Today there were a couple of interesting news items about Korean food from different ends of the power spectrum. It's never been easy to separate food and power, and this juxtaposition is interesting.
Despite the enormous protests and contentiousness of last spring and summer, now Korea is the largest importer of American beef by value. That is from zero to 16,642 tons worth $89.2 million a month. This isn't really a surprise, since the U.S.-Korea beef agreement was designed to unless the floodgates of U.S. beef, but it must be really disenchanting for the protesters who did so much and yet stopped so little. Mexico, that well known recipient of the blessings of unalloyed free trade, imports slightly more (if you can call 2000 tons more of meat "slightly more") but Korea is gobbling it down at astonishing rates. They are, for example, already eating 10,000 more tons of American beef than of the delicious, grass-fed Australian beef that was so clearly and lovingly marked in the supermarkets.
Tangentially, I was thinking about the taste of American beef when a friend of mine living in Seoul who is on his way back to the U.S. for a visit wrote me today: "I'm off to chow down on some proper galbi for the last time in a while." I can say that the beef we ate in Korea did seem superior to much of what we have eaten here, at least if you compare it with the Korean restaurants here. (no, there is no comparison). I credit seasoning and importantly too, the butchering style. For instance, I prefer the cuts at Mexican butcher shops than at the supermarkets around here. Mexican and Korean cuts are similar. You rarely see the standard kind of cuts found in U.S. supermarkets. I don't know why precisely, but perhaps I should look into it. My guess is it is because of preference and because of historical consumption patterns and the way it is cooked. I know some food histories I should check.
I am still amused that my students asked me, wide eyed "have YOU ever eaten U.S. beef? What's it like??" Having grown up in the Midwest I can say that I have eaten my own personal ton of corn fed beef. America is, of course, the land of the Old 96er (though I see Youtube took down that video of John Candy eating it because of copyright.)
With the discussion in the news of Madeleine Pickens' (wife of T. Boone) plan to save the wild horses, it may be time to revisit the American ban on slaughtering horses for meat. That would be a good seller in these hard times. I never did see horse meat for sale in Korea, but I did see smoked horsemeat sushi in Kyoto.
The other Korean food news item that struck me in an alternative way was the really striking announcement that Daewoo is going to be farming an area of Madagascar that is half the size of Belgium. (I don't know why the Financial Times picked Belgium to give the half-size for. Why not the full size of some other place? Or, even better, compare the size of the plantation to Korea? Now, Belgium is not all that big by Midwestern standards, but it still is kind of big. (Beligum is 30,510 sq km or 11,780 sq mi while South Korea is 98,480 sq km or 38,023 sq mi). The BBC reports this move as part of a large corporate move to free Korea from U.S. corn imports, especially in the wake of the high commodity prices just a few months ago.
This is a really interesting trend--the establishment of 99 year corporate leases from wealthy developed countries to exploit the resources, cheap land, and labor of the underdeveloped world, in this case for secure unilateral source of food, all as a result of global competition for resources, power, and wealth. There is a word for that, now what was it, I was just thinking of it...
Despite the enormous protests and contentiousness of last spring and summer, now Korea is the largest importer of American beef by value. That is from zero to 16,642 tons worth $89.2 million a month. This isn't really a surprise, since the U.S.-Korea beef agreement was designed to unless the floodgates of U.S. beef, but it must be really disenchanting for the protesters who did so much and yet stopped so little. Mexico, that well known recipient of the blessings of unalloyed free trade, imports slightly more (if you can call 2000 tons more of meat "slightly more") but Korea is gobbling it down at astonishing rates. They are, for example, already eating 10,000 more tons of American beef than of the delicious, grass-fed Australian beef that was so clearly and lovingly marked in the supermarkets.
Tangentially, I was thinking about the taste of American beef when a friend of mine living in Seoul who is on his way back to the U.S. for a visit wrote me today: "I'm off to chow down on some proper galbi for the last time in a while." I can say that the beef we ate in Korea did seem superior to much of what we have eaten here, at least if you compare it with the Korean restaurants here. (no, there is no comparison). I credit seasoning and importantly too, the butchering style. For instance, I prefer the cuts at Mexican butcher shops than at the supermarkets around here. Mexican and Korean cuts are similar. You rarely see the standard kind of cuts found in U.S. supermarkets. I don't know why precisely, but perhaps I should look into it. My guess is it is because of preference and because of historical consumption patterns and the way it is cooked. I know some food histories I should check.
I am still amused that my students asked me, wide eyed "have YOU ever eaten U.S. beef? What's it like??" Having grown up in the Midwest I can say that I have eaten my own personal ton of corn fed beef. America is, of course, the land of the Old 96er (though I see Youtube took down that video of John Candy eating it because of copyright.)
With the discussion in the news of Madeleine Pickens' (wife of T. Boone) plan to save the wild horses, it may be time to revisit the American ban on slaughtering horses for meat. That would be a good seller in these hard times. I never did see horse meat for sale in Korea, but I did see smoked horsemeat sushi in Kyoto.
The other Korean food news item that struck me in an alternative way was the really striking announcement that Daewoo is going to be farming an area of Madagascar that is half the size of Belgium. (I don't know why the Financial Times picked Belgium to give the half-size for. Why not the full size of some other place? Or, even better, compare the size of the plantation to Korea? Now, Belgium is not all that big by Midwestern standards, but it still is kind of big. (Beligum is 30,510 sq km or 11,780 sq mi while South Korea is 98,480 sq km or 38,023 sq mi). The BBC reports this move as part of a large corporate move to free Korea from U.S. corn imports, especially in the wake of the high commodity prices just a few months ago.
This is a really interesting trend--the establishment of 99 year corporate leases from wealthy developed countries to exploit the resources, cheap land, and labor of the underdeveloped world, in this case for secure unilateral source of food, all as a result of global competition for resources, power, and wealth. There is a word for that, now what was it, I was just thinking of it...
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