"He-e-e-e-r-e's dinner. Raw fish.

Korea's lean cuisine: 

How I lost 12 pounds eating Korean food

by Donald Burns

SEOUL, South Korea -- When I tell my American compatriots that I prefer rice and kimchee for breakfast, they usually look at me like I'm nuts. But I always catch their interest when I tell them how, thanks to Korean food, I shed 12 pounds. Last weekend I went shopping for a pair of suspenders just to hold my pants up.

OK, I was not so very fat to begin with, so you won't be hearing my story on Oprah. (Although, two years prior to Korea, my Italian ex-girlfriend stuffed me so full of pasta that I stopped wearing my best suits, just to keep the seams from splitting.)

Korean food is my favorite now, and lately I sound like the Euell Gibbons of Kimchee. But when I first got here, eight months ago, I ate Korean food only because the company cafeteria was my only practical option for eating out. (I work in a gigantic factory complex in Suwon, alongside 40,000 hungry people at lunch time.) Worse, I couldn't locate a single junk-food snack machine.

It didn't take me long to figure out that the best food value in Korea is, no surprise, Korean food: The western cuisine here is ridiculously overpriced, and hardly ever prepared correctly. Something is inevitably cold or stale, too sweet or salty. In Seoul, thirty bucks at a top restaurant buys you a spaghetti dinner that would be given away for free by any halfway-decent, happy-hour tavern back in New York. And the local fast-food franchises can't get it right either, cooking up Twilight-Zone "sets" like Pizza and Milk or, worse, Spaghetti, French fries and Coffee.

Korean food is the natural choice for a macho man like myself, an acquired taste that's not for sissies. We all know it tends to be hot and spicy. What's less obvious is that Korean food is not neatly categorized according to breakfast, lunch or dinner. Early one morning, pushing my metal tray along the cafeteria line, I was barely awake when a five-inch fish suddenly came flopping onto my plate, sending me into acute gastro-intestinal shock at about 6:40 AM. Resting lazily on its side, staring at me through that empty eye socket, this specimen would never be mistaken for a Mrs. Paul's filet. My Korean-English dictionary called it a "croaker"; what an understatement.
I mean, was this supposed to be breakfast--or some kind of appetite suppressant?

In fact, after the psychological shock had passed, my breakfast croaker was pretty tasty, reminding me of a West-sea fishing expedition, last October, an outing not to be confused with a USA-style clam bake. When we got to the beach, I helped set up some portable gas grills which I assumed would be used to cook the fish. Wrong! The fish were scaled, sliced and eaten raw, right on the beach; the gas grills were used only to boil rice. (Even without cooking, the raw fish were plenty hot after being cut up and soaked in "wasabi" a Kelly-green mustard sauce.)

Korean food simply has to be healthier for you. According to recent cover stories in Time and Newsweek, Americans are obsessed with eliminating fat from their diets; yet, we typically derive 40% of our calories from fat, as compared to 20% for people living in Asia.

And a report on the AP newswire said that Kimchee is gaining a loyal following abroad; in fact, the Korean government is sponsoring a campaign to make sure that the foreign press gets the spelling right ("Kimchee" is OK, "Kimchi" is a Japanese spelling, according to AP).

At a recent breakfast seminar in Seoul's Chosun Hotel, it was pretty obvious that the Americans in the room, unlike the Koreans, were carrying enough spare tires to compete with Michelin. The menu included eggs, toast, hash-brown potatoes AND bacon AND ham AND sausage. "This has something to do with the year of the pig, right?" I asked a beefy midwesterner sitting next to me. I think a waiter had to be treated for cholesterol inhalation. I cleaned the plate anyway.

Back at the company cafeteria, dinner time, I offset my pig-out platter with some Korean cuisine: Brown-seaweed soup and beef, blue-pepper anchovies, radish kimchee, rice and the daily mystery item, this time a "hair tail" (some kind of eel-like fish, according to my dictionary--I dunno). These Korean dishes are tasting even better now that I can read the menu in Hangul. Sometimes I'm not even sure if what I'm eating is animal, vegetable or mineral. But I'm never disappointed.

(Originally published in the Korea Times)