8 ms·

For centuries massive meals amazed visitors to Korea (2019)

143 points by carabiner 1y ago

Terr_ 1y ago
> Daedong-beob unified the various forms of taxes to a single kind: rice. This, in effect, made growing rice equivalent to growing money, encouraging even more production than strictly necessary. This is still relevant these days, whenever someone talks about linking a currency (and taxes collected in that currency) to a commodity like gold. The market for the metal becomes distorted, and the overall economy distorted as well, vulnerable to anything that might impacts the the mining or refinement of the metal. Another historical connection might be how the weird status of silver and gold are linked to European colonization.
- erulabs 1y ago
  Rice makes quite a good currency, especially if you only have one primary cultivar. It's relatively fungible and dried white rice more or less lasts forever without spoiling. It's quite nice it has the side effect of also literally being food. If rice had been common in Rome, we might still be paying taxes in rice.
  - vkou 1y ago
    > we might still be paying taxes in rice. As long as the largest form of economic activity was agriculture, and access to hard currency was limited, people were paying taxes with food (or labour in their landlord's fields). We pay taxes in money because we have a diversified economy, where 90% of us are not subsistence peasants, and the money supply & availability of banking is large enough that we (or our employers) have cash on hand.
    - fluoridation 1y ago
      >We pay taxes in money because we have a diversified economy It's all a fiction, though. Ultimately wealth can be translated to very raw things, like energy, space, and time. Using rice as currency is not too different from using Joules as currency, as it's ultimately just captured and stored solar radiation. The issue with using food as money is not that the economy is diverse, as it's ultimately for the most part powered by people eating. The issue is that if you spend money to make a km^2 of land usable for factories that produce, say, semiconductors, that's not exactly translatable to tons of rice.
      - vkou 1y ago
        I understand the individual sentences in your post, but I don't understand what overall argument it makes. (It also fails to take into account the practical aspects of collecting taxes, which is why food and labour were a common currency for them pre-industrialization, and money is the common currency for them post-industrialization. My post addresses the issue of collecting taxes more than it does the issue of generating wealth.)
        fluoridation 1y ago
        It's possible I might have misunderstood your point. What I was getting at is that the economy being diverse is not a reason for money to be pegged to rice. Perhaps you were talking about the physical act of paying? "We pay taxes in money" = "we give stacks of paper to the government [rather than bags of rice]"?
        vkou 1y ago
        Yes, I was talking about the physical act of paying - and the form that payment could take when you're trying to extract taxes out of cash-poor subsistence peasants - and how in that kind of world, taxes in a single, fungible type of good (food, days of service in agricultural labour) are common. The economy being diverse, and not just a bunch of peasants barely making ends meet is a great reason for me to not be taxed in rice. I don't grow rice. I don't know anyone who grows rice. I'd have to take money, buy rice, give it to the taxman. This is... Not ideal. (Just like the taxman getting paid in <whatever random non-food good I produce is not ideal.) Even in pre-industrial societies, where where taxes-in-food were common, city-dwellers paid taxes in cash.
        fluoridation 1y ago
        But just like how you don't actually hand over stacks of paper to pay your taxes, you wouldn't need to actually pay in literal bags of rice in a world were rice was currency. I would imagine any economy that kept using rice as currency past the point of subsistence farming would develop tokens.
  - dluan 1y ago
    It's still used for bribes in Japan, where earlier this year the agriculture minister was sacked for receiving gifts of rice in the middle of a nationwide rice shortage. His replacement still has an outside chance to become the next prime minister.
    - jama211 1y ago
      Surely that was somewhat of a once off, bribes in Japan are usually money like anywhere else, this is an extremely atypical exception
      - altairprime 1y ago
        The most interesting search result for “rice as a bribe” was its use in a Pathfinder module in order to curry favor with birds. I recognize this isn’t precisely the point here, but given the cross-section of countries represented, I would imagine bribing people with what was literal food currency for centuries has merely decreased in priority relative to local fiat currency, which is perhaps widely accepted nowadays but less readily produced from farmland.
        jama211 1y ago
        I’m very confused by your comment to be honest, of course fiat currency wouldn’t be produced from farmland?
  - charlieyu1 1y ago
    Rice is also literally power, a warlord’s strength is limited by the rice he has
- imtringued 1y ago
  >Another historical connection might be how the weird status of silver and gold are linked to European colonization. Land is a finite resource so people fight over it. If you make your money a finite resource, then people will fight over money as well. It's not very complicated.
- vintermann 1y ago
  One thing that has stuck me in old tax records is that when taxes were paid in natura according to fixed exchange rates (e.g. one cow is two sheep, one measure of butter is three squirrel skins etc.), then government probably actually valued some income more than others. The "market value" of these goods almost certainly didn't match the fixed exchange rates, but people's ability to trade for the best tax unit were also limited (and often legally restricted to the same exchange rates!). So e.g. pastoralists who paid their tax in actual skins may have been more valued than people who paid their tax in "a skins worth" of grain. I wonder if there's some good books on this sort of thing.
stx5 1y ago
[flagged]
- jjangkke 1y ago
  ah you are an expert in Korea ;) Korean peninsula has always been a target of invasion by its neighbors due to its fertile lands in the south west which produce majority of the rice compare to the rest of the country.
  - jacquesm 1y ago
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    - stx5 1y ago
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  - stx5 1y ago
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jjangkke 1y ago
