Update re: ducks

Apparently my previous thought experiment regarding ducks and other fowl has attracted the attention of a NASA scientist (ok, so he's my father), who informed me that my proposed experiment is not all head-in-the-clouds metaphysical speculation. Indeed, Austrian Naturalist, Nobel Laureate, and expert on nidifugous birds Konrad Lorenz "discovered that if greylag geese were reared by him from hatching, they would treat him like a parental bird. The goslings followed Lorenz about and when they were adults they courted him in preference to other greylag geese."

Interesting, eh?

News Alert: Ostensibly mundane trip to the market turns into scatologico-linguistic romp

Since my return to Korea nearly 2 months-ago, I have been searching for ways to meld my various needs, passions, idiosyncrasies, and compulsions so that I can satisfy many or all of them with less effort. One great way of doing this has been riding my bicycle around town to the various old-school markets (e.g. Ch'ilseong [seven stars], Seomun [west gate], p'yeonghwa [peace]), which:
- lets me feel good about relying a little less on gas
- gets me a bit of exercise and helps me learn the layout of the city
- lets me make purchases outdoors, thereby contributing less to the various sorts of environmental damage I believe are caused by large grocery stores
- gives me a chance to see sliced-off pig faces, large chunks of beef, skinned/eviscerated dogs, crabs laid on their backs gasping and squirming, catfish flopping on the street, and bunches of turtles sitting in plastic tubs waiting to be made into soup, all of which reminds me that eating meat is a nasty business, though easy to forget about
- lets me talk to old Korean people who are usually quite wrinkly/grizzled and also hilarious and cute and who may be either refreshingly ornery or heartwarmingly generous, but are never saccharine or sycophantic or fake or overly made-up like supermarket staff
- puts me a little bit closer to the people making the food and to the food itself. People at the market are still middlemen, but they are more likely to know where their stuff is coming from, to buy local, and to buy what's in season.
- opens me up to awesome random stuff, like...

I saw a bunch of baby potatoes, ideal for making "Jorim," a dish where you boil and soak potatoes in sugar and soy sauce. The stall owner wasn't there, so I asked the lady selling fish on the other side of the street where the potato lady was. The fish lady started screaming for her, and this little, hunchbacked, sturdy-as-hell Korean grandma hobbled down from her neighbor's fruit stall and told me that the big basket of potatoes was 5 bucks, the small was 4, but that she'd give it to me for 3. I told her I'd be happy to pay the normal price and that she didn't have to cut it for me, so she put the potatoes into the bag I had brought with me, and then, as a bonus, started shoving jujubes (real ones, not the candies - a subject for a Matnan Masticatables post for sure) into my backpack. I tried to explain that I had just bought a kilo (10 bucks' worth) of jujubes from another vendor, but she continued shoveling until every nook and cranny of my bag was filled. What a lady.

From 맛난 Masticatables

Then I stopped at a lady selling ginger. We weighed out what I wanted - 2 bucks' worth. She put it in my bag, then added another clump or two, then threw in 3 bright red chili peppers, saying something like "You're a foreigner, so you're a guest here. It's important to treat guests well." Wow! They look all worn-down from being outside in the sun and wind and cold day in and day out all year long, but they're so...nice. Amazing. [Am I referring to the ginger or the grandmothers? Your guess is as god as mine.]

Then, on the way home, I some spraypainted graffiti that made me pull over, dismount, and take some pictures. It was on a big column supporting a bridge, and it looked like this:

From 맛난 Masticatables

The writing is not actually grafitti - it's more like a PSA that says "Urination Forbidden." I'm not sure why that particular column was a trouble spot, but anyway, it got me thinking about Korean a little. The first word there - sobyeon - comes from two chinese characters:,
- "so" 소 小 meaning small; and
- "byeon" 변 便 which generally means comfort, but apparently can also mean excrement
The word for faeces, on the other hand, is "daebyeon," which comes from:
- "dae" 대 大 meaning big
- "byeon" 변 便 meaning, again, comfort
But that's not all:
- add the word for "machine, device" and you get byeon-gi 변기 便器 (squat) TOILET
- add the word for "west" and you get yangbyeon-gi 양변기 洋便器 (sitting) TOILET
- or, add the word for small and you get sobyeon-gi 소변기 小便器 URINAL
- add the word for "hidden, secret, profound" and you get byeonbi 변비 便秘 CONSTIPATION
- add the word for "place, location" and you get byeonso 변소 便所 BATHROOM
- add the word for "using" and you get yongbyeon 용변 用便 RELIEF, DISCHARGE (of the bladder)

The whole trip, from my house to the market to the sign back to my house took less than two hours (most of it was spent intentionally getting lost in the market). What a beautiful afternoon.

