Category Archives: College

While Weeding Cilantro with a Japanese Hand Hoe on Daddy’s Farm

I asked Mommy how she knew Daddy was the one once –
and observed the steam from her black-rimmed mug
drift aimlessly from hands and up through greying strands
of hair until it disappeared. I watched her eyes cloud
with memory, then counted creases in her white skin
until she said, “His eyes are beautiful.” Daddy’s eyes
are blue – the color of sky in spring when glimpses of green
emerge, that pierce with passion too intense to name. Sometimes
it is the color of crashing waves past midnight, a deep blue
that trembles with wisdom. I wonder what blue my mother
saw. “His eyes were different, Sora. I saw truth.” Yes – there is
truth in every limb of Daddy’s body. His ears hear everything –
from the old creak of a dying tree, to the pop of a green bean bud
snaking blindly from ground to light. His mouth does not
form shouts, only laughs in a way that transmits tranquility, and
the creases of his sandpaper skin conceal bits of hardened
dirt. I see truth in the curve of his back, in muscles that tighten
and release as he pushes mulch up against baby green tomato
transplants, a human machine that only stops when purple spreads
like watercolor against greying clouds and fades into darkness.
And when they twinkle as Mommy erupts into laughter in front
of the television, massaging his work away – I know why
she followed those eyes across an ocean that separated her
from family and familiarity. Mommy captured blue eyes that
brimmed with truth and still holds tight – and so when I asked,
“How will I know?” she smiled and said, “You’ll find them, too.”

Daddy and Rhubarb

Midnight Dance at Deering

Walking back in the dark, slowly placing one foot in front of the other,

I started to twirl – my mind with my feet,

Staring up at the silver moon, tears

Welling up in my heart, mouth itching to open wide and

Scream – so I knew I had to dance and

When I ran out into that open field of

Pesticide-laden too-green grass and started to

Lunge, tiptoe, skip, leap and kick –

I was dancing in Daddy’s clover field again,

Nose filled with the sweet scent of loamy earth and the

Stars were shooting sparks out of the Milky Way –

My own private fireworks…but

Opening my eyes from that beautiful dream to see that

This sky of stars was distant, not quite there –

A friend who texts while talking to you – and the grass

Stung the skin of my legs as I rolled, then

Bent backwards, almost touching, arms flailing

And as music built up in my ears, so, too

Was that displaced feeling of loneliness and

Sadness, of fear of the unknown –

Building as I grabbed pieces of air in my fist, kicking and

Stabbing and running, my breath

Heavy, panting

Heartbeat wild.

My freshman year of college was

Years long, but too short and I am

More confused of my place on Earth –

My mission, my passion, my dream –

Than ever before and as

I fell to the ground, taking one final

Bow, the glorious ending to a

Midnight dance underneath a polluted sky, in a

Field of chemical-covered grass far from home, I

Listened to the thumping beat of my soul in

My ears and as the sound died down, my

Mask of power, of unending happiness,

Love, joy, confidence – crumbled, and I was

Wailing – without tears, without sound.

Afterwards I slid my dirt-smudged toes into

My Italian sandals once more, looked

Up at the haze surrounding the moon and

Slowly walked on, putting one foot

In front of the other

Drained, full, and empty

All at once.

Ambiguous and Proud

As the only Japanese girl in my tiny, conservative Midwestern town, I grew up fighting for Japan. In discussions about World War II in history class, the attack on Pearl Harbor would inevitably come up, and the boys would tease me mercilessly that the war was my fault. “Your people didn’t play fair,” they would say, and a blush of anger and embarrassment would flare up on my cheeks as I would explain the unfairness of the atomic bombs. They would laugh and tell me to go back to Japan – I was too unpatriotic.

But even as they mistakenly called me Chinese and stretched their eyes with their fingers to mimic the shape of my eyes, I never felt embarrassed of being Japanese. My American father and Japanese mother had instilled in me a great sense of pride in being Japanese. My siblings and I grew up in a bilingual environment. Because my father became fluent in Japanese, the rule was that we could only speak Japanese in the house and watch only Japanese television. My mother urged us to complete nine years of Japanese Saturday School, and her cooking palette included not only Japanese, but Thai, Italian, and Indian cuisine. My father made it a point to counter popular thought – he became an organic and local farmer at a time when this type of agriculture was made fun of as being “hippie” and impractical, for example – and because my father was the world to me, I made it a point to flaunt my uniqueness to my classmates. To think of it now, normalcy was to be white. Thus, I never identified as “white”; in fact, I rejected it again and again.