i been to a museum that showed what Koreans in the 16th century ate with and I was shocked to find how huge the spoon and bowls were. It's not uncommon to find very tall Koreans 6ft and up these days but they are eating a lot less so I wonder how they've become all so tall.
- Izikiel43 1y ago
  More protein
- lifestyleguru 1y ago
  [flagged]
preommr 1y ago
> One man in my parish is aged between 30 and 45, and in a bet he ate seven bowls—and that’s not counting the bowls of rice wine he drank. One old man, aged 64 or 65, said he had no appetite, and finished five bowls. Surprisingly comical record-keeping.
- block_dagger 1y ago
  What do you find comical about it?
  - n1b0m 1y ago
    Well the part about the old man contains irony: he claimed to have no appetite, but his action of finishing five bowls of food is the opposite of what he said.
    - kelipso 1y ago
      The implication is that someone who says he has no appetite might typically eat five bowls of rice because of the norms of eating a large amount of food in Korea. Whether it's true or whatever, who knows, but that's what's being implied and illustrated in this example.
wagwang 1y ago
A korean meal is only limited by the size of the table. I've visited resturants in korea where there were no less than 30 plates that came out of 1 set meal.
- mock-possum 1y ago
  What do they do with all the food that doesn’t get eaten?
  - kragen 1y ago
    Usually there isn't much. The plates are tiny and mostly have vegetables.
  - wrp 1y ago
    A substantial restaurant meal in Korea is usually served with several standard side dishes. Due to the expense and effort of providing these to each table, restaurants often require a minimum party size of two. Also, I'm not sure if it's illegal or just gross, but if a dish looks untouched, sketchier places will sometimes just pass it along to the next customer.
    - kijin 1y ago
      Reusing dishes that were served to another customer is absolutely illegal and carries significant penalties if caught. The problem, of course, is that it's difficult to catch. Many middle-aged and older customers have a habit of mixing up leftover vegetables after a meal, and they encourage others to do so. The idea is that if everyone does the same, the restaurant can't reuse any dishes. Meanwhile, honest restaurant owners want to assure customers that the their dishes are new. So they serve food in a way that will make it very obvious if it was reused. For example, kimchi is often served in long (~30cm) slices, so that customers will have to cut them themselves, as if breaking a seal.
      - wrp 1y ago
        I hang out with a mostly older crowd and often eat in downmarket neighborhoods, and I've seen that dish mixing after meals. Nice to learn that bit about long kimchi slices. I just assumed it was because people like it long, like with spaghetti.
RyanOD 1y ago
When we visit my Korean in-laws, I can confirm a glorious feast is going to happen.
codeableconcept 1y ago
This is similar in terms of macros to the traditional Irish diet in the 19th century, which for workers was purportedly made up of around 13 pounds of potatoes a day for an adult man. This traditional Korean diet appears to also be extremely high in carbs as a proportion. Of course these groups had significantly higher energy expenditures than most moderns, but it does seem possible that caloric excess in the absence of significant dietary fat does not drive obsesity / metabolic disease in the same way.
- nradov 1y ago
  What's the hypothesis there? Were they just shitting out the extra starch without digesting it? Due to conservation of energy the calories can't just vanish. It doesn't seem physically possible for most adult men to consume 13 pounds of potatoes a day. I'm a large man and I think I'd burst or vomit before choking down that much, regardless of how hard I'd been working. Most likely that number is just wrong.
  - carabiner 1y ago
    Hypothesis is that the irishmen were doing hard physical labor that required a high caloric intake. PCT thru-hikers consume 4,000-4,500 calories per day (at least I did) while staying thin. According to inter-net, 13 lb of potatoes has about 4,500 calories. Apparently US civil war soldiers expended 3-4k per day.
    - nradov 1y ago
      I was responding to the claim by @codeableconcept that the absence of significant dietary fat somehow prevents obesity, independent of energy balance. That seems unlikely. Obviously it's possible for an active man to expend ~4500 kcal/day. I've done it myself many times. Even back during the Civil War, US soldiers typically consumed more energy dense food and only got a fraction of their calories from potatoes.
  - astura 1y ago
    >it doesn't seem physically possible for most adult men to consume 13 pounds of potatoes a day. I'm a large man and I think I'd burst or vomit before choking down that much, Presumably you aren't doing hard manual labor every day.
mock-possum 1y ago
Well yeah, isn’t korea the origin of the conspicuous gluttony of mukbang?
- Flowsion 1y ago
  Early mukbang wasn't really about gluttonous binge eating. It was more just a way for people to eat in front of their computers with another person. It's changed a lot now, though.
shihab 1y ago
> To Koreans, they looked more like sauce bowls, leading them to conclude that the Japanese had starved themselves to stretch out the siege. As a Bengali man, that's exactly how I felt when I came to USA and first visited japanese restaurants. Part of the reason we consume so much rice is that rice is kind of the main dish (not a side)- it literally takes up central and most of the space in your food plate. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%E0%A6%87%E0%A6%B2%E0%A6%BF%E0%A6%B6_%E0%A6%AE%E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%9B_%E0%A6%AD%E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%9C%E0%A6%BE_%E0%A6%93_%E0%A6%AD%E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%A4.jpg#/media/File:%E0%A6%87%E0%A6%B2%E0%A6%BF%E0%A6%B6_%E0%A6%AE%E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%9B_%E0%A6%AD%E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%9C%E0%A6%BE_%E0%A6%93_%E0%A6%AD%E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%A4.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%E0%A6%87%E0%A6%B2%E...
- hbarka 1y ago
  Ilish fish also known as hilsa, the king of fish. That’s one delicious fish.
- teleforce 1y ago
  Typical Japanese will devour their small rice bowl until there's none of rice grain is left over, since they're taught from the very young age not to waste food. Most of other Asian nations will not eat their rice until it's completely finished. Even with their most delicious biryani dish there're always many rice grains left in the plate. I think the small bowl make it much easier to completely consume the rice unlike the big bowl or plate.
  - nirava 1y ago
