Korean Girls Taste American Snacks

[Taco]

Asian women like to be wined and dined but have trouble eating some American foods.

[MrMan]

The reason Korean women tend to be thin is because they find food like pot tarts to be unappetizing. Koreans I've known who eat American snacks think they are too sweet or too salty.

I spent a year in Korea. When I first got there, I kept wanting a salt shaker at restaurants. The manager of my school and I went out for sam ke tang, ginseng chicken stew that comes boiling in a hot pot which can be really, really good if you go to the right place. It's one of the few foods that isn't red if you can't handle hot chili pepper. You can add spice to it. My manager saw me about to dump this little tiny dish of salt they gave me into the soup. He said, "Don't do that. It will be too salty." So I sprinkled a bit in, tried it, and poured the rest in. I don't know if that was enough.

By the end of the year, I'd adjusted to the lack of salt. I want home to my parent's, tried some of my mom's food, and wondered if she accidently dumped too much salt in. It was so salty I could hardly stand it. I was back to normal after several days, able to eat yummy salty food.

Korean food is pretty, good, though. We eat it at my house, but our version of it is too salty for Koreans. At least one Korean we gave Korean vegetables to for dinner found it to be too salty. They eat a lot of fresh vegetables. There are a few gross things. I never had raw octopus. I had some boiled squid for breakfast there, and found a snail at the bottom of some noodles I was eating at a Korean Chinese restaurant.

Their version of Chinese food is different, but they have some good dishes. Jajang noodle, however they spell it, beef with black bean noodle is a pretty good fast food. They also have friend mandu, dumplings. I went to one nice 'real Chinese' restaurant when I was there, too. Of course the grilled meat is good. Spinach and bean sprouts are two of my favorite side dishes. When you order a main course, they bring these little bowls of side dishes to share. Chinese cabbage kimchi is almost always on the table. Next to that, daikon pickle seems to be the second most common. I liked it when they brought out spinach and bean sprouts, the way they do it with sesame oil. It's delicious.

The downside is if you are in Korea, people get food out of the common bowls with the chopsticks they put in their mouths. They don't use a separate spoon or set of chop sticks for dipping, at least not when I was there. And you only get a little bowl of rice, so you don't have a plate, really, to put your stuff on if you want to get your vegetables and meat and set it apart so you can prevent contact with other people's saliva. I've seen plates, etc. in Korean restaurants in the US.

I didn't eat a lot of 'chip' type snacks in Korea. They did have some good cookies that tasted like fortune cookies in Korea. Those little green sticky rice cakes with a sweet filling, probably sweetened bean, was good. Some of the donuts in the backers had that stuff in it, too. Lotte chewing gum is better than Wrigley's. It's softer and easier on the jaw. Lotte had a really good Ghana brand chocolate bard which was better than Hershey's. I used to buy blueberry, which tastes great. I liked some of their soft drinks like Milkis and their apple sider soft drink was pretty good, too, for something different. I never tried their smelly dried squid snack that some movie theaters sell, and others prohibit over there.

[newlifeinphilippines]

Its good im back in america. Can't stand asian food. I love american food only. Frankly i love everything america except teh women. I think id have to import a wife to america cause theres no way id put up with asia living.

[chanta76]

Mr Man,

That's big reason why Koreans are allot slimmer compared to Americans.in matter of fact you can say that about all Asians . The food is better and healthy in the long run compared to the American diet. My wife has a hard time eating the American snacks saying it's too sweet. Regarding salt. Many KOrean dishes has allot of salt in it so they don't add any more. And the sharing of food is where it seems foreign to Americans but other culture does it too. I think to some extent in India and Arab culture they share the food. I 'm not sure where it started from but I remember eating with a bunch of American in a Korean restaurant.

We went out for sam-ki -san (Korean grilled bacon) and as you know you cook it on a grill in front of you in middle of the table. Each person has their own rice bowls and we share the ban-chan.(little veggie dishes) ..anyway once the meat was cooked all the American would grab the meat and pile up on their plate...I was shocked !! Typical Koreans don't eat like that we kind of share the meat portion and if need more we order more but don't like stock pile the meat . I mean all the meat was gone. That was the last time I every eat with Americans. I mean to the Korean crowd they thought the American were too selfish or pigs. There was this one fat American girl that kept doing that...it was annoying but it shows that even in eating habit the cultural differences.

In Korea and most of Asia it's reflected in the language (speaking honorific for example) and the eating where people would share. The western mind set is not like..that. Sadly Korea is becoming more and more like America where it;s all about ME.

[Taco]

Korean food is pretty, good, though.

Yeah, if your like eating gelatinous sea creatures in your spare time.



However, I can't argue with the results...

[Ghost]

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[MrMan]

We went out for sam-ki -san (Korean grilled bacon) and as you know you cook it on a grill in front of you in middle of the table.

Is that the same thing as sam gyup sal. (I'm not sure if I spelled that right.) I had a Canadian co-worker, raised on a farm in Alberta, who corrected me when I called that stuff 'Korean bacon.' She said it is Korean side pork. Bacon is smoked.

Each person has their own rice bowls and we share the ban-chan.(little veggie dishes) ..anyway once the meat was cooked all the American would grab the meat and pile up on their plate...I was shocked !! Typical Koreans don't eat like that we kind of share the meat portion and if need more we order more but don't like stock pile the meat .

I don't see the problem if everyone gets their fair share. Were they split it up fairly?

Stock piling prevents them from having to share the slobber from other people's chopsticks. It's hotter off the grill. If all Americans and Canadians are eating out together, they can agree on a set of community chop sticks for dipping or a fork. Are there still lots of Canadians in South Korea, would you happen to know? It seemed like half the English teachers were Canadian. Koreans preferred Americans. I couldn't tell who was Canadian based on their accent, not unless they came from the eastern part of the country.

[MrMan]

Taco,

I basically avoided seafood in Korea. When I first got there, I went out after work with some co-workers to a fish place. I remember they ordered a hot-pot bowl of seafood soup to share. I hadn't developed a tolerance for hot pepper. I took one spoonful out of the bowl before other people started dipping their spoons in, slurping loudly, and sticking their saliva-laden spoons back in. I wasn't used to sharing saliva at all. The chopsticks is a little less gross to me. You touch the part you eat, and you don't dip a spoon with saliva on it into the very fluid you are drinking.

The soup was too hot.

I also still don't want to eat sashimi, and early on, someone drove some coworkers and me through mountains and curves, me in the back in the middle, jetlagged, and we arrived at this place that smelled like a fishing doc. They served raw fish and had no Hibachi grills. I had little tolerance for red pepper and I ate a little kimchi and rice, and couldn't bring myself to eat raw fish.

Sea food restaurants smelled funny, so I just stayed away from it. There is plenty of gross stuff over there, like live octopus. I never tried silk worm larvae, a popular street food. It looks like shelled pecans, but every once in a while, one of the pecans in the stack wiggles and falls off the pile. I think they boil them.

But most of the food was rice, pork, beef, vegetables. I ate a little boiled squid with hot sauce on it. Most of the stuff I saw was kind of like normal food, just spicy. Overall, it's tasty food. It's hard to avoid hot chilli pepper, but easy to avoid gross stuff there.

I hear they put insects in some of the food in Thailand.