FAQ on food

I like rice. Rice is great if you're hungry and want 2000 of something.
-Mitch Hedberg

A brief list of answers to potentially common questions about Korean food:

1. Do Koreans eat kim chi with every meal?
Yep. And white rice. Even for breakfast. And when they're 35 they look 25. (Yes that's a possible Post hoc ergo propter hoc but it seems more plausible than, "God unfairly made Koreans decay 10 years slower than the rest of the world.")

2. Um... What's kim chi?
It's cabbage, ginger, garlic, peppers, green onions and fermented seafood (oysters or anchovies or shrimp). They mix it all up and then bury it in pots for a few months. When it comes out it's nutrient rich and calorie low.

3. Have you eaten octopus?
My school serves it for lunch at least once a week. And I've eaten whole squids, a squishy-still-moving-slug-ish thing (it looks like digestion), fresh shrimp (cooked in the most torturous way the locals could conceive), abalone, chestnuts, the best pears in the world, etc. I like the food here a lot. But I'll be honest: I'm pretty sick of octopus, if you want to know the truth.

3a. What's the most torturous way the locals could conceive?
They put a quarter inch of salt in the bottom of a pan, heat it up, and toss in live shrimp. When they put the lid on the shrimp bounce around like popcorn, trying to flee the searing heat. After two or three minutes, some shrimp are still jumping. The first (and only) time I saw it, I lost my appetite. Why they don't kill them instantly via beheading or boiling, I hope has more to do with efficiency and less with deep-rooted sadism.

4. Oooook... something happier perhaps? What's octopus taste like?
Octopus tastes unique. It's really rich, like Top Ramen condensed into 8 tentacles. And sometimes it's entirely blah. I think it depends on how it's cooked. Sometimes it chews like thick noodles. Other times it's like masticating surgical tubing.

5. Is there anything Koreans eat that you refuse to try?
One thing: dog. They eat dog here. I have yet to see it for sale or in a restaurant, but seeing as I don't even like meat, I'm not about to eat Otis.

Another teacher and I remarked on the strange scarcity of shorebirds, pigeons and ravens. I've never been to a city and not seen pigeons and black birds. Nor have I ever been within 50 miles of a body of salt water and not seen seagulls. I mean, there's more seagulls in Spokane, 300 miles from a sea, than there are in Tongyeong, which rests in the middle of a bay, spread across multiple harbors and surrounded by hundreds of islands.

And, in Tongyeong, Chicken & Beer shops abound.

I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions. Meanwhile, no "chicken" for me.

6. How is the beer?
Budweiser's better. Thankfully the exchange rate ensures a bottle of Stella at a bar only costs US$5.75. You'd think that'd mean I'd drink less.

7. What do Koreans drink then?
In lieu of beer, the national drink is Soju. It's basically sweet vodka with a tequila kick. I won't touch the stuff. My co-workers and principals do, frequently. It's considered a marketable skill to be able to drink your boss under the table so people here practice a lot. Not kidding.

8. What's your favorite food?
I like most of it. The ingredients are fresh, cheap and the fish and rice are ecologically friendly. A lot of foods have labels telling you how close to organic it is. Also they eat food that's in season for the most part. So we've got great fruits right now and certain types of fish. I'm guessing in the next season we'll be eating different types of fish. The fast majority of fish we eat is caught the same day and live up until a couple of minutes before we eat it. Restaurants have tanks of fish out in front so you can preview dinner. In the fish markets, little old ladies sitting on stools point at the live fish they have in shallow bowls, which then protest by splashing water everywhere.

But the soups win overall. They're spicy, hearty, and healthy. Sometimes they have tofu, or muscles or shrimp. Other time they have fish in them. Like whole fish, chopped into three pieces and plopped into your soup.

8. How spicy?
Let me give you an example: a couple weeks ago I for dinner I ate fire. Of course I don't mean crackling in your fireplace fire. Oh no. I mean burned at the stake in the inquisition fire. Midway through my meal the pain reached a sufficient level, so I doused my mouth with just about a litre of water, which I hope simultaneously protected my stomach lining from vaporizing. It was quite the exercise in suffering. Like a good Korean Buddhist I strove to accept my circumstances as inescapable, and by the end of my meal I'd achieved complete detachment, albeit through ambivalence towards survival and a blunt numbness in my mouth.

I'm not complaining though. I'm convinced the spicy food best explains why I haven't been sick in Korea. Since so many illnesses enter the body through the nose and since my sinuses are regularly drained by lunch or dinner, germs have little time to colonize my body.

9. Sooo... that's your favorite food?
Not actually. One food in particular stands out as remarkable though. It's called 실비 and pronounced Shill-bee. It's entirely antithetical to profitable restauranteering. Say you go out for fish in the United States. You want a bit of seafood too. So you buy some fish, some muscles, oysters, clams on the half shell, then move on to some squid, a bit of abalone, and then a couple of crabs. You decide you want some beer. So you order a few of those. The meal runs you a hundred bucks or so. The food, if you're lucky was caught within the past week, and only on ice for a couple of days total.

Ok, now shillbe. You do things in reverse. You buy five or six beers. At 5,000 won each they run you around $30. That's some expensive beer. But here comes the finger food. It starts with some raw squid, octopus, muscles, some steamed oysters, abalone, and other seafoods. There's kimchi of course, and some potato pancakes. There's plenty of other sides as well (bean sprouts, seaweed, etc). You drink and eat to your fill. Then the server returns. This time she deposits four fried fish, some cooked squid, some new shellfish, some seaslugg-ish thing, some rice, etc. You're full again, but oh, here she comes with more fish, more seafood, more sides. Ad infinitum. She came back with at least 4 courses, but I really can't remember. I was rolling around on my back, futilely flailing my hands.

Oh and this fish and these seafoods were harvested that morning. Thirty bucks for more seafood than you can eat and 5 large beers to share amongst your friends. Perfect.

10. Do you ever miss food from home?
Yes! Lauren and I agree that its the small things we miss most about home. And most of those small things are food.

I miss flavor. Korean food has three flavors: spicy, fishy and umami. When we eat spaghetti, Korean people sometimes express surprise at the intensity of flavors. When I eat the same spaghetti I think, "Well, it's not that spicy."

I miss the diversity of tastes and spices in food from home. I miss that on Monday I can eat Mediterranean or Teriyaki, on Tuesday French or Chinese, on Wednesday Ukranian or Italian, on Thursday Thai or Indian, on Friday Ethiopian or Mexican, on Saturday fish-and-chips or Sushi, on Sunday oatmeal and all the leftovers. Every day here I eat Korean food. There's diversity in Korean foods, but it's still bit monotonous, and you know how much I abhor monotony.

I miss my Mom's soups on the first crisp days of fall. I miss Rachel's fresh baked chocolate chip cookies. I miss my dad's barbecue and chocolate milk. I miss sub sandwiches. I miss the choice and the paradox that comes with it.

Appreciate what you have: if you're not living in Poland or small-town Korea, you have plenty of options at dinner time.

If you have more questions, contact me. I love the food here, so I'm happy to talk about it.