    The Japanese mostly eat sticky rice, which is very easy to eat and "clean up" even with a chopstick. The Indian subcontinent eat long-grain Basmati or similar rice which fluff up into individual grains on the plate. It doesn't make sense to individually pick out single leftover grains. In nearly every culture is the idea of "Annapurna" or the god of food, and wasting food is generally frowned upon and considered bad table manners. I've been scolded plenty of times as a child for not cleaning up my plate in Nepal. I wouldn't attribute it to small bowls at least. The Japanese instilling good virtues into their children almost institutionally perhaps plays some part in it, but also some of it is just physics.
petesergeant 1y ago
Two thoughts: * Korean are tall by East Asian standards; 3-4 cm taller than Chinese and Japanese * Thais don't eat that much, but they will massively over-cater, and there's not really the same taboo as in Europe of food wastage. My father, who like me spent a couple of decades in Thailand (although at different times) reckoned it was because historically they've had very few food shortages compared to other countries
- decimalenough 1y ago
  Taller than the Chinese average, perhaps, but northern Chinese are generally much taller than southern Chinese. Guess what's next to northeastern China? That's right, Korea. Thais don't have big meals, but they do snack incessantly, which makes up for it. And overcatering for guests is a pan-Asian or arguably a global phenomenon.
  - petesergeant 1y ago
    > And overcatering for guests is a pan-Asian or arguably a global phenomenon. Sure, but Thais will go to a restaurant as a family and order 3x the amount of food needed. Somehow, all the rice will get eaten, and some of the meat will be left.
zkmon 1y ago
Similar situation in South India too. Eating culture is shaped by foods available. Here in western world, I'm shocked by how little rice they serve at my office lunch and at restaurants (we call it as cat food). I usually eat 4-6 times of that rice per meal at home. Still my people make a special observation that I eat very less food at home.
- writebetterc 1y ago
  I'm sure that if you went back 100 years you'd be less surprised, but of course the rice would've been replaced with oat porridge or potatoes.
  - pjc50 1y ago
    The old European one would have been bread: the traditional 2lb/900g ish size loaf would have been consumed in a day. Apparently Turkey still has very high levels of bread consumption.
    - pjmlp 1y ago
      Germany as well, it is like bread with everything, sometimes feels like back in the middle age, using bread as plates.
      - marssaxman 1y ago
        Maybe they were on to something we've lost: bread is delicious.
- anon291 1y ago
  This is why South Asians have all our metabolic issues (I'm talking about those living in the west). It took me so many years to break myself of this habit. It's not healthy to consume this much white rice. The bowl size at a Japanese restaurant is appropriate for one meal. Carbohydrates and fats are very cheap in developed countries (and developing countries, like India). Protein is not cheap and is underconsumed in most countries. Meals should be focused around protein. It's basically impossible to not get enough carbs and fats living in the United States or any developed nation. In fact, you're probably getting more than you need relative to the amount of protein you consume. Of course, if you live a traditional South Indian lifestyle including lots of manual labor, fishing, farming, etc, then you may have higher carb requirements. For most people today, this is overkill. I've seen this problem in my own family, including untimely deaths, metabolic problems, etc.
decimalenough 1y ago
> Daedong-beob unified the various forms of taxes to a single kind: rice. This, in effect, made growing rice equivalent to growing money, encouraging even more production than strictly necessary. This is not much of an explanation, since feudal Japan had basically the same system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kokudaka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kokudaka
- tetris11 1y ago
  maybe Japan's feudal lords were more corrupt, disincentivizing production. Whereas Koreans paid directly to the king
- rsynnott 1y ago
  AIUI that was a bit different; that was _notional_ rice (the tax wasn't necessarily paid in kind).
stephenanand 1y ago
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kijin 1y ago
> the rice bowl in the photo was 3.5 inches tall with a diameter of over 6 inches, holding nearly a liter of rice to be eaten with soup that came in an even larger bowl, with an assortment of side dishes. For one person. In one meal. 1 liter of Korean-style cooked white rice weighs about 500 grams. It contains about 1.5 Calories per gram, judging from the label on my Hetbahn. So that's about 750 Calories tops. The photo doesn't look like white rice, so the caloric content is probably lower. I would give at most 100 Calories for the soup and all the side dishes combined. The soup is mostly water, with very little solid content. (That chunk you see in the photo is rice. Dude is dunking his rice in the soup to make it softer, because who wants to munch on 1 liter of rough brown rice?) Meanwhile, his side dishes are leafy vegetables like kimchi and namul. Side dishes made of animal products like ham and eggs were considered a luxury until only 60 years ago. Fat was also a luxury, so everything had to be lean. This is in stark contrast to a Western meal, where fatty side dishes contribute a lot of Calories. So that's about 850 Calories for the whole table, or about one Big Mac with medium fries and a sugar-free drink. Not a particularly heavy meal for an adult male who spends most of his time working in the field. The reason Koreans ate a lot of rice, fruit, and vegetables is because those foods have low caloric density by modern standards. It's mostly just water and carbohydrates. If not for their high energy expenditure, Koreans would all have died of diabetes.
- NoLinkToMe 1y ago
  What is your take on the comparisons with Japan and the comments left by European visitors, both of whom who likely ate similar ingredients in Asia both of whom were noted to eat a lot less? To me the article doesn’t really make sense. Either the Korean diet was being overstated (likely, but why if it was consistently noted?), or there was some unexplained extra energetic expenditure by Koreans versus Japanese (unlikely), or Koreans were significantly more fat than Japanese (unlikely).
  - kijin 1y ago
