Chapter 164: Meat
At the Mwanza aquatic products processing plant, workers are pouring freshly purchased fish into wooden barrels, ready for the next stage of processing. This factory relies purely on manpower and chiefly produces salted dried fish. Salted fish can be stored for a long time, is easy to transport, and can even be carried as army provisions.
In an era when preservation technology is still immature, East Africa can only make these traditional products. Canned goods would be somewhat feasible but are too costly. Cans require metal or glass containers, and the colony lacks the capacity to produce either; only after they have their own ironworks or glassworks can the idea be revisited. And even that is just the first step. After acquiring materials, you need machinery and other techniques.
During this age, every piece of metal—even bones—was significant enough to be collected for reuse. East Africa certainly isn't wealthy enough to provide immigrants with canned food. Production alone would be expensive; the cost of recycling containers (sterilizing or re-melting them) wouldn't be worthwhile. To make a profit, you'd have to sell them in Europe, where fierce competition already exists, plus canned foods aren't widely accepted except in the military, and most armies already have stable suppliers. Ernst has no chance to break in unless a war causes a big demand for military rations.
Hence, the Hechingen consortium mostly exports simple farm products like flour and timber to Europe. Within the colony, fish or meat is processed in a simpler manner. Attempting mechanical fish processing is beyond imagination for now—just the first step of descaling is a headache. As a result, the salted dried fish produced in East Africa is entirely handmade, with no machinery involved.
Every day at Mwanza's aquatic products processing plant, large batches of freshly caught freshwater fish from local fishers are brought in. Workers there first remove scales and other waste using hand tools; the next group splits open the fish, taking out guts and gills, then rinses them. After that, fish are neatly arranged in big vats for salting, and finally hung on rods to be air-dried. It's a plain, unadorned method—but done at scale, so production capacity is decent. With more than 500 workers, Mwanza's aquatic products processing factory is the largest dried-fish producer in East Africa, supplying the interior and arid areas.
After the colony banned the consumption of wild game, it needed alternatives for meat. As East Africa wages one-sided slaughter of wildlife and fences off territory, animals' habitats have shrunk, leaving large numbers of beasts destroyed. Meanwhile, the colonists still require protein. Their solutions are threefold: harness East Africa's fisheries, raise livestock, and plant soy.
Of these, fisheries are the most readily available, with broad waterways – especially many lakes. Both freshwater and saltwater fish resources abound. Livestock takes time to breed, plus the colony has a limited supply, mostly reliant on imports. Another decade or so will be needed before big results appear. Soy offers the easiest access to plant protein. The colony grows it on a broad scale, often in rotation with wheat, given that soy root nodules fix nitrogen. The tropical highlands are well-suited for it, though it can't replace meat entirely.
Thus, to meet settlers' protein needs, fisheries remain the primary option, particularly as fish is safer to eat than the wildlife of the African savanna. After preliminary salting, pathogens and parasites are effectively reduced. In Mwanza and other places, large volumes of fish are handled by laborers. Once scaled, eviscerated, salted, and dried, these fish can be stored in East Africa for several months. Coastal, lakeside, or riverside dwellers can have fresh fish, while folks in drier areas survive on salted fish.
Naturally, fish alone doesn't solve everything. Animal husbandry must be the real path forward. The East African grasslands form a vast natural ranch—even if not very high-quality, the sheer size is huge. The greatest constraint is the uneven seasonal rainfall. Meanwhile, for the next century at least, cattle and horses cannot be replaced. Besides cattle and horses, the region also values poultry such as chickens, ducks, and geese. Large-scale poultry raising is no simpler than livestock, so the colony mostly relies on small backyard flocks, which are less vulnerable to epidemics. That means it's immigrants themselves who feed them. The government only supervises or encourages it.
East Africa has also promoted the local "guinea fowl," sometimes called the "turkey hen" when it was introduced into Europe by the Ottoman Empire, said to have decent meat. Since this is a rare African domestic species, it's more disease-resistant, and guinea fowl screech endlessly upon seeing fire, thus helping warn of fires. That's crucial in a place like East Africa, especially in the dry season, where everything is flammable.
Poultry-raising in East Africa depends mostly on household initiative. Families must also manage their own vegetable plots. After all, the colony's farmland is quite large. But each immigrant has to complete the farmland tasks assigned by the Hechingen consortium first, leaving little time for personal expansions. Meanwhile, newly opened farmland always belongs to the government and can be reclaimed any time. The immigrants thus lack property rights. East Africa has no shortage of land, so the administration tolerates them cultivating extra patches, but it's mostly women who do the extra labor—since female immigrants have relatively lighter assigned tasks, they can find time to bring in extra income. Chicken and vegetable patches are basically run by women and children.
Returning to aquatic products factories: at every big lake or coastal site, the colony has built fish-processing plants that collectively supply meat throughout East Africa. By local distribution, each facility covers its own zone's meat requirements, joined by other permissible meat sources. Overall, it suffices for settlers' demand for protein.
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