Ramblings

Lowpro sent me a link of some people eating Korean food at a restaurant in Shanghai. In the video they are eating live baby octopus, which in Korean is called san-nak-ji. I had it once when I was over there. I personally don’t think it’s very good, not because it’s a tiny, slimy, sea creature crawling around in your mouth trying to escape, but just because raw octopus doesn’t really taste like anything. An octopus is mostly saltwater, afterall. You also have to make sure the baby octopus is completely coated in oil before you try to swallow it, otherwise the suckers can stick to your throat and you can choke pretty easily.

One of the first meals I had when I arrived in Korea was a full-grown octopus, which the waitress brought to our table when it was still healthy and able to crawl around and look at us. It was big, with a head the size of a soccer ball and arms that easily could have been over four feet long. Our waitress plopped it into a pot of boiling water in front of us and put a glass lid on top, so I could see the octopus inside squirming around as it was being boiled alive, frantically trying to push the lid off with its arms. It was pretty sad, it’s futile attempt to save its own life. As you can imagine, it didn’t manage to last too long in there. When it was fully cooked and dead our waitress grabbed a pair of scissors and started cutting open its head, causing all of its brains and guts to leak out everywhere. She gave me a big spoonful of the brain and octopus broth and one of its arms, all covered in suction cups. It was alright, I guess. At the time though, I did feel kind of bad about it because octopi are really smart. If we lived under the sea they would be our pets.

Hadrian had probably eaten more than a few things people could consider pets. He was especially into eating dog in Korea, but he is also the only guy I’ve ever met who proudly claims to have killed and eaten a rat. Sometimes my Korean friends would tell me not to worry about eating dog, that it was fine since in Korea they only eat “basic, yellow dog” which, as far as I can tell, basically means golden retrievers and Labradors.

I went with Hadrian to a market once to find a special dog soup that’s served in the summer. I forget the name of it, but the idea is that you eat this extremely hot and spicy soup and then somehow it will cool you off, like a glass of lemonade. I never understood how a boiling hot bowl of soup that has been spiced with hot peppers and garlic was supposed to make you stop sweating, but Hadrian swore by it and ate it whenever he got the chance.

“Must be something in the dog meat, since they got different DNA and everything,” was the closest I ever got to a real explanation from Hadrian.

The live animal market in Korea is kind of a funny place, and based on the kind of looks we got walking through it, not the type of environment Koreans appreciate a pair of dopey white guys wandering around in. I doubt you’ll find the address listed in a guidebook. In the back we found the small café Hadrian had been looking for. The first thing I noticed when we sat down was the thick smell, like a dog coming in from a thunderstorm. There was just one old and wrinkled woman working there. I don’t think she really wanted to serve the dog soup to us, but Hadrian can be loud and demanding when he wants to be, so she caved and gave us each a bowl after he started banging on the table with his fist. It was like a dozen other bowls of cheap soup I’d had in Korea, with noodles, vegetables, and a few pieces of crumbly meat. It was hot, though, one of the spiciest dishes I’ve ever eaten. Real hot. So hot that it didn’t even really taste like anything, which I guess was probably a good thing. And, no, it didn’t make me feel any cooler. I don’t think I would order it again, no matter how sweltering the weather.

You don’t have to be that adventurous, or know somebody like Hadrian, to find weird foods. A lot of people when I tell them that squid is a common snack in Korean movie theaters usually exclaim, “Oh, I love calamari!”, but this is a little bit different because it’s not lightly breaded with a splash of seasonings dipped in marinara sauce, but just a tentacle with its huge suckers still attached that’s been sitting on a grill in a movie theater for a few hours, kind of a seafood version of a hotdog from 7-Eleven. Trying to eat a grilled squid tentacle is like trying to chew through a tire, and for some reason they were never cooked very evenly. One side would always be all blackened and charred and kind of tasted like gravel, and the other side would be all soft and raw and pink. Whenever I went to the movies I always ended up getting stuck next to the guy (there’s assigned seating at movie theaters in Korea) who would slowly gnaw through a couple of plugs of the stuff over the course of the movie.