    There are records from every country around Korea, throughout recorded history, that Koreans eat a lot. There are also statements that Irish farmers ate 14 pounds of potatoes, English peasants ate 4 pounds of bread, and that Japanese samurai ate 4 pounds of rice a day. All of these statements were made from the point of view of aristocrats who had rich foods, as they looked down upon commoners who had nothing but plain starch to fill their caloric budgets with. So I think that a large part of this stereotype has to do with the fact that Korea used to be one of the poorest countries in the world until very recently. In China, even commoners had access to delicious 9-Calories-per-gram cooking oil since the Song dynasty. In Japan, sushi as we know it appeared in the Edo period and became the fast food of choice for urban laborers. Meanwhile, Korean society remained almost exclusively agricultural until Western visitors arrived to take photos of their massive rice bowls. Same caloric content, just more voluminous. There are also issues of measurement that were lost in translation. The report that Korean soldiers ate 3 times as much rice as the Japanese? True, Koreans ate 7 cups of rice, while the Japanese ate 2 cups. But the Japanese measuring cup was 3 times as large as the old Korean cup (hob). The much more reasonable 7:6 ratio can probably be explained by the fact that Koreans had the home advantage at the time of the war, or that Koreans are taller than the Japanese on average. And yes, the obesity rate is also higher in Korea, despite the fact that Japan has enjoyed a modern lifestyle for much longer.
sbinnee 1y ago
It was a fun reading as a Korean and my hometown Jeonju was even mentioned! My partner is non-Korean and I can definitely tell the difference in rice consumption for sure. I can eat much more much faster. But the funny thing is she can eat more bread faster than me.
1cool 1y ago
For centuries, Korean peasants lacked food and endlessly complained of hunger but I won't cherry pick random historical (and foreign) observations to support it.
AndrewThrowaway 1y ago
Anecdotal story. Once I stumbled into Korean restaurant in China Town in NYC. I just ordered something like lunch. I was alone. They kept bringing plates after plates of various dishes. I was ashamed to leave so much food. Paid like 11 dollars but it was in ~2015.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  Come back and try KTown on 32nd. (Get off the ground floors.) $20 will buy a good meal. $40, decadence. (Avant alcohol.)
ListeningPie 1y ago
What happened to all the excess calories they are eating? Huge bowl of rice, table filled with food, and the people look almost malnourished.
- NaomiLehman 1y ago
  probably eating once a week
- cyber_kinetist 1y ago
  From the other comment by kijin - 1 liter of rice isn't actually that much (~500g, which approximates to 750 kcal). And given that most Koreans in the area didn't eat that much outside of rice (only vegetables and fruits) since access to meat was reserved for the super-wealthy, most Koreans were probably malnourished when also factoring in the manual labor they needed to do (rice farming is very labor-intensive)
BrandoElFollito 1y ago
Reading the comments here and elsewhere, and these from my Korean friends -- this is not reflected in Korean restaurants, at least in France. I have tried a few in and around Paris (the latest was yesterday, a small family-run one lost in some random street), and the food is at best normal size, and less positively massively overpriced. You usually get 3 tiny plates (with two leaves of kimchi, to give some context) and a normal plate of food + a small bowl of rice. This is enough for my French stomach, but reading about the lavish servings and whatnot, this may just be a local thing.
- nobodyandproud 1y ago
  I’m not surprised. When I went London over ten years ago, the recommended Korean restaurant paled to what’s in NYC. I imagine competition and easy access to Korean ingredients are the main factors.
- cyber_kinetist 1y ago
  Native Korean living in Korea here. Many restaraunts in South Korea have self-bars where you can refill the kimchi (and other various banchan (side dish) assortments) as much as you want - and in the rest of the places that don't have this you can just ask the waiter to give some more for free instead! Refusing to give free kimchi isn't just considered bad service here; it's just outright weird. Only the "touristy" Korean restaraunts outside of the country don't do this - they charge hefty prices to innocuous side dishes like kimchi, and I've even heard places in Europe sell soju in shots (which is outright ridiculous, soju is one of the most cheap-ass low-brow artificially made commodity liquor here!)
- rsynnott 1y ago
  I suppose people adapt serving sizes to local norms. That said, the first Korean place I ever went to (in Dublin) served comically large amounts of food. I could never figure out how they made the economics work; they were the same price as the neighbouring Chinese places but must have been using at least twice as much food.
- carabiner 1y ago
  Yeah that sounds very westernized. This is what you'd see for one person at an average, traditional Korean restaurant in the US: https://s3-media0.fl.yelpcdn.com/bphoto/GZx0kD7qjv5983YOuGd_WQ/o.jpg https://s3-media0.fl.yelpcdn.com/bphoto/GZx0kD7qjv5983YOuGd_.... Depending on the place you might see a few more/less sides. There are also places like what you describe that don't give you all the sides, where it's just focused on having an entree, so more like this: https://www.yelp.com/biz_photos/mamas-kitchen-bellevue-2?select=lC1Kr-ixybfdhHezNazRyg https://www.yelp.com/biz_photos/mamas-kitchen-bellevue-2?sel.... I can understand this because I've seen groups of non-Koreans at the traditional places leaving all the banchan untouched.
ashanoko 1y ago
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quanto 1y ago
I am amazed how a narrative could be formed by select samples. The Korean peninsula has very little arable land, and much of Joseon Dynasty's history was marked by famine and mass starvation.
- yongjik 1y ago
  Well, both can be true. Before the industrial revolution, everyone depended on good weather, and people would starve if you had a bad year. But what are you going to do with all that rice on a good year? Somebody's got to eat it. Besides, pre-modern farming is back-breaking labor. One reason why traditional farmers ate so much (if the food was available) is that they needed the calorie.
  - quanto 1y ago
    Both China and Japan were agrarian and primarily rice-eating too, so if the presented narrative was true, what made Korea special?
kwillets 1y ago
This article seems somewhat fanciful. Medieval Koreans ate two meals a day, and famines were common. Only a small area of the country is suitable for rice cultivation. The photos seem to show only upper-class clothing and furniture. I've been to that makgeolli place in Jeonju, and it sells drinks and food as a set; there is no free food.