Heaven on Earth

And on the 8th day, the Lord said: "Let there be the best friggin' sandwich imaginable."

Theological questions: what would it mean for God to say "the best friggin' sandwich imaginable?" Does it mean the best sandwich humans can imagine? Monkeys can imagine? God him/her/itself can imagine? Can God imagine a better sandwich than I can? And can God imagine a sandwich so awesome that even he couldn't make it? [Does this entail that God can't be omnipotent?] Can I imagine that? Did I just? Or do I just think that I did? Is anyone else qualified to tell me?

Anyhow, a few words about this madness. I am sure that most people reading this have more or less the same feelings about this sandwich as I do - it is ridiculous and a hazard to public health. What interests me, though, is the way that the sandwich can be understood as something not at all new, as sort of a natural and even necessary step for KFC to take. The advertising, obviously, is meant to make the sandwich seem revolutionary. The stated motto is "Unthink," as if the DoubleDown;s lack of bun is so worldview-rattling as to make you reconsider everything you ever thought you knew about sandwiches. It kind of reminds me of that (relatively) famous passage from Nietzsche's "The Gay Science" where the Madman runs around talking about how God is dead and everyone will soon lose their bearings and forget how to distinguish between up and down and good and evil and will find themselves tumbling around in an inconceivable meaningless universe. Yes, that's how we're supposed to pretend to feel when KFC steals our buns. In reality, of course, it's just one more permutation of the standard Base Meat-Supplement Meat-Cheese-Sauce formula. Every ingredient in the Doubledown was already on KFC's menu, likely even in combination with each other (there must have been a double-chicken-bacon-cheeseburger at some point), so that the only really "new" thing about the sandwich is that you have to eat it like a hashbrown.

I don't pretend that this is a novel or even moderately insightful analysis of the DoubleDown. Everyone knows and scorns all these facts. And yet, nonetheless, the company and all their marketing teams and behavioral economist squads have clearly decided that blatant lies and fake, pointless visuals (who cares what it looks like in slow-mo?) and aggressive tactics are the best way to sell the product. Watch the commercial, with the beast flopping around on the screen and people screaming "CHICKEN!" and uttering in total awe "It's got everything!" as if Chicken, Cheese, Bacon, and Sauce were the only edible foods known to man. As if vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients weren't part of the category "everything."

The thing is, the industry has no choice except to present its foods like this. The DoubleDown can best be conceived as an edible product (rather than as food - come on, what food has nationwide launch dates set out months in advance?), produced according to the logic and necessities of the fast-food system. This system is already completely intact, from the farmers who grow the corn and soy to the CAFOs that raise the meat to the slaughterhouses that form and the patties to the distributors who move stuff around the country to the storage units at the franchises. What's easier: to make a few tweaks with already-existing ingredients and procedures and to call the result new, or to find new suppliers for new foods, remodel factories to process different stuff, train new workers at those factories, come up with new shipping and storage methods, and in the end, risk making huge batches of a product that might scare people because it's made of things they're not used to? Consider also that KFC and other fast-food chains are operating at the very cheap end of the price spectrum - actually, it is incredible that it's possible to get so many calories for so little money - so that any if any of the processes mentioned in the second alternative above cost a bit more, KFC may have to raise the price of the sandwich 20 cents, which would be negligible were it not for the Wendy's across the street selling an almost identical product.

In a food system like ours that is somehow, oxymoronically, both incredibly centralized and incredibly competitive, the barriers that keep fast food chains from introducing truly new products are formidable, and the incentives are nearly non-existent. What can the companies do, then, other than shuffle around the pre-made pieces of some jigsaw-puzzle burgers and then try to do their best to convince us that whatever they've come up with is worth eating? Introduce a "new" product, sell it for a while, silently drop it off the menu when it loses its buzz appeal, and then introduce it again under a new name a few years later when people have mostly forgotten.

