cuisine

Last week I went out to dinner with a few coworkers. My boss was craving some samgytang, which is a chicken and ginseng soup. We went to a little restaurant nearby that none of us had been to before, and took our seats on the floor at a table.

An old lady, in time, came to our table to take our orders. My boss said, "Nega samgytang chuseyo," which means please give us four samgytangs, to which the lady replied, "Ne, nega boshintang," okay, four boshintangs. Pretty certain that she hadn't gotten our order right, we soon clarified that we didn't want boshintang, but samgytang. "Ah, nega samgytang," said the old lady, and soon we were eating our chicken and ginseng soups.

A little curious about what we nearly had ordered, what boshintang is, my boss sent a text message to a friend asking just that. The reply he got was simple- dog.

The impression I've gotten regarding Koreans and eating dog is that most find it to be very antiquated and barbaric. However, there is still a portion of Koreans, most of them older, who still do it.

Some fellow foreigners that I talk to over here say that they wouldn't mind trying dog. When asked why they respond alone the lines of, "Well, when will I ever get the chance again?" I don't quite follow this logic, and view eating dog as something I could never do, especially because of how the dogs are killed. It's believed that the meat tastes better if the dogs experience a rush of adrenaline shortly before death. To achieve this the dog will be placed into a burlap sack and beaten to death with a baseball bat.

I'll stick with the samgytang.