Veggie Pride

Nick fails to escape the photo in the Dream Mart produce section.

I'm sorry, but Korean corn-on-the-cob
is like the homeless version of
American sweet corn.

When you move to another country you discover new fruits, veggies, meats, and other goodies.  In Korea, I love the enormous crunchy-sweet apples, the round crisp pears, the sweet white melon.  We quickly learned not to touch the deceitful Korean corn-on-the cob, which is so tasteless an Iowa farmer wouldn’t toss it to his least favorite pig.  That said, Korea loves to dump canned corn on American food, somehow assuming that we are as obsessed with that grain as they are with rice. We've learned to ask for corn to NOT be put onto our pizza, hot dogs, etc.  

Today I wish to tell two recent stories related to my attempts to identify strange veggies. 

Last week, when Nick stopped our van at a busy intersection, I noticed a man selling meter-long sticks out of his Bongo truck (a unique style of pick-up truck here).  Some big banners (Korean do so love their banners) announced the name of these stick things, but that did not help me imagine what these things were or what they would be used for.  So I watched, puzzled, as women approached the truck and bought a few sticks at a time.  The items seemed to be not quite wooden; more like extremely long, skinny carrots. I rolled my window down and took some pictures, secure in my anonymity amid the confusion of busy traffic.  But just as the traffic light turned green and Nick stepped on the gas, I was caught.  The seller looked directly at me, picked up a long root-thing, and waved it limply in front of him like a whip in slow motion, a bright smile lighting up his face. 

Long Stick Seller Man (just before waving one at me).

My second veggie encounter this week happened outside my doctor's office.  I came out of the building and nearly ran into an ajumma setting out her veggies for sale on the sidewalk.  I noticed one box of very large, light-green veggies that I’d not seen before, sort of like zucchini but of monstrous proportions.  Proudly whipping out my stunning array of Korean vocabulary, I asked “Mwa yay-yo?” (“what is it?”) while pointing to the box at her feet.  She responded quickly “Han gay ee chawn won” ("2000 won for each one").  I smiled, shook my head, and repeated my question. She proceeded to pick up one of the veggies in question, poke me in the belly with it a few times, and restate her price. My smile was surely more strained now, but I bravely tried one more tactic: “Ho-bahk?” ("pumpkin/squash?").  And AGAIN with the poking but this time she said “say sah me.”  Which I didn’t understand.  Wishing to stop the prodding of my gooshy middle-aged middle parts, I walked away, my curiosity about the veggie unsatisfied, and new questions arising about the ajumma's unorthodox persuasion methods.  

P. S. Veggie Research

The Sticks: I e-mailed my stick truck picture to my delightful new Korean tutor, and she responded this way:

that is called burdock.
korean pronounciation is woo awng
it is food which we can eat.
if you drew this, you can lose weight. but way to drew is little bit difficult.

This give me some new information, but I was not entirely clear on how vegetable doodling is a feasible diet plan.  I also wondered whether the weight loss reference was a polite hint.  But, thus armed with some new information,  I consulted Wikipedia (see Arctium):

(a) The grippy seedpods of burdock (we called them “hitchhikers” as kids walking through the Michigan woods) inspired the concept of Velcro. 

(b) Some Koreans make tea out of the burdock root or cut it up for Korean veggie soup.

(c) The flavor of burdock is not necessarily its selling point: 

"Burdock root is very crisp and has a sweet, mild, and pungent flavour with a little muddy harshness that can be reduced by soaking in water." (quothe Wikipedia).

Hmmm… tea with “a little muddy harshness,” anyone?

The Monster Zucchini:  The Poking Veggie Ajumma said what sounded like "sesame" but I couldn't find any Korean spelling of this word that made sense (I found these interesting versions, though: three new non-; new thirty two; three American companies; three three American).  I knew that Koreans eat the very tasty "sesame" leaves with grilled meat, but (a) those leaves aren't from the same plants as sesame seeds and (b) they aren't from plants that create veggies of frightening size. So the closest I've found to the poking veggie is "Asian zucchini" but I'm not convinced I've identified the monster yet. The squash, I mean, not the ajumma.

P. P. S.  AHA!
Here is an explanatory note from Jeremy Knapp, an Iowa transplant to Korea (his lovely wife is Korean and Jeremy is fluent in the language and culture):

The 우엉 (burdock) actually tastes lovely as a tea. Muddy is the wrong word. I would think "earthy," in the same way that a nice stout beer might be earthy. Mellow, not pungent.

The 수세미 (soo-say-me) is used to make natural sponges; we call it "loofah" or "luffa" in English. As the plant gets older and the seeds get more hard and dry, the flesh dries up and creates a sponge.

See here: http://sjjadu.tistory.com/300And here: http://www.ohfarm.co.kr/blogshop/gomonesusemi/gomonesusemi-intro04.htm

P.S. Yes, there's a difference between the (black or gray) wild sesame plant and the domestic sesame plant. But the ordinary white sesame (Big Mac Bun and toasted sesame you see here and there) comes from the same plants that those tasty leaves grow from. I used to raise these plants back in Iowa.