Beondegi also is a very common street food that you’ll see if you ever go to Korea, usually being served out of these big, wide woks full of boiling water. One of my Korean friends described beondegi as, “a snack, you know, like popcorn,” but that’s a very misleading description of what it really is: boiled silkworm pupae. Not that I have a problem with eating insects—I once ate a scorpion (technically not an insect, but whatever) that was roasted on a stick—but the fumes from the beondegi woks were absolutely suffocating and gag-inducing. The beondegi man always seemed like the saddest of the street vendors, constantly awash in the steam of his own food. Later I found some canned beondegi at the grocery store by my apartment. I never bothered to open up a can because the photo on the label was just as nauseating as the smell, but I used to pick up a couple of cans every so often and mail them to my friends in the US, but none of them ever thought it was very funny. Supposedly it tastes better than it smells, but that’s the only compliment I ever heard anybody say it.

Another time I went to a restaurant in Korea with some other Americans and Canadians, and they gave us a menu in English that very clearly said chicken anus was an entrée. Just chicken anus.

“How can that be a satisfying meal?” I asked my friends, but they weren’t very interested in finding out. I tried to ask the waiter to clarify, but I never knew the word for anus in Korean, so he walked away in the middle of our conversation.

A minute later the chef came out. “Look, dude,” he said to me in English, “you definitely do not want to order that.” We asked him where he learned his English, and he said he had lived in Florida as a kid, before his parents forced him to move back to Korea so he could work in their restaurant as a cook. He didn’t seem very happy about it.

We asked him why he didn’t change the menu to read as something more appetizing, but he just shook his head and said it was better that way.

“This way no foreigners will ever order that dish. Seriously,” he added before he headed back to the kitchen, “don’t eat the chicken anus.”

We decided to take his advice. He probably knew where that anus was coming from.

Of course, the best foods are fried. I was living in Spain when I was very little, and my parents said the local restaurants would grab entire nests of baby birds, flash fry the brood when they were still alive, then put them back into the original nest before serving them to you. I wish I had been old enough for solid food at the time.

A friend of mine, when traveling through Peru, told me how he somehow managed to befriend a young Peruvian kid, even though this kid only knew a handful of words in both Spanish and English, and my friend’s knowledge of Quechua was pretty meager. His new friend told him that he would treat him to a meal, and after a harrowing, hour-long moped ride through the jungle, they arrived at a dirt-floored restaurant that only served guinea pig. They prepared it by skewering the whole animal—bones, fur, claws, eyes, and everything else—then deep frying the entire thing in an oil drum heated underneath by an open fire. They slapped it on his plate and my friend said it was the greasiest meal he’d ever eaten in his life, a meal that, on the moped ride back into town, required several emergency roadside stops to clear from his system.

I met this guy another time who, after I told him where I was from, excitedly confessed to me, “Ah, yes, I love America. So much meat!” Although that’s one of the many reasons people love this country, it’s not exactly a secret that the way it’s procured is kind of gross. Back in college I worked for the Department of Animal Sciences at my university for a couple of semesters, which was interesting, but at the same time I was so completely revolted by the science behind food processing that I wished I could have erased from my memory everything I’d learned on the job. A lot of cheap deli meats—Oscar Meyer bologna is a good example—are mechanically separated, which means that whole animal carcasses are tossed into a giant vat, and then pressed through a sieve at high pressure that’s designed to only allow meat to pass through. I’m sure a little bit of anus manages to leak through, but nobody seems to mind.

Somebody also once told me that the roast beef at Arby’s arrives at the restaurant as a liquid in a plastic bag—and needs to be cooked a certain way before it hardens enough to be sliced—but I had already stopped working at the Department of Animal Science when I heard about that and didn’t feel like emailing my old boss to talk about it.

I also ate raw lamb in Turkey once which, I know, sounds like a guaranteed way to get worms, but it was actually pretty good. I would eat it again.

I love food….45,999 out of 100,000.