions of Grassland series dry rations each month. The task assigned by the Planning Department was to complete 400,000 portions of No. 1 relief rations and 50,000 portions of No. 1 instant soup blocks by the end of June 1631, and to complete the annual total order of 1.2 million portions by the end of the year. In addition, orders for other ready-to-eat foods were also placed, including fish sauce, salted fish, pickles, preserved vegetables, kimchi, biscuits, and candy.

The various food enterprises under the Ministry of Light Industry and the People’s Committee of Agriculture—the grain processing plant, the seafood processing plant, and the food factory—all expanded their scale and increased their personnel. 850 Guihua employees worked in two shifts, with all leave canceled. Production ran 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

The roads from Bopu to the various food factories were renovated and all converted to high-grade cinder-hardened roads. Heavy ox-carts and light Zidian handcarts bustled along the roads, their wheels rumbling. The factory gates were busy with vehicles coming and going from morning to night, looking no different from the factories in other industrial areas. However, when producing ready-to-eat foods with a large amount of spices, people nearby could smell the strong aroma.

Every day, many vehicles entered and exited the food factory, transporting goods. Some were even delivered in refrigerated containers on trucks: 150-kilogram baskets of various vegetables; 50-kilogram bags of brown rice, rice flour, and beans; 100-kilogram bags of dried sweet potatoes and sweet potato flour; 50-kilogram baskets of fruit; 50-kilogram bags of cane sugar and salt; 5-kilogram bags of spices; 50-kilogram boxes of salted and fresh fish; and 5-liter packages of fish sauce… Finally, there was the rarest food: oil, packaged in 5-liter wooden barrels or ceramic jars. The contents were varied: besides the common soybean oil and lard, there was also fish oil with a strong fishy smell and various other edible vegetable oils.

The floors and walls of the new factory building were all tiled. Lighting was provided by rows of glass windows, and the ventilation windows were fitted with multi-layered screens, from coarse gauze to fine gauze that could be used for making clothes, preventing even the smallest flying insects from entering. Workers had to wade through a lime water pool, change their clothes, and wash their hands carefully before entering and leaving the workshop. They wore white work clothes, head covers, and masks, and oilcloth overshoes while processing the raw materials. Most of the raw materials were ground into powder, and vegetables and fruits were processed into paste or dried products. Then, according to the formula, various raw materials were continuously poured into large pots for processing. Then, water was added in a mixing pot for stirring—the mixing pot was driven by steam engine power transmitted from the overhead drive shaft. A newly installed large mixing pot could stir 250 kilograms of raw materials at a time.

The industrial department was temporarily unable to produce stainless steel, and due to cost and energy issues, they could not produce aluminum either. Therefore, most of the processing equipment in the food factory was made of tin-plated iron. There were also a few small-sized processing devices made of copper, and some used glassware or ceramics.

The evenly mixed paste was heated to 100°C by steam to ensure the food was fully cooked. Then, the paste was poured into molds, which were mounted on a rotating chain plate and pulled into a gas-heated continuous kiln for drying. The shrinking biscuits automatically fell out of the molds onto large tin-plated iron trays as the chain plate rotated.

Due to the lack of latex gloves, workers had to disinfect their hands with disinfectant before entering the workshop and were not allowed to touch the food and packaging paper with their hands during packaging. All operations were performed with tongs.

The packaged relief rations were placed in a disinfection room and heated to 120°C with superheated dry steam from a dedicated boiler, then cooled to 40°C. After sterilization and disinfection, the rations were packed into a standard 20-liter wooden box. The box was lined with oiled paper coated with persimmon oil to ensure it was waterproof. Then, a bag of lime was placed in the box as a desiccant. The lime bag was printed with the conspicuous black words: “Recyclable Material, Please Recycle!”—not only the lime bag, but the paper box and the wooden box also had similar warnings.

In addition to supplying individual ready-to-eat relief rations, the food factory also produced multi-person relief rations. The ingredients were exactly the same, but they were made into 2.5-kilogram blocks. When used, they were broken up and boiled with water into a paste, known as “No. 1 On-site Relief Ration.” This ration was used when setting up refugee relief centers to recruit refugees at the site of a disaster.

To ensure the supply of vitamins and prevent beriberi and scurvy due to a monotonous diet lacking vitamins, the food factory not only produced instant soup blocks but also manufactured 15,000 kilograms of dehydrated vegetables and dried fruits. In addition, the grain processing plant had to prepare 50,000 kilograms of brown rice—for preparing meals at the transit camps. The brown rice was also processed: it was first cooked into rice and then thoroughly dried. This way, it could be cooked into porridge without much fuel. In an emergency, it could also be eaten directly.