Surprises at the Market: South Korea

This post was written by a former classmate of mine, the engaging Kelsey Hotle. After graduating from the University of Minnesota with a bachelors in nutrition and dietetics, she moved to South Korea to teach English. She produces podcasts about the adventures of people living aboard, which you can find at Frolicking Foreigners.

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. 

Dropwort?
Photo by Kelsey Hotle.

My second year in Korea found me far removed from the little farming community.
Depending on who you ask, Changwon is either the eighth or ninth largest city in the Republic of Korea. This city is packed full of high rise apartments and businesses stacked into ten story buildings adorned with Vegas-style neon decoration. My apartment is conveniently located one block away from the glorious Sangnam market, hosting hundreds of vendors - the perfect venue for some market research. 

The glorious Sangnam market.
Photo by Kelsey Hotle.

To complete the assignment, I recruited a Korean friend to help me interview some “local” farmers. The goal was to learn how big the farms were, their distance from the city, which fruits and vegetables they grew, and what a farmer’s day was like on the farm. 

Our first interviewee was a woman selling an assortment of common vegetables. She frankly asked us to leave her alone. So, we weaved around the crowded displays, past the meat vendors and found our next victim. A woman selling all sorts of fruits also turned us away. After a few more denials, we knew something was fishy (other than the block of seafood vendors). 

Photo by Kelsey Hotle.

As we were just about to lose hope, we finally found an elderly marketeer who agreed to answer our questions. According to her, nobody at the market was a farmer. Instead, they were vendors that had bought their vegetables from a ship earlier that morning. Furthermore, she hinted that the vendors were encouraged to humor the customers into believing the produce was local. 

Could I have been any further off?
    
My ability to properly assess the situation was clouded by my idealistic thoughts and the vendors' willingness to sugarcoat the truth. After thinking critically about it, of course Koreans aren’t exclusively eating local produce. Consider what happens when you squeeze 50,000,000 people into a country the size of Kentucky. It’s not easy to grow enough food to feed them all. As much as I want Korea’s food system to put the United States’ to shame, it turns out neither are perfect. 

As an expat, I tend to search for solutions to the problems I met with in the States. Honestly, it helps me justify my life here. Whether it’s an excuse or me merely looking for what I want to see - this has been a good reminder that things are rarely what they seem.

Are you living aboard and interested in writing for Land, Food, Life? Contact me at hannahmillerRD@gmail.com.