Kimchi

Whatever, wherever and whenever you choose to eat in Korea, your order will always be served with a diverse array of free side dishes which are replenished as you eat.  One or two of these sides will always include some variants of ‘Kimchi’, a food eaten proudly (to say nothing of bravely) with every meal in Korea. 

Some tourist guides have described kimchi as ‘cabbage dipped in teargas’ but this is in fact too kind. Records are unclear about its origins - perhaps an experimental germ warfare laboratory, perhaps fragments from a passing meteor - but in Korea it has been cultivated well beyond the realms of conventional earth science. It makes you glad that the USA only allowed Oppenheimer to play with plutonium, rather than something really dangerous. If Truman had dropped Kimchi on Hiroshima there would be no more Hiroshima today, in fact there would have been nothing east of India since 1945.

Kimchi comes without government health warnings

Kimchi however is no cold war secret.  Not only is it made routinely by most people at home, but as winter begins it forms something of a community welfare effort as huge groups of volunteers are mobilised across the length and breadth of the country to prepare kimchi for the poor and needy. 

Thousands of volunteers at Seoul City Hall making kimchi for the poor

First the cabbage leaves are rolled in a severe cocktail of basic ingredients, yeasts and spices. The whole lot is then left in earthenware pots to go off, biologically degrade and then reconstitute itself as an entirely new alien life form with the ferocity to make a Klingon’s knees buckle

Naturally Koreans suppress a chuckle watching westerners eat this for the first time. They openly encourage us with recommendations that the stuff is ‘very good for cancer’. It is just as we start to formulate a witty riposte that the reaction sets in. First the eyes becoming bloodshot, then the uncontrollable dribbling, the incoherent gibberish and finally that sensation of being 9 months pregnant with a nuclear reactor core in meltdown. 

It should be said the natives here are little better at enduring the stuff themselves. After lunch it takes a full two hours before any of them will venture more than 50 yards from either the gents or a water dispenser, while meetings in confined conference rooms are entirely out of the question.