Yet I never identified as “Asian American” either – I identified as foreign Japanese and melting-pot American. When my friends urged me to date the only Chinese American guy in school, saying that we were both Asian and thus compatible, beneath my polite laughs I felt a tickle of anger. Culturally and linguistically, it is true that China and Japan are similar, but it irked me that they could group us together as one and say that we were the same.
During high school, I discovered that my parents had very much shaped my identity – they had always urged us to be both American and Japanese. But I felt that I needed to escape their protection to find my identity on my own. Thus, during my senior year of high school, I flew to Tokyo alone to spend an academic year abroad. There, it soon became clear that my light skin tone and curly Italian hair automatically allowed Japanese people to pin me as a foreigner, even though I spoke fluent Japanese and knew the culture extremely well. My appearance alone falsified my Japanese identity. One day, my Korean-Japanese friend told me that one of her classmates complained about wearing the same uniform as I did on the train, because I “stood out” and embarrassed her. My suspicion of being rejected by other Japanese was finally confirmed.

I came back to the States knowing that in Japan, I was American, and in America, I was Japanese. I could never be fully accepted by either group, which saddened me. In my mind, the world was conspiring against me.

But after taking a course in Asian American Studies and Hapa (Mixed Race) Studies with the incredible Prof. Nitasha Tamar Sharma, I have come to think of my non-acceptance by any group as a valuable quality. Not automatically being placed in one specific racial group on campus gives me the freedom to skip around, learn about different cultures and people without shame or doubts of being too white or too Asian. I am not white or Asian, or black or Latina, or any race at all for that matter, because in my mind identifying as a specific race cements racism.

All of my life I have searched for a clear identity and a place where I could be fully accepted. But today, my identity is vaguer than ever before. I seem to have multiple cultural identities, and no racial identity. But strangely, this vagueness does not faze me. To you, I might be Asian, white, or even Latina, but frankly it does not matter. Call me what you want, but I am ambiguous and proud.

Lies

I first found out about the danger of the nuclear radiation leaking from the Fukushima plants after the disastrous March 11th earthquake in Japan from a single text. A French friend who was studying abroad in Tokyo with me sent me a series of panic-stricken words full of concern about the effects of the radiation. “My friends from home are telling me it is dangerous to stay,” she had written. “Are you going home?”

This caught me completely by surprise, since in the days following the magnitude 9.0 earthquake off the coast of northern Japan, I, along with everyone else, was still just trying to accept the reality of the harrowing, stark sights of the aftermath of the tsunami. The Japanese media covered the nuclear plant and its many problems, but officials calmly proclaimed on television that of course, everything was under control. My host family believed them, as did I.

So I laughed off that text, replying to her that it would blow over soon enough and that there was absolutely nothing to worry about.

Then, my parents finally got through to me on the faulty phone lines, and my father’s worried voice cut through across the Pacific and into my innocent ear. He told me that he and my mother were rooted in front of our television day and night, watching the news on the Japanese news channel. The situation with the plant could get worse, and the Japanese media may be hiding the truth from its citizens, he told me.

I could feel the panic steadily grow inside of me as a thousand what-if scenarios repeated over and over in my mind. What if the media was feeding us lies? What if the nuclear plant blew up and radiation leaked into Tokyo? Tokyo was only a three hour bullet train ride from the plant. What if I couldn’t get to safety in time? What if there was another, even more destructive earthquake and tsunami headed to Tokyo? Tokyo Bay would rush in and drown us all.

That night, I started having nightmares of being pierced by radiation. The moonlight that streamed in through the window would burn me alive in these dreams, and I would toss and turn to try to get away. I wondered if there was already radiation in the water I drank to quench my parched throat in the morning. I trembled as violently as the aftershocks.

But my host family continued on as if nothing happened. They laughed, just as I had laughed at my friend, about my fears of radiation poisoning. They focused their energy on keeping Japan together after the tragedy of the tsunami.

To this day, I wonder if it was right of me to leave Tokyo just as Japan was facing a catastrophe. I could have stayed and helped the Japanese citizens somehow. I could have suffered with them. But my family was calling anxiously over the rushing waters of the ocean that separated us, and the nightmares would not stop.

