A Cigarette Good for the Body?
"I haaaate summer..."
Jiyu was melting clean through. Summer break had ended, but the heat showed no intention of backing off. October was nearly here, and the temperature was still hitting thirty degrees Celsius—nearly ninety Fahrenheit. Weather like that simply wasn't reasonable. Where had autumn gone? It was hiding somewhere and refusing to come out.
Lately, living through Korea's weather felt less like spring, summer, autumn, and winter, and more like a year that had kept only summer and winter. Spring and autumn were absurdly brief, gone before you ever felt the temperature against your skin. Anyone who had bought clothes for those seasons was close to weeping tears of blood. The seasons ended before they ever got the chance to wear a single outfit.
Hot, then cold, then hot, then cold again. It felt like pacing endlessly between a walk-in freezer and a sauna.
The one saving grace was air conditioning, which meant they didn't have to stew in the full weight of summer the entire time. Yumi walked with a melting Jiyu braced against her. Yumi herself was one step from liquefying. And so was I.
The summer sun was far too great a trial for kids who were still only third graders. Not the sort of obstacle you simply pushed through.
"We're almost there, you two. Hang on just a little longer."
An ice cream shop showed in the distance. Step inside that Baskin-Robbins, and the air conditioning—cranked to the max—would be there to greet them. An ice cream shop that didn't run the AC would be nonsense. Every scoop they had worked so hard to make would melt into soup.
"Haaaa! Heavens above!!!"
Jiyu was howling at the sky. At school the AC blasted so hard she barely knew what heat was. Out here, she was walking through the full reality of it.
"We're here!"
I opened the shop door. The moment it swung wide, a rush of cold air snapped us back to our senses, reassembling minds the heat had melted down. Whoever invented air conditioning deserved a Nobel Prize. That single machine had probably saved a few hundred million lives.
"It's cool! So cool!"
Jiyu and Yumi lit up the instant they felt the chill. Once we were inside Baskin-Robbins, the heat forgotten, we set about choosing ice cream. Being short, we couldn't see the case very well. I wanted to grow, and fast. There were far too many inconveniences that came with being small. Back when I was a man, past a hundred and eighty centimeters—nearly six feet—I had never understood why height mattered.
In a child's body like this, though, a hundred and thirty-five centimeters, barely four and a half feet, felt like a genuine burden. Hadn't that same short stature already kept me off the extreme roller coasters at the amusement park?
"Jiyu, Yumi, I'll treat you. Pick whatever you want!"
"Whoa! Hana, you're the best!"
"Thanks, Hana! We'll enjoy every bite!"
I had never come out and told Jiyu and Yumi that I had an absurd amount of money, but the two of them seemed to have caught on anyway. It was obvious, really. Riding to and from school every day in a foreign car that looked expensive at a glance, and then claiming to be poor, would have been the strange part. Even so, I didn't treat them every day.
If I paid for everything just because I had money, the friendship might curdle into something ugly. There was a chance they would become friends only for the cash. I couldn't say Jiyu and Yumi would ever think that way, but I also couldn't know how things might turn out.
"Mmm, I'm going with strawberry!"
"Instead of each of us getting our own, wouldn't it be better to buy a quart or a family size and share?"
Yumi had a point. We could split the flavors anyway, so buying one of those sizes and sharing, the way she said, seemed smarter.
"Sounds good! Then let's each pick a flavor we like!"
"Okay!"
We could have chosen five flavors, but we settled on three. Our stomachs were too small to taste all five. I picked chocolate, Jiyu picked strawberry, and Yumi picked Shooting Star. I hadn't expected our tastes to diverge quite this much.
"Um, big sis! Could you pack these three flavors nice and full?"
Jiyu was laying on the charm for the employee. Watching her, a dad's smile rose on my face before I could stop it. The woman behind the counter must have felt the same way. She answered with a bright grin.
"Sure, sure. Big sis'll pack it nice and full for you."
With that, she pulled out a scoop and dug in deep, again and again. Then she brought out a family-size tub and began packing the ice cream in, layer by careful layer.
We watched it go in with shining eyes, staring so hard it was a wonder beams weren't shooting out of them.
KT&G pored over the data Starlight Foods had sent. For the cigarettes they intended to make going forward, the research Starlight Foods had produced was worth a great deal.
"What? We don't have to add any of the other harmful substances?"
"They're saying this tobacco leaf alone is enough to make a genuinely tasty cigarette?"
KT&G could hardly believe the findings. A cigarette was never just tobacco leaf. All sorts of harmful substances went in, and even toxic ones, to tune the flavor. Yet the data from Starlight Foods stated flatly that none of those harmful or toxic additives were necessary at all. Using that data as a base, KT&G began running experiments of its own.
No matter that the numbers came from Starlight Foods, there were too many parts that simply didn't make sense to swallow on faith. Of course, KT&G did place a certain trust in the uncanny foods Starlight Foods produced. Among the people who worked there, there probably wasn't a single person who hadn't tried something Starlight made. Even now, plenty of KT&G employees kept Starlight Cherry Tomatoes on hand against the prospect of overtime.
KT&G's company dinners tended toward the bland side, so people often just ate a Starlight Cherry Tomato to get a meal out of the way. The company itself more or less encouraged it. Paying employees to handle their own meals was far cheaper than preparing food for everyone working late.
KT&G tried swapping the tobacco leaf Starlight Foods had made into cigarettes they were already producing. The results were not good.
"Cough, cough!"
"This is way too strong..."
The in-house smokers were unanimous: the flavor was far too intense. Even if they tried to tough it out and keep smoking, the coughing kept forcing the smoke back out, and they couldn't finish a cigarette. KT&G went back and rebuilt them according to the data Starlight Foods had provided, stripping out the harmful substances and the toxins. Safety testing was already complete, so smoking them in this form wasn't a concern. The only purpose was to confirm whether the data was actually true.
"This is really good, though?"
"Starting today, I'm switching to this."
The praise was unanimous. Most of them went so far as to say they would abandon the cigarettes they had been smoking and move over to the ones KT&G had just made. KT&G understood, all at once, that this cigarette was exceptional. Which meant the data from Starlight Foods was true.
KT&G felt the need for an entirely new cigarette lineup. This one still contained nicotine, so it would hardly be good for anyone's health, but set beside the cigarettes they were already making, the difference was night and day. Simply leaving out the toxic substances and the chemicals would amount to an enormous improvement for the body.
A cigarette might still be bad for you, but it would be far better than the others. And what KT&G was counting on was this: cigarettes made from Starlight Foods' tobacco leaf were, without exception, outstanding in flavor. If what smokers cared about most was the taste of what they smoked, then the reason to switch from some other brand to this one was perfectly clear.
Good flavor, and not all that bad for your health besides—there would be no reason left to smoke anything else.
KT&G turned its attention to electronic cigarettes as well. Tobacco leaf of this quality left no reason not to use it.
KT&G was also a company that exported heavily overseas. They were very curious what smokers in other countries would do once they tried a cigarette made from this Starlight tobacco leaf. Taste something you couldn't get from any other cigarette, and you would become a devotee of whatever KT&G made.
After finishing a range of tests, KT&G was able to close the tobacco-leaf contract with Starlight Foods successfully. It was a deal with no downside for them in any case—a chance, while they were at it, to raise the steadily falling share of domestic tobacco leaf they purchased. It was good for Starlight Foods, too. A contract that suited both sides.