143 points by carabiner 1y ago

> Daedong-beob unified the various forms of taxes to a single kind: rice. This, in effect, made growing rice equivalent to growing money, encouraging even more production than strictly necessary. This is still relevant these days, whenever someone talks about linking a currency (and taxes collected in that currency) to a commodity like gold. The market for the metal becomes distorted, and the overall economy distorted as well, vulnerable to anything that might impacts the the mining or refinement of the metal. Another historical connection might be how the weird status of silver and gold are linked to European colonization.

erulabs 1y ago
Rice makes quite a good currency, especially if you only have one primary cultivar. It's relatively fungible and dried white rice more or less lasts forever without spoiling. It's quite nice it has the side effect of also literally being food. If rice had been common in Rome, we might still be paying taxes in rice.
- vkou 1y ago
  > we might still be paying taxes in rice. As long as the largest form of economic activity was agriculture, and access to hard currency was limited, people were paying taxes with food (or labour in their landlord's fields). We pay taxes in money because we have a diversified economy, where 90% of us are not subsistence peasants, and the money supply & availability of banking is large enough that we (or our employers) have cash on hand.
  - fluoridation 1y ago
    >We pay taxes in money because we have a diversified economy It's all a fiction, though. Ultimately wealth can be translated to very raw things, like energy, space, and time. Using rice as currency is not too different from using Joules as currency, as it's ultimately just captured and stored solar radiation. The issue with using food as money is not that the economy is diverse, as it's ultimately for the most part powered by people eating. The issue is that if you spend money to make a km^2 of land usable for factories that produce, say, semiconductors, that's not exactly translatable to tons of rice.
    - vkou 1y ago
      I understand the individual sentences in your post, but I don't understand what overall argument it makes. (It also fails to take into account the practical aspects of collecting taxes, which is why food and labour were a common currency for them pre-industrialization, and money is the common currency for them post-industrialization. My post addresses the issue of collecting taxes more than it does the issue of generating wealth.)
      - fluoridation 1y ago
        It's possible I might have misunderstood your point. What I was getting at is that the economy being diverse is not a reason for money to be pegged to rice. Perhaps you were talking about the physical act of paying? "We pay taxes in money" = "we give stacks of paper to the government [rather than bags of rice]"?
        vkou 1y ago
        Yes, I was talking about the physical act of paying - and the form that payment could take when you're trying to extract taxes out of cash-poor subsistence peasants - and how in that kind of world, taxes in a single, fungible type of good (food, days of service in agricultural labour) are common. The economy being diverse, and not just a bunch of peasants barely making ends meet is a great reason for me to not be taxed in rice. I don't grow rice. I don't know anyone who grows rice. I'd have to take money, buy rice, give it to the taxman. This is... Not ideal. (Just like the taxman getting paid in <whatever random non-food good I produce is not ideal.) Even in pre-industrial societies, where where taxes-in-food were common, city-dwellers paid taxes in cash.
        fluoridation 1y ago
        But just like how you don't actually hand over stacks of paper to pay your taxes, you wouldn't need to actually pay in literal bags of rice in a world were rice was currency. I would imagine any economy that kept using rice as currency past the point of subsistence farming would develop tokens.
- dluan 1y ago
  It's still used for bribes in Japan, where earlier this year the agriculture minister was sacked for receiving gifts of rice in the middle of a nationwide rice shortage. His replacement still has an outside chance to become the next prime minister.
  - jama211 1y ago
    Surely that was somewhat of a once off, bribes in Japan are usually money like anywhere else, this is an extremely atypical exception
    - altairprime 1y ago
      The most interesting search result for “rice as a bribe” was its use in a Pathfinder module in order to curry favor with birds. I recognize this isn’t precisely the point here, but given the cross-section of countries represented, I would imagine bribing people with what was literal food currency for centuries has merely decreased in priority relative to local fiat currency, which is perhaps widely accepted nowadays but less readily produced from farmland.
      - jama211 1y ago
        I’m very confused by your comment to be honest, of course fiat currency wouldn’t be produced from farmland?
- charlieyu1 1y ago
  Rice is also literally power, a warlord’s strength is limited by the rice he has
imtringued 1y ago
>Another historical connection might be how the weird status of silver and gold are linked to European colonization. Land is a finite resource so people fight over it. If you make your money a finite resource, then people will fight over money as well. It's not very complicated.
vintermann 1y ago
One thing that has stuck me in old tax records is that when taxes were paid in natura according to fixed exchange rates (e.g. one cow is two sheep, one measure of butter is three squirrel skins etc.), then government probably actually valued some income more than others. The "market value" of these goods almost certainly didn't match the fixed exchange rates, but people's ability to trade for the best tax unit were also limited (and often legally restricted to the same exchange rates!). So e.g. pastoralists who paid their tax in actual skins may have been more valued than people who paid their tax in "a skins worth" of grain. I wonder if there's some good books on this sort of thing.

stx5 1y ago

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jjangkke 1y ago
ah you are an expert in Korea ;) Korean peninsula has always been a target of invasion by its neighbors due to its fertile lands in the south west which produce majority of the rice compare to the rest of the country.
- jacquesm 1y ago
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- stx5 1y ago
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jjangkke 1y ago

i been to a museum that showed what Koreans in the 16th century ate with and I was shocked to find how huge the spoon and bowls were. It's not uncommon to find very tall Koreans 6ft and up these days but they are eating a lot less so I wonder how they've become all so tall.