I feel terrible because I had the option to leave. My host family and friends from school did not have that luxury, and thus comforted themselves with a baseless knowledge that they would not be hurt. I left with tears of sorrow, but also of guilt.

Thus, I applaud the courage of two indie filmmakers, Junko Kajino and Ed M. Koziarski, for going back to the radiation filled lands and air of Fukushima after the disaster, and trying to capture the stories of those who could not escape – those whose lives have deep and impenetrable roots in the now contaminated soil of Fukushima. Kajino and Koziarski’s documentary, Uncanny Terrain, which they are still in the process of completing, shows the lives of organic farmers of the area who cannot sell their produce because of the level of radiation.

Kajino and Koziarski held a preview showing of the documentary on Sunday at High Concept Laboratories. They showed only raw footage of what they had taken so far at this benefit event. In order to go back to Fukushima again to capture the one year anniversary of the earthquake, they needed to raise money, they said.

In the footage, one farmer poses the question of what can be said to be grown organically – without pesticides or herbicides – when the land itself is contaminated. Another farmer explains how many Fukushima residents face discrimination from other Japanese. He said people do not want to be near them for fear of “catching the radiation” and that cars with Fukushima plates are asked to be moved from parking spaces because they think those cars will contaminate the spaces.

When I saw the footage of the beautiful green mountains and rice paddies, which now are contaminated by radiation, I was both filled with sorrow and guilt. But another emotion soon consumed me – anger. These farmers had done nothing to deserve this, and yet, they suffer severely. Farmers are being forced to kill their livestock. They do not know of the effects of the radiation on their own bodies.

Had Japan done this to its own people? A well-researched article called “The Fallout” in the New Yorker explains that the United States may have effectively introduced nuclear power to Japan. After World War II, the article said, President Eisenhower was concerned that the fear Japanese citizens had of the nuclear weaponry America used against Japan was pushing it away from the United States. The solution they came up with was to put in place nuclear plants for peaceful purposes. Japanese politicians soon got on board, since they saw it as an easier way to create energy.

Now, more than half a century after the eruption of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan is again plagued with radiation. Will it be able to escape from nuclear energy? Will Japan finally learn to turn to wind, solar or geothermal energy?

Though someday I would like to return to live in Japan a bit more, my mother is still wary of the idea. There is always the danger of earthquakes and tsunamis. But now there is the added bonus of radiation – and radiation-poisoned food.

But as I think of my father’s own organic farm in Central Illinois, I think of the fact that Illinois relies heavily on nuclear power, as well. Recently, there has been news of a nuclear power plant in Byron, Illinois, shutting down because of power loss. My solution when faced with danger in Tokyo was to run away, but what will happen if our own organic farm was contaminated by radiation?

I can only sit and pretend that there is no danger, and fill myself with lies. This time, I have no other home to escape to and my heart is rooted in the dark black soil of our Bottomland.

The Question of Disappearance

I should have known. But it still came to me as a shock when I looked around during Wildcat Welcome week and found that though I was surrounded by Asian American faces, not one was Japanese.

Perhaps Japanese Americans or Japanese international students at Northwestern stuck together, and I had not chanced upon them yet, I thought.

Yet a quarter and a few weeks later, I am still in search of that group. I have discovered that the Japan Club is made up almost entirely by non-Japanese students, and though I have met some Japanese Americans, or at least heard of a few people of Japanese descent that apparently exist somewhere in the realm of our undergraduate population, I have yet to meet a concrete group of Japanese students that hang out together. I am close to concluding that such a group does not exist.

I guess after growing up in a conservative, Midwestern town where I was the only half-Japanese, much less Japanese, girl for miles and miles, I expected my college experience to be different. I believed that college – especially Northwestern, a university that boasts diversity – would have Japanese or half-Japanese people who would share my experiences. Chicago, I knew, had a Japanese population, so why would Northwestern be any different?

After searching, pondering, and asking all around, I found that the answer may lie in Japan herself. Japan has become more and more isolated over the years, and has kept most of its people inside her borders. There are many reasons for this; mainly, as I learned while studying abroad in a private Tokyo girls’ school last year, because Japan has a dwindling population to start with. My teacher, an older man, told all of us girls to “have lots of babies to save Japan.” Because of economic prosperity and more work options for women, Japanese women are starting families in their 40s instead of their 20s. Thus, they cannot have many children.

