This from Newsweek's article about the architect Rem Koolhaas:

“My parents needed to find extreme ways of getting food,” says Koolhaas as we talk at his firm, OMA (Office for Metropolitan Architecture), overlooking the resurrected city. “My father succeeded to buy a number of laboratory rats,” he says, “and so at some point they were delivered at home, but there was no electricity anymore, so when my parents entered the apartment they felt that there was something there, and they lit a match and there was a heap, a kind of pyramid, of dead rats.”

The key words are extreme, food, rats, and electricity. Food and rats may be connected extremely, but what is electricity doing in there? For instance how did, and did finally, the lack of electricity interfere with food and rats being so connected ?