Izikiel43 1y ago
More protein
lifestyleguru 1y ago
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preommr 1y ago

> One man in my parish is aged between 30 and 45, and in a bet he ate seven bowls—and that’s not counting the bowls of rice wine he drank. One old man, aged 64 or 65, said he had no appetite, and finished five bowls. Surprisingly comical record-keeping.

block_dagger 1y ago
What do you find comical about it?
- n1b0m 1y ago
  Well the part about the old man contains irony: he claimed to have no appetite, but his action of finishing five bowls of food is the opposite of what he said.
  - kelipso 1y ago
    The implication is that someone who says he has no appetite might typically eat five bowls of rice because of the norms of eating a large amount of food in Korea. Whether it's true or whatever, who knows, but that's what's being implied and illustrated in this example.

wagwang 1y ago

A korean meal is only limited by the size of the table. I've visited resturants in korea where there were no less than 30 plates that came out of 1 set meal.

mock-possum 1y ago
What do they do with all the food that doesn’t get eaten?
- kragen 1y ago
  Usually there isn't much. The plates are tiny and mostly have vegetables.
- wrp 1y ago
  A substantial restaurant meal in Korea is usually served with several standard side dishes. Due to the expense and effort of providing these to each table, restaurants often require a minimum party size of two. Also, I'm not sure if it's illegal or just gross, but if a dish looks untouched, sketchier places will sometimes just pass it along to the next customer.
  - kijin 1y ago
    Reusing dishes that were served to another customer is absolutely illegal and carries significant penalties if caught. The problem, of course, is that it's difficult to catch. Many middle-aged and older customers have a habit of mixing up leftover vegetables after a meal, and they encourage others to do so. The idea is that if everyone does the same, the restaurant can't reuse any dishes. Meanwhile, honest restaurant owners want to assure customers that the their dishes are new. So they serve food in a way that will make it very obvious if it was reused. For example, kimchi is often served in long (~30cm) slices, so that customers will have to cut them themselves, as if breaking a seal.
    - wrp 1y ago
      I hang out with a mostly older crowd and often eat in downmarket neighborhoods, and I've seen that dish mixing after meals. Nice to learn that bit about long kimchi slices. I just assumed it was because people like it long, like with spaghetti.

RyanOD 1y ago

When we visit my Korean in-laws, I can confirm a glorious feast is going to happen.

codeableconcept 1y ago

This is similar in terms of macros to the traditional Irish diet in the 19th century, which for workers was purportedly made up of around 13 pounds of potatoes a day for an adult man. This traditional Korean diet appears to also be extremely high in carbs as a proportion. Of course these groups had significantly higher energy expenditures than most moderns, but it does seem possible that caloric excess in the absence of significant dietary fat does not drive obsesity / metabolic disease in the same way.

nradov 1y ago
What's the hypothesis there? Were they just shitting out the extra starch without digesting it? Due to conservation of energy the calories can't just vanish. It doesn't seem physically possible for most adult men to consume 13 pounds of potatoes a day. I'm a large man and I think I'd burst or vomit before choking down that much, regardless of how hard I'd been working. Most likely that number is just wrong.
- carabiner 1y ago
  Hypothesis is that the irishmen were doing hard physical labor that required a high caloric intake. PCT thru-hikers consume 4,000-4,500 calories per day (at least I did) while staying thin. According to inter-net, 13 lb of potatoes has about 4,500 calories. Apparently US civil war soldiers expended 3-4k per day.
  - nradov 1y ago
    I was responding to the claim by @codeableconcept that the absence of significant dietary fat somehow prevents obesity, independent of energy balance. That seems unlikely. Obviously it's possible for an active man to expend ~4500 kcal/day. I've done it myself many times. Even back during the Civil War, US soldiers typically consumed more energy dense food and only got a fraction of their calories from potatoes.
- astura 1y ago
  >it doesn't seem physically possible for most adult men to consume 13 pounds of potatoes a day. I'm a large man and I think I'd burst or vomit before choking down that much, Presumably you aren't doing hard manual labor every day.

mock-possum 1y ago

Well yeah, isn’t korea the origin of the conspicuous gluttony of mukbang?

Flowsion 1y ago
Early mukbang wasn't really about gluttonous binge eating. It was more just a way for people to eat in front of their computers with another person. It's changed a lot now, though.

shihab 1y ago

> To Koreans, they looked more like sauce bowls, leading them to conclude that the Japanese had starved themselves to stretch out the siege. As a Bengali man, that's exactly how I felt when I came to USA and first visited japanese restaurants. Part of the reason we consume so much rice is that rice is kind of the main dish (not a side)- it literally takes up central and most of the space in your food plate. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%E0%A6%87%E0%A6%B2%E0%A6%BF%E0%A6%B6_%E0%A6%AE%E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%9B_%E0%A6%AD%E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%9C%E0%A6%BE_%E0%A6%93_%E0%A6%AD%E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%A4.jpg#/media/File:%E0%A6%87%E0%A6%B2%E0%A6%BF%E0%A6%B6_%E0%A6%AE%E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%9B_%E0%A6%AD%E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%9C%E0%A6%BE_%E0%A6%93_%E0%A6%AD%E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%A4.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%E0%A6%87%E0%A6%B2%E...

hbarka 1y ago
Ilish fish also known as hilsa, the king of fish. That’s one delicious fish.
teleforce 1y ago
Typical Japanese will devour their small rice bowl until there's none of rice grain is left over, since they're taught from the very young age not to waste food. Most of other Asian nations will not eat their rice until it's completely finished. Even with their most delicious biryani dish there're always many rice grains left in the plate. I think the small bowl make it much easier to completely consume the rice unlike the big bowl or plate.
- nirava 1y ago
  The Japanese mostly eat sticky rice, which is very easy to eat and "clean up" even with a chopstick. The Indian subcontinent eat long-grain Basmati or similar rice which fluff up into individual grains on the plate. It doesn't make sense to individually pick out single leftover grains. In nearly every culture is the idea of "Annapurna" or the god of food, and wasting food is generally frowned upon and considered bad table manners. I've been scolded plenty of times as a child for not cleaning up my plate in Nepal. I wouldn't attribute it to small bowls at least. The Japanese instilling good virtues into their children almost institutionally perhaps plays some part in it, but also some of it is just physics.