They also cannot afford to have many children. Japanese families are small because supporting a child through the grueling process of education is incredibly expensive. Because succeeding in life is all based on getting into a good college, and getting into a good college is in turn based all upon a single test, parents must spend extraordinary amounts of money on their children to have private tutors, or to go to expensive cram schools.

So the population of Japanese children is dwindling, and the Japanese government cannot afford to lose more people to immigration. That explains the downward spiral of the population of Japanese Americans residing in the United States.

But why are there so few Japanese students studying abroad? South Korea is undergoing the same problem of a dwindling population, but Korean international students are numerous at Northwestern.

This is a difficult question, since Japan – like Korea – knows that the future lies in global marketing. In any job, fluency in English would be greatly valued.

My theory is that Japanese students are so comfortable in their Japanese society that they do not want to experience being a foreign exchange student in a new place and culture. When I was studying abroad in Tokyo, I noticed that most of the girls I went to school with did not have dreams of living outside Japan. They had their puri-cura booths (photo sticker booths where eyes are made bigger and faces are literally changed so that they appear prettier) and karaoke, kawaii (cute) shops, and Disneyland (which they adore to the point of obsession). They had all that they ever wanted at their fingertips – not to mention a complex society which they were lucky enough to understand and navigate.

They did not want to study abroad in college, for they suffered through all-nighters, cram schools, tests and memorization just to be accepted into a good college, which would guarantee them a job. In Japan, college is where students are finally able to escape the strangling pressure to perform and do whatever they want. Tests are a piece of cake, class attendance is almost optional, and the last year is usually spent applying for jobs.

So why would you give that up to suffer through self-consciousness and difficult classes in the States? Not to mention that you would also have to give up a school that would guarantee you a job.

A final theory of mine is that after the disastrous earthquake and tsunami that killed thousands in northern Japan last year, Japanese people felt obligated to stay in the country to help rebuilding their ailing homeland. Every Japanese was expected to do something for their country. So that was yet another reason for Japanese students to stay home.

In the end, it is perhaps not really surprising that hardly any Japanese student seems to exist at Northwestern. And though I miss the opportunity to speak Japanese every day, as I had done at home, I will keep up my fluency in other ways.

For now, I guess I will remain the half-Japanese American student at Northwestern. At least as an Asian American, and as a mixed race student, I do not feel so alone.

Winter Beauty at the Chicago Botanic Gardens

Darkness slid slowly across the icy blue water of the lake towards Horaijima – the Island of Everlasting Happiness – as the sun set. On the island, Canadian geese bathed in the disappearing sunlight as a moon nearing fullness rose behind them. It was nearing sunset at the Japanese garden at the Chicago Botanic Garden.

Picturesque scenes such as this make winter a good time to visit the Botanic Garden.

“It’s in its own way as beautiful as in the spring when the bulbs are coming up, or in the summer. In the winter, it kind of has that feeling of a refuge, and it’s quiet. You can see, you know, the birds more. It has a whole new level of kind of, peace, because we don’t have thousands of people here, too,” said Jennifer Groskopf, the manager of visitor services at the Garden.

She recommended visiting the Japanese garden, greenhouses, and Dwarf Conifer garden during the winter months. Because both the Japanese and Conifer Gardens have many evergreen trees planted in them, they are green and beautiful year-round, Groskopf said.

Inside the tropical greenhouse, Jill Zigler, 35, offered a reason for the popularity of the greenhouses: “In a typical winter, this would be my favorite garden – just because it’s so warm,” she laughed.

The winter season also offers the opportunity to take gorgeous shots for photographers. 72-year-old Marty Winn said he was part of the Garden photo club that meets once a month to take pictures. “Sometimes when it snows there are interesting snow patterns. When the snow sticks to trees, you can get a nice photo,” he said.

Like Winn, Joy Howard, 30, enjoys the beauty of the snow. She said she liked visiting the Japanese Garden after it snows because “the way that it shapes the plants makes it interesting.”

The Japanese garden is a favorite during the winter season for Howard, but also to part-time Garden tour guide Lynn McKary, 58. “The Japanese garden in particular – they don’t consider winter dormant. They consider winter as important as any other season, and I just love that idea. They don’t wait out the winter. They say, ‘okay, it’s winter, so what? It’s going to be great,’” she said, referring to the Japanese.

