Seeing how happily they ate, Mo Qiong had them cook dozens of kilograms of rice.
Without any oil or meat, they ate plain rice with pickled vegetables and somehow felt as if they were enjoying haute cuisine.
Their past lives must have been miserable. Mo Qiong had merely given them a meal, yet every one of them wore a deeply satisfied expression.
As far as Mo Qiong knew, the staple foods of ancient Japan were wheat and radishes. Although rice was all offered as tribute, it was not as if they had never eaten it at all. Those who had not were children or young people; basically, anyone who lived a full life had tasted it at least a few times. Especially during the Azuchi-Momoyama period, soldiers even received rice while serving in the army.
Yet this group claimed they had never even seen cooked rice.
After asking around, Mo Qiong learned that their staple foods were mostly taro and beans. They mixed various beans together and cooked them, and that counted as a meal. They rarely even ate buckwheat.
As for rice, they could neither afford to eat it nor were they allowed to.
For productivity to be this low, it had to be at least a thousand years in the past.
At that time, although Japan had learned technology and systems from the Sui and Tang Dynasties, most regions were Ghost Land. Only a few core areas, such as Heian-kyo, had undergone substantial development.
That was why so many miserable farmers still lived in the other remote regions.
"Delicious!"
"It's so tasty!"
After their second bowl of plain rice with pickled vegetables, it seemed as if their taste buds had been opened to an entirely new world.
The rice's soft, fragrant richness, combined with a slight chewiness, already