petesergeant 1y ago

Two thoughts: * Korean are tall by East Asian standards; 3-4 cm taller than Chinese and Japanese * Thais don't eat that much, but they will massively over-cater, and there's not really the same taboo as in Europe of food wastage. My father, who like me spent a couple of decades in Thailand (although at different times) reckoned it was because historically they've had very few food shortages compared to other countries

decimalenough 1y ago
Taller than the Chinese average, perhaps, but northern Chinese are generally much taller than southern Chinese. Guess what's next to northeastern China? That's right, Korea. Thais don't have big meals, but they do snack incessantly, which makes up for it. And overcatering for guests is a pan-Asian or arguably a global phenomenon.
- petesergeant 1y ago
  > And overcatering for guests is a pan-Asian or arguably a global phenomenon. Sure, but Thais will go to a restaurant as a family and order 3x the amount of food needed. Somehow, all the rice will get eaten, and some of the meat will be left.

zkmon 1y ago

Similar situation in South India too. Eating culture is shaped by foods available. Here in western world, I'm shocked by how little rice they serve at my office lunch and at restaurants (we call it as cat food). I usually eat 4-6 times of that rice per meal at home. Still my people make a special observation that I eat very less food at home.

writebetterc 1y ago
I'm sure that if you went back 100 years you'd be less surprised, but of course the rice would've been replaced with oat porridge or potatoes.
- pjc50 1y ago
  The old European one would have been bread: the traditional 2lb/900g ish size loaf would have been consumed in a day. Apparently Turkey still has very high levels of bread consumption.
  - pjmlp 1y ago
    Germany as well, it is like bread with everything, sometimes feels like back in the middle age, using bread as plates.
    - marssaxman 1y ago
      Maybe they were on to something we've lost: bread is delicious.
anon291 1y ago
This is why South Asians have all our metabolic issues (I'm talking about those living in the west). It took me so many years to break myself of this habit. It's not healthy to consume this much white rice. The bowl size at a Japanese restaurant is appropriate for one meal. Carbohydrates and fats are very cheap in developed countries (and developing countries, like India). Protein is not cheap and is underconsumed in most countries. Meals should be focused around protein. It's basically impossible to not get enough carbs and fats living in the United States or any developed nation. In fact, you're probably getting more than you need relative to the amount of protein you consume. Of course, if you live a traditional South Indian lifestyle including lots of manual labor, fishing, farming, etc, then you may have higher carb requirements. For most people today, this is overkill. I've seen this problem in my own family, including untimely deaths, metabolic problems, etc.

decimalenough 1y ago

> Daedong-beob unified the various forms of taxes to a single kind: rice. This, in effect, made growing rice equivalent to growing money, encouraging even more production than strictly necessary. This is not much of an explanation, since feudal Japan had basically the same system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kokudaka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kokudaka

tetris11 1y ago
maybe Japan's feudal lords were more corrupt, disincentivizing production. Whereas Koreans paid directly to the king
rsynnott 1y ago
AIUI that was a bit different; that was _notional_ rice (the tax wasn't necessarily paid in kind).

stephenanand 1y ago

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kijin 1y ago

> the rice bowl in the photo was 3.5 inches tall with a diameter of over 6 inches, holding nearly a liter of rice to be eaten with soup that came in an even larger bowl, with an assortment of side dishes. For one person. In one meal. 1 liter of Korean-style cooked white rice weighs about 500 grams. It contains about 1.5 Calories per gram, judging from the label on my Hetbahn. So that's about 750 Calories tops. The photo doesn't look like white rice, so the caloric content is probably lower. I would give at most 100 Calories for the soup and all the side dishes combined. The soup is mostly water, with very little solid content. (That chunk you see in the photo is rice. Dude is dunking his rice in the soup to make it softer, because who wants to munch on 1 liter of rough brown rice?) Meanwhile, his side dishes are leafy vegetables like kimchi and namul. Side dishes made of animal products like ham and eggs were considered a luxury until only 60 years ago. Fat was also a luxury, so everything had to be lean. This is in stark contrast to a Western meal, where fatty side dishes contribute a lot of Calories. So that's about 850 Calories for the whole table, or about one Big Mac with medium fries and a sugar-free drink. Not a particularly heavy meal for an adult male who spends most of his time working in the field. The reason Koreans ate a lot of rice, fruit, and vegetables is because those foods have low caloric density by modern standards. It's mostly just water and carbohydrates. If not for their high energy expenditure, Koreans would all have died of diabetes.

