Years: Salted fish life since going to the countryside.

Chapter 884: Traditional Sea Cucumber and Dried Abalone at a Bargain Price

"Captain, you are too polite. We are all here to serve the people. What is your name?"

"Haha, I forgot to tell you, my name is Wang Jianguo, and I'm the leader of the production team in Ganshitou Village."

"Captain Wang."

The two men came into the house while talking, and after sitting down, Captain Wang asked with some confusion.

"It seems that Purchasing Manager Han's accent is not that of our locals?"

"Captain Wang has a good eye. My elders and I came here from the Forty-Nine City for vacation. We couldn't stay idle at the sanatorium, so we asked for a temporary purchaser job. I can travel back and forth to gain some knowledge and understand our local customs and practices. If there are suitable materials, I can also make some contributions to the logistics department."

After Han Li said this, Captain Wang's expression became more respectful. He knew that the people living in the ** sanatorium were people who were often heard on the radio. It was not comparable to the coal mine sanatorium where Zhang Dagang, who often came to their village to purchase supplies, worked.

The young man in front of him, named Han Li, can go there to recuperate with his elders during the summer vacation and can easily get a purchase permit. Anyone who is not a fool can figure out the tricks involved.

Therefore, in the following conversation, Han Li not only learned from Captain Wang about the situation of the surrounding villages and fish catches, but also more about the current attitudes of the locals towards seafood. Of course, Captain Wang spent most of his time talking about their difficulties.

For example: There is an old saying in the local area that "fish is the bran of meat". No fish, shrimp or crab can satisfy your hunger. Due to geological reasons, the annual crop harvest in these coastal villages is pitifully small, and they can only rely on these seafood to survive.

However, in the eyes of local fishermen, eating seafood every day is not a way to live. If a family can have a meal of pork, it will make them happier than the Chinese New Year.

Unfortunately, after these seafoods are caught, they become smelly on the same day and rotten in three days, making it impossible to transport them outside to exchange for money or food.

Captain Wang said that in recent years, thanks to the establishment of aquatic product companies, warehouses capable of freezing and refrigerating, and roads and cars built by the state, the lives of fishermen like them have become much better than those of the older generation.

However, the number of cold storage warehouses is still a bit small. Every year when the fishing season comes, the fish caught at sea weigh down the nets so much that they cannot be pulled up. As long as the luck is not too bad, one can return with a full load every time.

Those production teams that delivered their goods to the aquatic product company late would not accept them, so they could only bring them back, dump the fish on the roadside with wheelbarrows, and pick out the valuable fish from them and pickle them with salt.

In a good year, the pickled fish on the roadside would be piled up like firewood, which looked good, but the same was true for all the surrounding production teams. They had no way to sell the fish, and in the end, apart from completing the tasks assigned by their superiors, most of the salted fish would be distributed to the villagers, and only a few of the best would be left behind and wait for the surrounding buyers to come and buy them.

As for the shrimps, crabs, and many other fish that were of little value in the eyes of the locals, the villagers were allowed to pick them up at will. In the end, those that no one wanted were taken away to be made into manure or crushed to feed the pigs.

Han Li couldn't help but sigh when he heard this. This situation where I had good things but couldn't sell them due to various storage and transportation problems, and there was no way for the villagers to live a good life, let alone in the 1970s, it was not uncommon even in the late 1990s.

Otherwise, the country will outsource the road construction to capable people or companies for a long period of time and allow investors to charge fees for a certain number of years.

Finally, with the permission of the national finance, he turned into an infrastructure maniac, frantically building all kinds of infrastructure, including small mountain village roads that businessmen and enterprises were unwilling to build.

There may be many situations like this, but we have to admit that in the end people’s products can be sold, and everyone’s life and transportation are better than before.

Han Li and Captain Wang had almost understood the news, and then went to the warehouse to check the goods. This broken warehouse looked inconspicuous from the outside, but there were really a lot of things inside.

Dried abalone, dried sea cucumbers, dried scallops, bundles of kelp, baskets of seaweed, and dried shrimps. It can be seen that the local villagers are not stupid at all. What they lack is a way to cash in on these things.

Han Li was a person who had hardly any contact with seafood in his two lifetimes. Although he knew these things, he had no idea about the grade classification of these seafood.

But isn’t Captain Wang next to him? Han Li directly asked about the two kinds of sea cucumbers that were obviously made with unskilled craftsmanship.

"Captain, when I was with Sijiucheng, I had a lot of good seafood, but I've eaten a lot of sea cucumbers. But why do you have black ones among these two types of sea cucumbers?"

Captain Wang smiled and explained to Han Li that the blackened sea cucumbers were specially made by local fishermen in order to extend their shelf life. The last processing step of this type of sea cucumber is to wrap the sea cucumber with wood ash and then dry it. This layer of wood ash plays a role in drying and absorbing moisture, and the locals call it carbon ash sea cucumber.

Another type of sea cucumber with slight white salt flowers on the surface is made using a more traditional craftsmanship. Although the shelf life of this method is not as long as that of the carbon ash sea cucumber, this method can maintain the taste of the sea cucumber to the greatest extent.

At the end of his speech, Captain Wang pointed at the things in the warehouse and patted his chest to guarantee that these dry goods were of absolutely the best quality and were all clean without a grain of sand.

After hearing this, Han Li asked Captain Wang about the prices of these things.

The price of dried sea cucumbers is twenty to twenty-five yuan per catty, which is similar to the price list Gong Jianglong gave him.

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However, what Han Li did not expect was that these dried abalone, which looked very good, were large in size and very imaginative, were only 60 to 80 cents per pound. This was basically the same price as the carp bought in Sijiu City, but in Han Li's opinion, it was almost like giving them away for free.

After hearing the price for the free gift, Han Li learned about the situation from the side.

It turns out that the main reason why local villagers get these abalones is because of their shells. Abalone shells are called "Shijueming" in traditional Chinese medicine, and the medicinal materials company purchases them all year round.

Because it is a collective economy, many things cannot be done, but each place has its own workarounds.

In order to get some vegetables, grain and pork for their families, local villagers often dive into the water to pry these abalones.

They exchanged the abalone shells for money, and handed the abalone meat over to the production team for confiscation. The elderly and weak in the village processed it into dried goods at home to earn some work points. This method of processing has almost become a tacit rule in the local area.

Although abalone is one of the eight delicacies of the sea in the Manchu-Han banquet, the number of people who eat it is far less than that of sea cucumbers, especially in the Beidai H area. Some people even avoid it because of its "shape", which is the most important reason why dried abalone is so cheap.

Han Li didn't care whether others ate it or not, but as a person who had never eaten abalone in his previous life, but whose ears were full of legends about this food, the more of this kind of thing the better. Anyway, it wouldn't go bad if he put it in the decomposition space, Han Li said immediately after listening.

"It just so happens that an elder of mine likes to eat abalone. I'll buy all of them from your team. But I came here on horseback this time. Captain Wang, how much can I take away?"

(End of this chapter)