Instant Food Blog

Here are some of the more questionable food items that I have in my apartment, laid out on top of the most questionable piece of furniture I have in my apartment, a pink couch that I found in the parking garage of my building. On the left, we have a bag of Seasoned Dried Fishmeat, which are fried crackers that taste like fish. They are so bad that after eating half a bag, I woke up in the middle of the night with intense stomach pains and what I thought was the beginning of a fever. I was fine by morning, but unless we are all willing to give my immune system the bad-ass credit of stopping Swine Flu dead in its tracks in less than six hours, it's probably better to assume that Seasoned Dried Fishmeat is toxic mulgogi and should not be eaten by anyone.

The bag to the right is, of course, a bag of ramen noodles. In Korea, it's generally true that a restaurant uses a cartoon depiction of whatever animal you're going to eat inside on the sign out front, whether it be a cow for beef, pig for pork, or octopus for wriggling tentacles on a plate. The notable exception to this is restaurants with signs that feature pictures of waterfalls. They serve dog. Which is fine. All I want to know is, do the little foil packets in these bags of ramen contain raccoon flavoring? I feel like no matter what the answer is, I'm going to be disappointed.

All of the boxes on the couch are filled with chocolate and cookie sticks called Pepero Sticks (not Pocky). These were all given to me by my students on Wednesday because they love me.

On an unrelated note, Wednesday in Korea, or 11/11, was also "Pepero Day," a day for exchanging Pepero sticks that was started by Lotte Department Store in the 1990s as a shameless cash grab, and is the second-most insidious thing that Lotte has perpetrated on the Korean people, right behind giving the company a name that nobody here can pronounce.