NoLinkToMe 1y ago
What is your take on the comparisons with Japan and the comments left by European visitors, both of whom who likely ate similar ingredients in Asia both of whom were noted to eat a lot less? To me the article doesn’t really make sense. Either the Korean diet was being overstated (likely, but why if it was consistently noted?), or there was some unexplained extra energetic expenditure by Koreans versus Japanese (unlikely), or Koreans were significantly more fat than Japanese (unlikely).
- kijin 1y ago
  There are records from every country around Korea, throughout recorded history, that Koreans eat a lot. There are also statements that Irish farmers ate 14 pounds of potatoes, English peasants ate 4 pounds of bread, and that Japanese samurai ate 4 pounds of rice a day. All of these statements were made from the point of view of aristocrats who had rich foods, as they looked down upon commoners who had nothing but plain starch to fill their caloric budgets with. So I think that a large part of this stereotype has to do with the fact that Korea used to be one of the poorest countries in the world until very recently. In China, even commoners had access to delicious 9-Calories-per-gram cooking oil since the Song dynasty. In Japan, sushi as we know it appeared in the Edo period and became the fast food of choice for urban laborers. Meanwhile, Korean society remained almost exclusively agricultural until Western visitors arrived to take photos of their massive rice bowls. Same caloric content, just more voluminous. There are also issues of measurement that were lost in translation. The report that Korean soldiers ate 3 times as much rice as the Japanese? True, Koreans ate 7 cups of rice, while the Japanese ate 2 cups. But the Japanese measuring cup was 3 times as large as the old Korean cup (hob). The much more reasonable 7:6 ratio can probably be explained by the fact that Koreans had the home advantage at the time of the war, or that Koreans are taller than the Japanese on average. And yes, the obesity rate is also higher in Korea, despite the fact that Japan has enjoyed a modern lifestyle for much longer.

sbinnee 1y ago

It was a fun reading as a Korean and my hometown Jeonju was even mentioned! My partner is non-Korean and I can definitely tell the difference in rice consumption for sure. I can eat much more much faster. But the funny thing is she can eat more bread faster than me.

1cool 1y ago

For centuries, Korean peasants lacked food and endlessly complained of hunger but I won't cherry pick random historical (and foreign) observations to support it.

AndrewThrowaway 1y ago

Anecdotal story. Once I stumbled into Korean restaurant in China Town in NYC. I just ordered something like lunch. I was alone. They kept bringing plates after plates of various dishes. I was ashamed to leave so much food. Paid like 11 dollars but it was in ~2015.

JumpCrisscross 1y ago
Come back and try KTown on 32nd. (Get off the ground floors.) $20 will buy a good meal. $40, decadence. (Avant alcohol.)

ListeningPie 1y ago

What happened to all the excess calories they are eating? Huge bowl of rice, table filled with food, and the people look almost malnourished.

NaomiLehman 1y ago
probably eating once a week
cyber_kinetist 1y ago
From the other comment by kijin - 1 liter of rice isn't actually that much (~500g, which approximates to 750 kcal). And given that most Koreans in the area didn't eat that much outside of rice (only vegetables and fruits) since access to meat was reserved for the super-wealthy, most Koreans were probably malnourished when also factoring in the manual labor they needed to do (rice farming is very labor-intensive)

BrandoElFollito 1y ago

Reading the comments here and elsewhere, and these from my Korean friends -- this is not reflected in Korean restaurants, at least in France. I have tried a few in and around Paris (the latest was yesterday, a small family-run one lost in some random street), and the food is at best normal size, and less positively massively overpriced. You usually get 3 tiny plates (with two leaves of kimchi, to give some context) and a normal plate of food + a small bowl of rice. This is enough for my French stomach, but reading about the lavish servings and whatnot, this may just be a local thing.

nobodyandproud 1y ago
I’m not surprised. When I went London over ten years ago, the recommended Korean restaurant paled to what’s in NYC. I imagine competition and easy access to Korean ingredients are the main factors.
cyber_kinetist 1y ago
Native Korean living in Korea here. Many restaraunts in South Korea have self-bars where you can refill the kimchi (and other various banchan (side dish) assortments) as much as you want - and in the rest of the places that don't have this you can just ask the waiter to give some more for free instead! Refusing to give free kimchi isn't just considered bad service here; it's just outright weird. Only the "touristy" Korean restaraunts outside of the country don't do this - they charge hefty prices to innocuous side dishes like kimchi, and I've even heard places in Europe sell soju in shots (which is outright ridiculous, soju is one of the most cheap-ass low-brow artificially made commodity liquor here!)
rsynnott 1y ago
I suppose people adapt serving sizes to local norms. That said, the first Korean place I ever went to (in Dublin) served comically large amounts of food. I could never figure out how they made the economics work; they were the same price as the neighbouring Chinese places but must have been using at least twice as much food.
carabiner 1y ago
Yeah that sounds very westernized. This is what you'd see for one person at an average, traditional Korean restaurant in the US: https://s3-media0.fl.yelpcdn.com/bphoto/GZx0kD7qjv5983YOuGd_WQ/o.jpg https://s3-media0.fl.yelpcdn.com/bphoto/GZx0kD7qjv5983YOuGd_.... Depending on the place you might see a few more/less sides. There are also places like what you describe that don't give you all the sides, where it's just focused on having an entree, so more like this: https://www.yelp.com/biz_photos/mamas-kitchen-bellevue-2?select=lC1Kr-ixybfdhHezNazRyg https://www.yelp.com/biz_photos/mamas-kitchen-bellevue-2?sel.... I can understand this because I've seen groups of non-Koreans at the traditional places leaving all the banchan untouched.

ashanoko 1y ago

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quanto 1y ago

I am amazed how a narrative could be formed by select samples. The Korean peninsula has very little arable land, and much of Joseon Dynasty's history was marked by famine and mass starvation.

yongjik 1y ago
Well, both can be true. Before the industrial revolution, everyone depended on good weather, and people would starve if you had a bad year. But what are you going to do with all that rice on a good year? Somebody's got to eat it. Besides, pre-modern farming is back-breaking labor. One reason why traditional farmers ate so much (if the food was available) is that they needed the calorie.
- quanto 1y ago
  Both China and Japan were agrarian and primarily rice-eating too, so if the presented narrative was true, what made Korea special?

kwillets 1y ago

This article seems somewhat fanciful. Medieval Koreans ate two meals a day, and famines were common. Only a small area of the country is suitable for rice cultivation. The photos seem to show only upper-class clothing and furniture. I've been to that makgeolli place in Jeonju, and it sells drinks and food as a set; there is no free food.