The simplicity of the Japanese garden appealed to Gordy Okeke, 51. “My window through which I see the world is beauty. For me, I think the most beautiful place in the Botanic Gardens is the Japanese garden. There’s an old saying: truth is simple, if it were complicated, everyone would get it. So there isn’t any cluster here, everything is free, like a breath of fresh air,” he said by a bridge in the expansive Japanese garden.

As the sun made its way down, Okeke looked at the water surrounding the garden and said, “I love the position of water and ice – because when we were coming down here, part of it was flowing water and part of it was frozen. I saw beauty in that.”

Unity and Diversity

A diverse crowd of chanting protesters gathered in front of the Chicago Board of Trade building Saturday evening to express anger towards the wealthy “1 percent” of America and the banking system.

Mothers with babies, elderly men and college students stood on either side of West Jackson Boulevard, leaning up against walls, waving signs and banners, and beating on bottoms of blue pails. A 300-person crowd chanted back, “Occupy Chicago!” to the amplified shout of “People over profits!” coming from a large speaker across from the building. Cars, buses and police cars honked their horns and drivers waved their hands when passing the street in support of the protesters.

Albert Cipriani, 58, said he was protesting because “this is the first time in my life that there’s been a movement that expresses the profound pissed-off-ness of me at a fundamental level. It’s not just the Republicans against the Democrats – it’s not all that peripheral crap which the bankers love you to focus on. It’s grassroots, and it’s going after the central problem – the Central Bank,” he said.

Lisa Junco, 50, said she was also angry with the banks. “I’m basically here because I’m tired of all of the corporate greed,” she said. “The banks are not lending to small and medium sized businesses which could help stimulate the economy. They are also foreclosing on homes – sometimes illegally – and are not making much of an effort to work out payment plans to help keep people in their homes. They’re not helping out people or the economy at all. It’s just reckless greed. It won’t stop until more people have their voices heard,” she said. This was the third time she came to an Occupy Chicago event, she said. “This was kind of an awakening for me. I think I’m going to be more involved now,” Junco said.

Saturday was the first Occupy Chicago experience for Alison Victor, 30, and Sonia Brown, 24. Both Victor and Brown said that they were worried about their college tuition debt. “It’s a lot of money and it’s scary,” Brown said. Victor agreed and said, “I’m hoping that when I’m done with school it’ll be better. I have hope – I’m remaining optimistic.”

Money was also an issue for William Koehl, 60. He used to be a printer but “what happened to the newspaper business happened to the printing business 10 years earlier,” he said, so he is currently unemployed and has no health insurance.

Cipriani also said he lost his job as a technical writer in California. “They’re bulldozing homes in Riverside, California. And they’re boarded up and emptied. I was unemployed for three friggin’ years. I’d worked 20 some years as a hot-shot writer, okay, and it’s all dried up. That’s why I’m here in Chicago – that’s how bad it is,” he said.

Some protesters described their own solution to the economic problem. “We take control of our money supply, which is getting rid of the Federal Reserve, that’s how we do it,” Cipriani said. Koehl said we need a “rational transition” from Japanese to German trade policy, and therefore more regulation.

As the night grew darker, the crowd grew to about 1000 people, making maneuvering through the dense crowds difficult. Later, at about 7 p.m., the protesters began to march toward The Horse, according to occupychi.org.

Until then, protesters continued to rally, including 13-year-old Kyle Johnson. “I feel really fired up because,” Johnson paused, bursting into excited laughter, “it’s like this huge thing. Everyone’s really making noise and holding up signs. I’m definitely glad I came,” he said.

**written October 25th, 2011**

“I’m Just Like You”

On the medal stand of the 1968 Summer Olympics, John Carlos raised his fist in the air with Tommie Smith to express a need for change. He spoke with an award-winning  Nation magazine sports journalist Dave Zirin in Harris Hall Wednesday to tell about how dangerous activism can be, but why anyone can – and everyone should – stand up for their beliefs.

About 80 people sat transfixed during the speech, which was followed by a book signing for the recently published “The John Carlos Story”, a memoir ghost written by Zirin.

