Chapter 134 - 132: Add One More Person
Xue Dong had been busy with the factory since he returned, not only making cheese but also producing fresh milk to sell to the base, providing more residents with cheap, delicious, high-quality milk to supplement their nutrition.
In the past, only the rich district had access to the bottled or cartoned milk that required refrigeration; the ordinary areas of the base could not even get enough to eat, let alone drink milk, which they hadn’t tasted for many years.
The factory was large, producing fresh milk, cheese, by-products of dairy farming, and milk powder.
Milk powder was particularly important since it had a long shelf life, making it a top-tier survival resource.
Why were there hardly any children born to poor families? They couldn’t afford to raise them, and the death of a child would bring unbearable heartache.
If you can’t fill your stomach, mothers are unable to breastfeed; they simply don’t have any breast milk. How would you feed a child? Milk was out of the question since everyone was eating mutant animals—where would the milk come from?
Many children were raised on rice soup, which involved boiling rice or millet into porridge and feeding the children the thin layer of rice soup with floating grains. This meal had to be made from fine grains, as children couldn’t digest coarse grains, which would cause stomach swelling.
Look, raising a child requires a lot of effort. Parents and relatives were already exhausted during peaceful times, let alone during periods of natural disaster.
Back then, with poor conditions and the fear of having children, it was unbearable to watch a child you couldn’t provide for die before your eyes. It seemed better not to have children at all.
Now that conditions had improved somewhat, people were unable to conceive, having consumed too many mutant plants and animals, and many were in a similar situation.