Tōhoku Children Gnawing Radishes in Their Hunger

[Core Room]

"Unlike ordinary plants, the Shiso can't photosynthesize, so the Asura liquid fertilizer also contains carbohydrates, amino acids, and the like. Even so, as the dietitian Maribel says, if humans drink it over a long period, various nutrients start to run short. That's why we're pushing ahead with increasing vegetable production."

"Marie-san, so we make up the difference with vegetables."

"Yes. In a textbook from another otherworld there was a photograph captioned 'Tōhoku children gnawing radishes in their hunger.' We're using that as a reference."

"Radishes, is it."

"In the otherworld closely connected to this Library-City Dungeon, a considerable amount of development funding had been poured into the Tōhoku region, so even in the crop failures of the early Shōwa era, while there were complaints about being made to eat foul disaster-relief canned food, they never sank to a point where children were going without meals. But depending on the world, there were all sorts of patterns, economic distress, profligacy, failures of distribution, and so on. It's not Tolstoy, but one might put it this way: 'All worlds that have gone well are alike. Unhappy worlds are each unhappy in their own way.'"

"And those 'disaster-relief canned goods' can't be summoned, because they aren't library equipment. Is that it."

"Yes. Not just canned goods, no emergency rations can be summoned, so we'll grow extra of the vegetables that can be harvested at the end of autumn or in winter. Radishes, precisely."

The daikon is widely grown throughout China (in both North-China's Chinese Empire and South-China's Republic), where it is known as luóbo. That a daikon exists in this region would suggest there is a China here too. Or perhaps there was once a Chinese dungeon, and it was brought over from there.

"That said, the seeds come as magazine supplements, so we end up with mountains of magazines we don't need."

"Hauling them off to Musashi is a chore too. From next year on we'll be summoning even more seeds, so it might be quicker just to burn the magazines."

"Marie-san, can't we take seed from the vegetables we grow?"

"There are vegetables for which that works and ones for which it doesn't. Roughly divided, there are 'F1 varieties' and 'fixed varieties.' F1 varieties are also called first-generation hybrids, varieties given specific commercially superior traits by crossing different cultivars. They yield more, or are easier to grow, or sell well to consumers, so they're used heavily in commercial cultivation. Since they're varieties made by crossing, sowing their seed gives a next generation whose traits scatter every which way, so you have to buy seed every year. But in commercial cultivation the advantages outweigh that, so it isn't seen as much of a problem."

"'In the next generation,' meaning that if you take the seed…"

"Yes. But the cost of seed isn't a major issue. The trouble, in this dungeon's case, is that it isn't just seed, a magazine comes attached. If only there were a home-center dungeon somewhere. Fixed varieties, on the other hand, are ones improved by sowing seed every year, selecting the ones that suit your needs, and breeding from them. Summon the magazine and cultivate it once, and from then on you can grow from your own seed, but they inevitably vary in size and harvest timing, which is poor for bulk shipping, and generally they yield less than F1 varieties and are weaker against pests and disease."

"In short… Marie-san, what should we do?"

"When you have to grow large quantities of vegetables in a hurry, as now, F1 varieties are the way to go. But if we also summon fixed varieties and use that seed from next year on, we can avoid the situation where the dungeon gets buried under a mountain of magazines. The problem is the magazines and study materials that don't note which kind the seed is."

"So you don't know until you sow it. Is that it."

"Well, in cases like that, you can just 'deem' them F1 varieties and not take seed, and that settles it. The trouble is that this world has no F1 varieties, so no matter what we say here, there are bound to be farmers who go right ahead taking seed from an F1 variety on their own and then have a wretched time of it the next year…"

"It happens inside a village, so we can't very well ban it by law."

"It's not as if we can have the Seed Police make their rounds. And besides, it's precisely that sort of trial and error by the farmers that lets agriculture suited to this region develop. Japan imports its food simply because it's overpopulated, but Worker-Peasant Russia, with forty times Japan's area and about the same population, imports food because a planned economy just doesn't work."