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 mention it. My name is Wang Jianguo. I am the captain of the production team in Ganshitou Village."

"Captain Wang."

The two of them came into the house while talking. After sitting down, Captain Wang asked with some doubt.

"The accent of Han the purchaser doesn't seem to be from our locals?"

"Captain Wang has a good eye. My elders and I came here from Sijiu City for vacation. We couldn't stay idle in the sanatorium, so I asked for a temporary purchaser job. I ran back and forth to gain some knowledge and understand our local customs and customs. 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. They were not comparable to the coal mine sanatorium where Zhang Dagang, who often came to their village to purchase materials, worked.

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

Therefore, in the following conversation, Han Li not only learned about the surrounding villages and fishing from Captain Wang, but also learned more about the current attitude 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 bran in meat". No fish, shrimp, or crab can satisfy 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, eating seafood every day is simply not a life for human beings in the eyes of local fishermen. If a family can eat pork, it is even happier than the New Year.

It just so happens that after these seafood are salvaged, they are smelly on the same day and rotten in three days. There is no way to transport them outside to exchange for money or food.

Captain Wang said that in recent years, with the establishment of a fishery company, warehouses that can freeze and refrigerate, and roads and cars built by the state, the lives of fishermen like them have been much better than those of the older generation.

However, the number of frozen and refrigerated warehouses is still a little small. Every year when the fishing season comes, the fish caught at sea make the nets so heavy that they can't be pulled up. As long as the luck is not too bad, they can return with a full load every time.

Those production teams that deliver late to the fishery company will not accept them. They can only bring them back and dump the fish on the roadside with a cart, and pick out the valuable fish from them and pickle them with salt.

If it is a good year, the pickled fish on the roadside are like firewood piles, piles and piles, which look good, but all the surrounding production teams are in this situation. They have no way to dump them. In the end, in addition to completing the tasks of their superiors, most of these salted fish will be distributed to villagers, and only a few of the best ones will be left waiting for the surrounding buyers to come and buy them.

As for the shrimps, crabs, and many fish that were of no value to the locals, the villagers were allowed to pick them up at will. In the end, those that no one wanted were taken to the manure fermentation and broken into pieces to feed the pigs.

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

Otherwise, the country would have contracted the road construction to those capable people or companies for a long time afterwards, and allowed investors to charge fees for a certain number of years.

Finally, with the permission of the national finance, it became an infrastructure maniac, frantically building various infrastructure, including those small mountain village roads that those businessmen and companies were unwilling to build.

There may be many such and such situations in this, but it has to be admitted that the people's products can be sold in the end, and everyone's life and traffic are better than before.

Han Li and Captain Wang had almost understood the news, and then went to the warehouse to look at the goods together.

This broken warehouse is not impressive from the outside, but there are really a lot of things inside.

Dried abalone, dried sea cucumber, 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 these things.

As a person who has not been in contact with seafood for two lifetimes, Han Li knows these things, but he does not understand the level of work of these seafood.

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

"Captain, when I was in contact with seafood in Sijiucheng, there were many good ones, but I have eaten a lot of sea cucumbers, but why are there black ones in these two kinds of sea cucumbers?"

Captain Wang smiled and explained to Han Li that this blackened sea cucumber was specially made by local fishermen to extend the storage time. In the last processing step of this kind of sea cucumber, the sea cucumber is wrapped with plant ash and dried. This layer of plant ash plays a role in drying and absorbing moisture. Local people call it carbon ash sea cucumber.

Another type of sea cucumber with a slight white salt flower on the surface is made using a more traditional craft. 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.

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

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

The price of dried sea cucumbers is 20 to 25 yuan per catty, which is similar to the price list Gong Jianglong gave him.

But what Han Li didn't expect was that these dried abalones that looked good, large, and imaginative were only 60 to 80 cents per catty, which was basically the same price as the carp bought in Sijiu City, but in Han Li's opinion, it was almost free.

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

It turned out that the main reason why the local villagers went to get these abalones was because of its shell. The shell of abalone is called "Shijueming" in traditional Chinese medicine, and the medicinal materials company buys it 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, grains, and pork for their families, local villagers often dive into the water to pry these abalones.

They exchanged abalone shells for money, and handed abalone meat to the brigade for confiscation. The old and weak in the village processed it into dried goods at home to earn some work points. This processing method 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, there are far fewer people who eat it than those who eat 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 doesn't care whether others eat it or not, but as a person who has never eaten abalone in his previous life, but his ears are full of legends about this ingredient, the more of this kind of thing, the better. Anyway, he won't spoil it if he puts 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've bought all of those in your brigade, but I came here on horseback this time. Captain Wang, how much can I take away?"