Homo Sapiens

The bus started and stopped along its route as passengers got on and off. About fifteen minutes later, it pulled up near the East Star Restaurant.

”We’re here.”

As soon as Bower stepped off the bus, he was hit by a wave of heat and quickly scurried into the shade of a tree.

The East Star Restaurant, one of the designated employee cafeterias, was packed with people since it was lunchtime.

The group quickly squeezed inside.

The central air conditioning kept the entire restaurant cool. The first floor had a vast seating area, enough to accommodate five hundred people at once, and the restaurant had a total of three dining floors.

The East Star Restaurant specialized in Chinese fast food. The head chef was a Luzon native of Chinese descent who had previously worked at the Lima Nankai Chinese Restaurant, and the manager was a middle-aged woman.

Everyone waiting in line to order could see the busy scene inside the kitchen through a glass wall.

Compared to the average Chinese restaurant, the kitchen at the East Star Restaurant was remarkably orderly. There was no dirty water on the floor, nor the common issue of mixing raw and cooked foods.

Actually, this was thanks to Fengrao House’s general manager, Huang Keming. His management style was borderline obsessive-compulsive, leading him to establish a host of standardized regulations.

The benefit of this standardized management was that everyone had to follow protocol. Not only did it clearly define each employee’s duties and responsibilities, but it also prevented them from passing the buck.

Bower found the view of the kitchen through the glass wall very comforting. The beauty of its orderliness immediately gave the impression that the food was clean and hygienic.

If a kitchen had dirty water everywhere, flies buzzing around, and grease stains all over the place, no matter how much it advertised its cleanliness, no one would have an appetite after seeing it.

Before long, it was Bower’s turn.

A touchscreen was mounted at the window. After inserting his employee card, he selected Set Meal A, then added an extra dish of shredded pork with garlic sauce and a bottle of Coke.

After waiting for about three minutes, the food was passed out from the window.

He found a table with a few coworkers, and they began to dig in.

The East Star Restaurant’s Set Meal A was the employee meal, which was provided for free. The staple was 500 grams of rice, served with a fried egg, stir-fried cucumber, pan-fried luncheon meat, and a bowl of seaweed soup.

For non-employees, the price was 20 Pesos per meal.

This price was on the low side for the local area. If an ordinary restaurant were to supply it, there would be basically no profit margin unless they used inferior, cheap ingredients.

For instance, a rice bowl made with meat scavenged from refuse in the slums of Manila costs around 12 Pesos.

The thing was, the price difference between the basic employee meal and a pagpag rice bowl wasn’t that significant. And with incomes on the rise for ordinary people in Homo Sapiens Company’s controlled zones, more and more people were choosing the basic employee meal.

The basic employee meal was 20 Pesos a serving, a cost Fengrao House could easily absorb while still making a considerable profit.

On one hand, the supply of some raw materials didn’t require middlemen. On the other, they had their own farms and logistics, as well as their own power, water, and gas supply channels.

The final factor was that the raw materials for many dishes did not come from traditional crops and livestock.

For example, the thick, square fried egg Bower was savoring was actually made from insect protein extract. This was used to synthesize imitation ovalbumin, ovophosphoprotein, and lecithin-type fats, with added riboflavin, niacin, biotin, calcium, phosphorus, and iron.

In other words, this was an artificial egg.

But the texture and taste were similar to a real egg, and the nutritional content was also nearly identical.

Compared to natural eggs, which have production costs that are difficult to lower, a standard 50-gram serving of artificial egg cost only about 0.62 Pesos. A dozen servings of artificial eggs cost just 7.44 Pesos.

Of course, this type of artificial egg had no shell and could only be packaged in square containers.

Currently, Haitian Agriculture’s artificial eggs hadn’t been officially launched on the market, not due to concerns about public acceptance, but because of unresolved packaging issues.

For now, they could only be supplied to their own restaurants and food processing plants.

Similarly, the cooking oil and luncheon meat in the basic employee meal were also products of some hardcore food engineering.

The cooking oil was extracted from insects and seaweed, then re-blended. The cost per ton was only about 13,000 Pesos (equivalent to about 1,400 Chinese Yuan).

As for the luncheon meat, it was of course made from raw materials like starch, vegetable oil, fat, and insect powder.

If calculated by meat content, the luncheon meat produced by Haitian Agriculture had a meat content of around 30%. This was far more generous than most luncheon meats on the market, not to mention much cheaper.

The four flavors of canned luncheon meat launched by Haitian Agriculture were now officially for sale on the shelves of Fengrao House, and sales were very good.

Especially in the Tangdu District of Manila, Fengrao House could sell one or two tons of canned luncheon meat there every day.

For the people in the slums, eating canned food made from insect powder was far better than scavenging the rich’s leftovers.

Even if a small number of people had allergic reactions to the novel protein, it didn’t deter demand from the poor. After all, allergies only affected a small minority, and the vast majority of people were not allergic to insect protein.

The reason restaurants under Fengrao House liked to use artificial eggs, luncheon meat, and blended oil was simply because these ingredients were cheap and could effectively reduce costs.

As for whether the public accepted it or not, Fengrao House had no intention of explaining.

After all, it wasn’t as if there were no natural eggs, palm oil, or canned pork on the shelves; they were just more expensive.

For the average Luzon resident earning only five or six hundred Chinese Yuan a month, the choice was self-evident.

Take Bower, for example. He knew the fried egg in the basic employee meal was an artificial egg.

’So what?’

’I still have to eat it.’

This included the breakfast milk that Haitian Agriculture supplied to its own kindergartens and schools, which was all formulated with things like insect protein powder.

Otherwise, how could the company feed tens of thousands of hungry children and students? These were the families of employees, and that number was only going to get bigger in the future.

’Use natural cow’s milk?’

Luzon’s tropical climate isn’t suitable for raising dairy cows. The only alternative would be to import bulk milk powder from Australia and New Zealand for reconstitution. How is that any different from artificial milk? In fact, it might even be inferior.

Of course, the company still took good care of its employees’ families. Before supplying the children with artificial milk, it would test each child for allergies in advance.

If a child was confirmed to be allergic to the novel insect protein, they would be switched to reconstituted milk or a plant-based milk formula.

Li Qingye felt not a shred of guilt about this, because his actions had not wronged anyone.

At least for the poor and ordinary people of Luzon, wasn’t eating things like insect protein and trehalose a form of blessing?

One had to understand that Luzon currently had a population of 101 million, and its natural population growth rate remained high.

’Who could possibly feed so many people?’

Homo Sapiens Company could only forge a new path. Between starving to death and eating insects, the people had to make a choice.

Besides, it wasn’t as if whole insects were being served on a plate; they were being thoroughly processed.

In any case, Bower and the others didn’t feel repulsed by the artificial eggs. After a few meals, they got used to it.

Besides internal employees like Bower, other workers from the city also frequented the East Star Restaurant’s cafeteria, precisely because the food was so cheap.

If someone ate the basic meal three times a day for a whole month, it would only cost 1,500 Pesos.

A family of three with only one breadwinner could afford the basic employee meal.

And since Luzon had not yet entered a stage of population aging, a typical family often had three or four working members, so getting enough to eat was not a problem.