After all, for most ordinary people, eating is merely a means to fill their stomachs, and after fasting, the lack of hunger means that eating becomes a purely wilful and meaningless act.
So, at that point, most ordinary people would definitely give up the inefficient practice of eating for nutrition and instead embrace the efficient practice of absorbing spiritual energy to maintain their bodily functions.
Even if some people might eat to satisfy a craving, they could not possibly stick to three meals a day. Take, for example, a social livestock who often has bland, free lunches at the company cafeteria.
If he already possessed the cultivation of fasting, he would certainly prefer to skip this unappetizing lunch, for without the drive of hunger, eating it served no purpose other than torturing oneself.
The majority of food that humans ingest in the process of sustaining life could not be called delicious; it was simply eaten to stave off hunger. With fasting, even if some still wished to eat, it would make more sense to concentrate the money spent on three meals into one good meal.
Take a simple example, someone may have a pancake for breakfast, a bowl of Lanzhou noodles for lunch, and make tomato and egg stir-fry or hot and sour shredded potatoes for dinner. Though these foods aren’t terrible, they aren’t particularly tasty either; the conclusion is that they are eaten merely out of necessity to sate hunger.
Hence, in such cases, wouldn’t it make more sense to save the money from three meals a day to buy a large piece of pork belly and make a bowl of braised pork? Anyone with normal logical thinking would know which is the better choice.
As such, since even the basic habit of three meals a day would change, the supply and demand structure would naturally be disrupted, necessitating at least a fifty percent reduction in crop production to avoid overflow and waste.
Moreover, this takes into account that the elderly and the underage make up 30% of the Empire’s demographic structure; otherwise, an even greater reduction in production would be necessary.
To sum up, what the Empire urgently needs now is, in these few years before the nationwide adoption of fasting is completed, to liberate most of the farmers through urbanization and industrial transformation and upgrading and turn them into more efficient productivity for the new era, which, of course, involves a large number of catering and service industries.
As for the specific methods, Zhang Yanhang knew not much, only that one of them involved leasing a lot of the farmers’ land for centralized management and cultivation.
After breakfast, Zhang Yanhang walked lonesome to school as he always did, but shortly after setting out, he spotted an incongruous and familiar figure on the roadside.
"I’ll have an iced milk tea with extra pearls, extra milk, extra ice..." Since she hadn’t eaten breakfast, Zhao Yalan planned to buy a milk tea at the roadside to tide her over, this high-calorie drink should be enough to sustain her until lunch.
But just after placing her order, Zhao Yalan felt the pebble that had accidentally gotten into her shoe while walking was now becoming increasingly uncomfortable and irksome, truly insufferable.
Zhao Yalan tried to push the small stone in her shoe aside with her toes. Despite the confinement of her pantyhose affecting her toes’ agility and her maneuvering to some extent, she ultimately succeeded. ᴛhis chapter is ᴜpdated by novel✶fire.net
However, though she succeeded, the result was far from pleasant. Zhao Yalan still felt the small stone was incredibly awkward, and because its position had changed, the stone now pressed straight against her toenail, becoming even more troublesome.
Moreover, Zhao Yalan had reason to believe that if she continued walking with the pebble pressing against her foot, her pantyhose might tear a hole; these were the flesh-toned tights she had just put on that morning, and she really didn’t want them to be ruined after such a short time.
Thus, after a mental struggle and hesitation, Zhao Yalan set her camera aside and leaned slightly on the counter for support. She bent down, took off her shoe, gave it a little shake, and poured out the small stone.
Just then, the clerk informed Zhao Yalan that her milk tea was ready. She placed her shoe on the ground and reached out to take her milk tea. In the split second she received her drink, she heard a familiar "Wu Lake!" and felt a peculiar gust of air brush by.
Zhao Yalan doubted whether the "Wu Lake!" she heard was an auditory hallucination, and the chill "wind" that made her shiver was probably just her imagination since she had been watching that video she recorded recently, trying to figure out why it had suddenly gone viral and garnered hundreds of thousands of likes, boosting her followers by tens of thousands overnight.
Although Zhao Yalan rationally suspected she was hearing things, she still instinctively searched the ground with her foot, covered in flesh-toned tights, for her shoe that should have been there. Yet, what her foot found was nothing but the cold ground.
Zhao Yalan felt a sudden jolt in her heart as she feared the worst had happened. She quickly looked down, and the shoe that should have been on the ground was nowhere to be seen.
She looked around confusedly, hoping to spot her shoe. For some reason, she instinctively glanced up at the tops of the tall pine and plane trees by the roadside, only to find nothing.
Since she didn’t find her shoe in the trees, Zhao Yalan looked around bewilderedly at other spots on the roadside, as if searching for some clue.
Soon, a glimpse in the corner of her eye caught a sight that enraged her. The LV sneakers she had just bought for five or six thousand yuan yesterday were now perched securely on the roof of a small truck, moving away from her with the vehicle.
The white sneakers she had splurged on just yesterday with her first advertising payment were about to be forever lost. Overwhelmed with sorrow, Zhao Yalan couldn’t help but emit a groundhog-like scream, "Ah————!!"
Amid her sadness, Zhao Yalan also noticed a familiar figure keeping pace with and quickly overtaking the small truck. Although his clothes had changed slightly and he wore a helmet, his build had not, still the same weird fellow who had dashed over with a hundred-meter sprint speed last time and sent her shoe flying.