The Benefits of Tobacco
For the sake of mass production, they first went looking for suitable land. Ever since the cherry tomatoes, Starlight Food had made a habit of buying up spare ground in other regions ahead of time, so all that remained was to choose. There was no need to wear out their shoes hunting for a plot.
There was even a dedicated department that surveyed parcels and scoured the whole country for land that would do. The plants sprung from Hana's tooth all showed such monstrous vigor that finding ground for them was, if anything, convenient.
Whatever came from Hana's tooth was hardy enough to make you think it would take root in barren soil—or even in concrete. Fertile earth was unnecessary; any reasonably level stretch would serve. They simply tried to avoid plots pitched at a slope steep enough to make farming miserable.
Once a suitable site had been chosen, they moved the plant under security tight as a vault. The step was necessary, because the offspring grew properly only around the plant that had come from Hana's tooth. If that parent plant withered or died, no one yet knew what would become of the others—the ones that were, in effect, its children.
Parent plants of this kind were kept under guard inside buildings that would not so much as flinch through an earthquake, a tsunami, or a typhoon. A building meant to house one such plant was already finished, and into it went the tobacco plant that had just appeared. From now on, the stem that would bring forth these leaves would live under the sternest protection for a thousand years and more. It had no set lifespan to begin with.
Kim Sehee came out to the tobacco fields. The crop had already grown to a fair height. Raising tobacco ordinarily took months, but Hana's plants boasted a rate of growth so uncanny that it had long since stopped being a surprise.
Still, the peculiar nature of tobacco itself made things a little awkward. The crop demanded far more human hands than any other. Other plants could be worked with farm machinery and tools; tobacco could only be handled by hand. There was simply nothing about it that justified a machine.
Which meant that once this pilot crop was finished, they would once again be hiring staff by the truckload. That, more than anything, was why the government rarely picked a fight with the way Starlight Food did business.
Starlight Food had all but reinvented itself as a company devoted to farming, and the number of people it hired beggared imagination beside other firms. Vast fields had to be managed, harvests brought in, and the work piled up like a mountain. It was one of the few industries that employed nearly as many hands as manufacturing.
Nor was Starlight Food a company that lived off the domestic market alone. Its rice went to Japan, and the newly released Tangle was selling in the United States; recently it had even pulled off the notoriously difficult feat of winning a supply contract with the U.S. military. Its path was nothing like that of the leech-like firms people liked to say grew fat with a straw stuck into the home market.
Bluntly put, even if sales inside the country were banned outright, Starlight Food would not so much as blink. It could simply sell the entire volume overseas. There were even travelers from abroad who bought Starlight Food goods while visiting Korea and carried them home, because the company had not yet entered their own countries.
"Still, I am worried..."
"What seems to be the problem?"
"I looked into tobacco farming, and it doesn't seem like an easy business."
Kim Sehee did not know everything. That was only natural. Had tobacco never grown from Hana's tooth, it was a fact she might have gone her whole life without learning. She was not a smoker, after all.
"They say tobacco farming isn't particularly good for the body."
In fact, the number of households growing tobacco in the country was falling sharply. While the crop was in the field, the plants gave off nicotine, and farm them long enough and a person became addicted without ever meaning to. Some complained of dizziness and vertigo in the middle of the work; others lost consciousness altogether.
But Kim Sehee's worry vanished at the very next words from her employee.
"Ah. Hana's tobacco leaves don't give off nicotine. The sort of thing you're worried about won't happen, Chairman."
"They don't? That's a relief, then."
It was the moment the weight lifted. If nicotine had made the crop impossible to grow, she would have had no idea what to do next.
And so, as a pilot, the tobacco leaves proved they could be grown with success. Now it was time to put those leaves through every experiment they could think of.
"This tastes absolutely incredible."
"Doesn't it? I can barely remember any cigarette I've smoked until now. What kind of leaf were they even using?"
The Starlight Research Institute ran experiment after experiment. To wring out as much data as possible, they tried everything, down to the trivial.
The participants' reactions were excellent. Most of them, first of all, said it was wonderful to smoke. Everyone knew cigarettes came in many varieties, each with a taste of its own. But the leaf grown from Hana's tooth drew praise without a single dissenting preference—every participant talked it up until their mouths went dry.
And the greatest advantage of Hana's tobacco leaf was that it needed none of the usual chemical additives.
A cigarette was not leaf alone. Toxic substances harmful to the human body were packed in alongside it and smoked—tar, or compounds like DTD, things that did people no good.
At first they manufactured Hana's tobacco to the same formula as an ordinary cigarette and handed it to the test subjects. A hundred participants took part in the trial at the Starlight Research Institute. Continuous smoking was hard on the body, so they spread the cigarettes across as many people as they could.
"This is too harsh. I can't smoke it."
"I'm coughing too. Why is the taste this strong?"
All ten of the subjects complained of distress when the cigarette was made like a conventional one. The flavor was far too strong, and they coughed and coughed, as if they were smoking for the first time.
Told that the taste was overpowering, the researchers began stripping out the chemicals inside. Ordinarily, remove those and a cigarette lost the flavor smokers wanted, and they turned away from it. Hana's leaf was different.
"This is exactly right."
"Of everything I've ever smoked, this is my favorite."
The subjects preferred the cigarette with not a single chemical in it. One almost hesitated to call the thing a cigarette at all. It held nothing but a lone tobacco leaf, and every smoker had nothing for it but praise.
Make a cigarette from leaf alone, and nine smokers out of ten would call it tasteless and go looking for something else.
"Can we even call this a cigarette?"
"I was wondering the same."
"There's not a single toxin or chemical in it... nothing but nicotine. Can we really still say cigarettes are terribly bad for the body?"
Just as the researcher said, no one could imagine what a cigarette reduced to nicotine alone might do. A miraculous cigarette—one that might even look after a smoker's health—had been born.
A private person could obtain seed, harvest it, roll cigarettes, and tinker with the leaf however they pleased. The moment they sold tobacco, however, they ran afoul of the law.
That was why Starlight Food's manager had summoned a representative from KT&G. There was only one company in the country that would buy tobacco leaf at a fair price. It had once been a public enterprise, but privatization had turned it private, and KT&G was also the buyer of the leaf produced domestically.
"Starlight Food will be supplying tobacco leaf."
"I'm sorry?"
The representative understood, then, why he had been called. To think they would lay a deal this large on the table...
He wiped away sweat pouring like rain with his handkerchief, then spoke.
"It's such a sudden proposal... I'm a little thrown, I have to say."
Even so, domestic tobacco farms were shrinking by the day. If the leaf was offered at a reasonable price, the news was, from KT&G's point of view, nothing but welcome.
The state had been giving them pointed looks as the share of domestic leaf kept falling. From KT&G's side, it felt unfair. It wasn't that they refused to buy. They could hardly stop the country's tobacco farmers from quitting over backbreaking labor and illness.
So of late they had, at least, been cutting back on imports of foreign leaf.
"If the price and the volume line up, it's good for us."
The representative said as much as his authority allowed.