In conclusion, I'd like to mention one thing I love about Korea, which is: so much of the food here has been, more or less, the same for hundreds of years, and is therefore part of the national/cultural consciousness, and requires no advertising. Of course, the international and Koeran fast food chains advertise a lot, as do the major supermarkets and, of course, not owning a TV, I am pretty insulated from advertisements anyway. But I can't think of a single occasion when I've seen a billboard, TV commercial, or movie commercial for ginseng-chicken stew or recovery soup or beef ribs or tofu and kimchi or sesame seed powder soup or dumplings or any of the hundreds of traditional foods here. Back in 2006 I found it a little frustrating - you could go to a huge restaurant full of people, only to find that everyone was eating the same thing and there were only 5 or 6 items on the menu, usually variations on one theme. Now, though, I think it's pretty great - I decide whether I want rice or soup or noodles or stew or tofu or whatever, then go to a place that specializes. Everything is fast - not fast food fast, but not far behind either and cheap and I get to feel like I'm making my own decisions about what I eat. Beautiful. I swear I will try to do some Matnan-masticatables posting in the next few weeks.

Thanks for listening.

敎職員食堂

IE 교직원식당
IE School-employment-person-eating-place
IE Faculty Cafeteria

My daily schedule leaves me a ginormous lunch break - from 11 until 1 - each day that I'm at work. Initially I thought this meant that I'd be able to go home, whip myself up some awesome vegan concoction, enjoy a relaxing munch, and come back to work. But it's been quite chilly lately (we even had about 4 inches of snow the other night), so I've been opting for the more convenient...options.

There's a subway (restaurant) downstairs in my office building, which I am totally boycotting in favor of the 敎職員食堂, which serves up a pretty nice buffet full of Korean food every day for less than two dollars. In addition to rice and kimchi, there are usually 3 dishes, a soup, and some fruit all laid out at the buffet, and it's always at least 75% vegetarian and 50% vegan. Not for any particular reason. It's just that Korean meals generally include 5 to 10 different dishes, and back in the days when Korean cooking was taking shape, I suppose it was easier to procure lots of different vegetables than it was to get meat.

I've been trying to convince my coworkers, who have the same lunch break, to join me at mealtime, both because I want some company and because I think the wrapping-free food in the cafeteria is less taxing on the environment than the heavily wrapped and bagged stuff served at Subway. I also have an inkling that the cafeteria stuff is more likely to be local, but it's mostly unsubstantiated.

Anyhow, my peeps tend not to go with me (4 solo lunches this week!) because they don't know the menu in advance and don't want to wind up being forced to eat something fishy. Thus, I've procured the week's menu (in English) in advance in an attempt to make my officemates come up with yet another excuse. Presented below are some of the tastier translations:

Bean paste soup w/ styela clava
Hard-boiled fish paste in pepper paste
Hord boiled yellow corvina
Maximowiczia Chinensis
Salted viscera
Stir-fried seaweed stem
Multi grain powder slush
Roasted hairtail w/ curry
Stir-fried wiener & cultivated mushroom
Winter-sown greens
Sliced-jelly soup
Stuffed derma
Seasoned dropwrot

So now that they can see the menu in advance, what excuse could they possibly have for not going with me?

A little thought experiment

Say you had one duck egg and one chicken egg. You remove them both from their respective nests (do ducks even make nests??) and allow them to hatch and grow up together. They never see any animals other than the other; that is, the chicken never sees any animal other than the one duck, and vice versa. Will the chicken be "aware" that it is a chicken rather than a duck? If you insert the chicken into a duck family, will it try to fit in before they reject it (assuming they do)? Or if you introduce the chicken to a community of ducks and chickens, whom will the chicken choose to chill with? Will it identify with the ducks because it's used to them? Or does something inside it tell it that it's a chicken and allow it to recognize members of its own species? What if the chicken went to join the ducks while the duck went to join the chickens? WHAT THEN?

I feel like there must be some obvious answer I'm overlooking, like the time I asked my stepdad (NASA chemist) why we don't just put our trash and nuclear waste on rockets and shoot them into the sun*. Please help. If nobody answers to my satisfaction, I may be compelled to spend $600 registering my new pets with the authorities (so as not to violate my contract's pet clause) in order that I may attempt a non-vegan experiment.

*Shamefully, I was probably about 15 at the time and had been proudly nursing the idea for at least 5 years. Not my most brilliant moment, I admit. Slightly more brilliant, perhaps, than my plan to put little wind turbines on car roofs and grills and sideview mirrors to generate electricity. [I'm still convinced there may be a way to pull this off].