The professor of my food culture course advised us to never make assumptions. "When it comes to other cultures," she said, "it is always best to ask." She told us thousands of things that semester, but that stuck out as solid advice. Yet for some reason, I still held on to an assumption that all produce in South Korea was local.
In this case, I didn’t get off without a lesson. I bragged about the produce situation to the wrong person and wound up with a writing assignment. My goal: obtain actual information about the farms in Korea.
My first year as a teacher in South Korea gave me high hopes about local food. I lived in the middle of a farmer’s paradise, aka nowhere, called Seosan. Elderly Korean women sat on the steps of my high-rise apartment sifting though piles of produce, removing stems and such. Occasionally they tugged on my shirt and pantomimed until I pulled it into a makeshift bowl for them to fill with their seasonal produce. I’d usually post pictures of my unsolicited goods to Facebook in hopes that somebody could identify it.
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| Dropwort? Photo by Kelsey Hotle. |
