Don’t raise unruly people in extreme cold weather

Chapter 512: Creating Sugar from the Air

It was a rare good day, and Perfect made an exception and set up a dining table in the garden of his mansion and had afternoon tea.

She didn't have this habit on weekdays. After all, for the nobles of Victoria, afternoon tea was equal to socializing, and not many people drank afternoon tea alone.

Although the formation of this habit has a lot to do with Victoria's eating habits after entering the industrial age, Perfecto does not have this habit.

In the past, Victoria generally had two meals a day, a hearty breakfast and a formal dinner, to ensure enough energy for the day.

However, with the advent of the industrial age, the abundance of material goods and the increase in people's production and life, the long period of fasting from breakfast to dinner became an unbearable problem for the nobles and even the common people.

Ordinary civilians don't have that much spare money, so it doesn't matter if they just endure it, but those workers who need to work choose fish and chips fast food.

Just eat a few bites to fill your stomach so that you can still be in a good working state when you work in the afternoon.

But this was somewhat inelegant for the nobles. Although their ancestors were barbarians who used knives to cut people, with the development of society, the nobles claimed to be civilized and began to pay attention to many things.

At first, people might just ask their servants to prepare some ordinary snacks for them. However, as this habit continued to develop and the nobles became more and more particular, it evolved into the custom of drinking afternoon tea.

Today, on the tables of nobles like Perfecto, afternoon tea has evolved into specially crafted, cloyingly sweet cakes and pastries, as well as high-quality black tea that must be imported.

In the original world, due to the development of the world's sugar-making technology, especially the emergence of high fructose corn syrup, sweetness and sugar seem to have become a very common and common thing in daily life.

But in fact, before the emergence of high fructose corn syrup, sugar was an absolute luxury and an important strategic material. In cold regions, sugar was even considered a necessity for survival.

It sounds absurd and hard to understand. Isn't it just sugar? Is it really that exaggerated?

In fact, before the invention of high fructose corn syrup, the status of sugar was so important and exaggerated that even the most important reason for Europeans in the original world to engage in the colonial movement was to establish plantations in the colonies to grow sugarcane to produce sugar.

Even in Japan at the end of the shogunate, the famous southwestern powerful domain of Satsuma relied on the trade of smuggled sugar to pay off the huge debt of one million taels of gold owed by successive generations. At the same time, it also accumulated the funds needed to complete modernization reforms and finally realized its political goal of overthrowing the shogunate.

So the value of sugar is self-evident.

Especially in the era when industry was underdeveloped, growing sugar crops meant competing with grain crops for land, so sugar became an absolute luxury.

The role of sugar also determines the importance of this sweet thing to human beings.

First of all, sweetness can make humans happy. This may be some kind of subconsciousness or specialization of the nervous system accumulated by humans in the ancient biological evolution process, but eating sweet food can indeed make people feel better.

Secondly, sugar is a very high-energy food. Eating sweets can effectively replenish energy consumption, which is also an important reason why people who love sweets tend to gain weight easily. Too much energy cannot be consumed and can only be converted into fat and stored. From this point of view, it is easy to understand why sugar has become an important strategic material and even a necessity for survival in cold regions.

Eating sweets can indeed quickly replenish the body's energy in cold areas, thereby resisting the energy consumption caused by the cold.

Of course, with the development of modern industry, sugar is also an important raw material for making various explosives. The so-called need to get a certificate to buy sugar is not unreasonable, but sugar can really be used to make explosives, and the explosives made with sugar are not small at all.

It is also because of this that sugar has been a very important strategic resource from the original world until World War II.

It was not until the invention of high fructose corn syrup that this sweet substance, which could be efficiently extracted from corn starch by industrial means, quickly replaced sucrose as a food additive, making sweets suddenly popular in the original world and making it no longer a luxury for people to eat sweets.

Of course, there are still some differences between high fructose corn syrup and sucrose, and these differences also lead to the fact that high fructose corn syrup still cannot truly replace sucrose, which we will put aside for now.

For Perfecto in this world, sugar is not something difficult for her to obtain. Even in this environment where the end of the world is about to come, she will not be short of money.

Not to mention that if an alchemist has trouble eating candy, then there will be real problems.

Although Perfect would not be so extravagant as to use the Philosopher's Stone to create sugar out of thin air through fantasy alchemy, it was still easy for him to design an alchemical ritual to convert carbon dioxide in the air into starch and then use the starch to make sugar.

This is even a scientific technology that was already achievable in the original world. Perfect simply replaced the catalyst and conversion enzyme parts with alchemy.

After all, if alchemy is not counted, the current technological level of the world is roughly equivalent to that of the First Industrial Revolution. Biology and chemistry are both in their infancy and are basically still in the stage of establishing a complete scientific system.

Now let's talk about the technological issues that the original world has only solved in the 21st century, which is somewhat difficult for the scientists in this world.

Of course, it’s completely different with alchemy, especially fantasy alchemy, which is like clapping your hands and making whatever you shout come true.

However, the sugar-making technology is not yet popularized, as Perfecto only remembered when she ate a dessert while slacking off a few days ago, so she spent a day or two completing the entire alchemical ritual process of obtaining carbon dioxide from the air to make sugar, intending to popularize it.

Today's afternoon tea can also be considered a form of promotion. At least we should tell others that we have sugar-making technology, so as to attract people to invest, right?
Perfect does not intend to fully disclose this technology. After all, although sweets are good, eating too much can cause various serious problems. Perfect does not want all of his people to be fat and bloated, and to drip two pounds of oil while walking on the road.

Therefore, it is enough for her to attract some people in a small circle to participate in the sugar-making project and ensure that enough sugar can flow into the market.

And this would also help win over the nobles, wouldn't it? Although Perfect didn't care much about these things, she would not refuse something that went with the flow.

(End of this chapter)