Zirin spoke first and gave background of the Olympic Project for Human Rights, or the movement that Carlos and Smith were involved with as Black Power activist athletes, and what happened at the podium. “Here they are going to the medal stand, right, and one of the main thoughts that they had as they were walking up there is the idea that they can climb on that medal stand, do their thing, and be shot dead – right there on the spot,” said Zirin. Though 1968 was a year marked by assassinations, Carlos raised his fist anyway, he said. “What makes John so remarkable is that he’ll go out to Occupy Wall Street and say that he does not regret what he did for one solitary second,” said Zirin.

But Carlos refused to say that he was special because of this courageous action. When Zirin sat down from his speech, Carlos stayed put in his seat, body relaxed and said in a calm, low voice, “Let me start by sayin’, I’m no different from anyone sitting in this audience. I’m just like you.” He described his childhood growing up in Harlem, New York, and how his father satisfied his curious nature by always answering his many questions  to the best of his ability. He told many stories of racial tension and hardships before and after his public salute and said, “No matter how old you are or how young you are, you are always in the position to teach someone. I lost my first wife because the government did so much to us and she couldn’t take it no more, and took her life. But do you think that could stop me for what I had to do?”

Audience members included activists and were cheered on by Carlos’ speech. Carlos Enriquez, 21, said, John Carlos “gives me hope that no matter what happens to me, you know, I can help the country to change and it’s all going to be worth it in the end.”

Kamau Taylor, 10, connected to Carlos’ struggle. “When I was little I used to get bullied and I know how it feels,” he said.

After a question and answer session, participants formed a long line in order to get their books signed.

But before everyone left, Carlos said God gave him a job “to communicate to no more than one person, and no more than one thing. The message that you give, you can put so much love and so much sunshine in one individual’s heart that can radiate throughout the world. So remember, when you leave here, the question is: are you the one person that I reached today?”

**Written October 24th, 2011**

The Monster of our Generation

In Mary Shelley’s book Frankenstein, a doctor unknowingly creates a monster by piecing together dead body parts. When his creation starts killing off his loved ones, he discovers that science can create a danger to society.

Genetically modified (GM) foods are the hidden monsters of our generation and American consumers deserve to know what foods they eat are genetically modified.

In order to produce plants that are genetically resistant to pests – in a quicker, simpler way than natural breeding – plant geneticists discovered a way to isolate a specific gene and insert it into another strand of DNA, creating genetically modified foods, according to Deborah Whitman, senior editor of CSA Life Sciences. The process sounds innocent, but studies have shown that GM foods pose great health and environmental risks.

For example, a 2011 review by Environmental Sciences Europe found that liver and kidney problems resulted from genetically modified corn and soybean diets in several studies on mammals. In 2005, research by the Russian Academy of Sciences found that “more than half of the rats that were fed GM soy died within the first three weeks of life, six times as many as those born to mothers fed on non-modified soy,” according to projectcensored.org. Furthermore, since the introduction of GM soy in the United Kingdom, there has been a fifty percent rise in soy allergies in people, according to globalresearch.ca.

Genetically modified foods also pose a risk to the environment, including unintended harm to other organisms, according to Whitman. The genetically modified plants can also cross breed, creating potentially harmful combinations of genes which could not occur naturally.

Yet GM foods are prevalent in Americans’ diet – they are in roughly 80 percent of the processed foods sold in the United States and Canada, in the form of corn, soy, cottonseed or canola, according to the Mother Nature Network. Therefore, most Americans have eaten genetically modified foods, but are not aware of it, since the FDA does not require genetically modified foods sold in the United States to be labeled.

Genetically modified food advocates claim that the disease and pest resistant plants would help end world poverty by creating a more stable and efficient food source. But just as pests developed resistance to DDT, insects might resist genetically modified crops as well, according to Whitman.

The European Union has already begun to enforce regulation on genetically modified foods, so the United States should follow suit. The FDA should enforce stricter regulation on GM foods, and should not put them on the market if studies point to health and environmental risks. There is no reason why American consumers should let companies trick them into unknowingly consuming genetically foods that are potentially harmful to them. Citizens should ask more questions and spread the word about GM foods; as consumers we have a right to know what it is in the food that we buy.

In Frankenstein, when the monster sees that its actions have led his creator to a depressing death, it realizes its mistakes and commits suicide. But this genetically modified food monster unfortunately does not have a heart or a soul – all the more dangerous to you and our earth.