Dear July,
So you got a bouquet of green onions to make tteokbokki. Your shopping list so resembled mine I couldn’t help smiling. I feel like you’re secretly wandering around some marketplace in Seoul. At the Mangwon Market tomorrow, I’ll go buy a bouquet of green onions and a block of tofu like you. I’m glad we can still taste the same food. I guess I do come from a people who love sharing food.
It was Chuseok when I got your mail. I went to Busan and had lunch at my father’s mother’s house and dinner at my mother’s mother’s house. The holidays when all my relatives gather around a table are always a tense time for me. My mother always seasons vegetables during the holiday. This time, her mother told her, “You seasoned all this expensive spinach. What a big liver you’ve got.”1 Prices have soared here, too, so much so that a bouquet of spinach now costs 9,000 won. It was so funny that I could have spinach thanks to my big-livered mother. I laughed out loud until my eyes caught the pieces of cow flesh sitting next to the vegetables on the dinner table. How big a liver do you need to eat a cow? I wondered until the smell of burning flesh made me feel faint.
Something must be wrong with a world where sausages are cheaper than green onions. Not long ago, I saw the news that there was a frantic run for chicken at a supermarket that sold fried chicken at 6,990 won. How can animals be cheaper than vegetables? They must be fed, cleaned, taken to the slaughterhouse to be butchered or processed. And they move. They can do or not do something according to their wants. They can feel interested or aggressive towards other animals nearby. When feeling threatened, they will scream and try to run, swinging their arms and legs. To me who has never farmed, it seems far simpler to raise vegetables that don’t move. What happened to bring about this imbalance between the surprisingly expensive vegetables and the surprisingly cheap animals?
They say it takes about thirty to forty days for spinach to be sown, grown, and harvested. Not only are they affected by severe weather such as droughts, heavy rains, and typhoons, spinach are cool-season crops that are especially vulnerable to heat waves. In this time of climate crisis, it may not be long before we must tell them goodbye. Can you imagine a kimbap without them? But it’s hard to stomach that a bouquet of spinach costs more than a myeong2 of chicken, even considering the rapid rise of vegetable prices due to crop failures. It’s also said to take about thirty days for a chicken to hatch, grow, and be butchered. Chickens are expected to live over ten years under natural circumstances, but they are butchered early so their meat can be made fast, cheaply, and in large quantities. In fact, what people consume as chicken are chicks. Cooped up and deprived of sleep in battery cages lighted 24/7, they feed and feed until, a month later, they become meat-ready. Sent to the slaughterhouse, they let out a peeping cry. In South Korea, 1,035,650,000 myeongs of chicken were slaughtered this way in 2021 alone. It means 2,837,000 myeongs died every day, their bodies not fully grown.
The number of deaths is too staggering to seem real. These unrealistic numbers continue without end. The number of myeongs of women who lay eggs in a cage barely bigger than a letter-size paper folded in half until they get slaughtered a year later at most. The number of myeongs of boys who are macerated as soon as they’re born just because they can’t lay eggs. The number of myeongs of women pigs who get pregnant and give birth every six months for three years until they’re sent to the slaughterhouse. The number of myeongs of women cows whose baby and milk are forcefully taken from them by humans. Looking at the uncanny row of names and numbers, it all seems like a lie. You don’t see the Grim Reaper, living in the midst of a city. Turn your eyes away from the numbers, and everywhere you look is cleansed of their presence.
Some photos are even more unreal than seeing names and numbers in rows. I happened upon an image online, where milky stringy things were tangled together, resembling the threads of memory siphoned off of Dumbledore’s temple. On the photo was written an unidentifiable number: 84879.
What on earth is this? Staring and staring didn’t give me any clue. A few minutes of research revealed that the photo was taken from Moon Sun Hee’s photo-documentary essay, Mooda: A Record of Burial Sites of Living Animals during the Epidemics3. The image shows part of the land three years after animals were shoved into holes and covered with dirt to contain the spread of bird flu and food-and-mouth disease. She had heard that the burial grounds become legally reusable three years after interment and embarked on a journey to find out the truth. I quote her words after she returned from surveying the land:
“Cotton-like mold blossomed endlessly between the crevices. The farmer ventilated the ground and spread new soil, but to no avail. The mold spread defiantly, doggedly, clutching at the sand and the dirt. What is going on beneath the earth’s surface?”
Reading this sentence transported me to the scene. I could feel the smell and texture of the land vividly, even those of the mushy underground. The number next to the photo refers to that of animals buried alive there. When food-and-mouth disease began spreading in the winter of 2010, the government disposed of 3.5 million cows and pigs, even those that were in good health, on the pretext of preventive measures. The burial sites made at the time are said to number 4,799 nationwide.
This winter, 7.1 million myeongs of ducks and chicken were buried alive due to avian influenza. Most people showed more concern for chicken prices than for the deaths of 7.1 million lives. I started to worry about things not reflected in the price of chicken: lands that grow mold, rivers overflowing with animal waste, groundwaters polluted by rotting corpses. What price do they amount to? For me, it is a tough and hefty question. I can only surmise that the world’s most vulnerable places will take the hit the most harshly.
As you rightly pointed out, whether veganism is a viable option for those who can’t afford expensive meat and vegetables is a question fraught with complexity. A task more urgent for me, however, is to face the tightly interlocking problems of meat consumption, factory farming, climate crisis, and inequality, together with more people. To fill the bellies of those rich enough to eat cows, a more than adequate number of cows are raised on the periphery. While vast forests disappear to make room for feed crops for cows, other regions are afflicted with floods or droughts. Climate crisis, as we have already witnessed, takes away the homes and lands of the underprivileged the fastest. During a downpour, some head home as usual after work, while the semi-basement homes of many are submerged underwater. Prolonged droughts force some Harlemites to unplug hydrants while others go on drinking bottled water. Which side am I on? Which part of land will I inhabit? What can I do to preserve the world around me?
There’s a slaughterhouse and burial site not too far from me, but I stick to my routine. The moldy land troubles me from time to time, but I don’t know what I can do about it. Only when the out I occupy feels out of joint do I stand still, bewildered. Just like you halted in your parents’ store, before the dinner table. July, your questions and stories also make me halt. I stop and think. That we need a new story. You know, I love how we can answer questions with questions, add stories to stories.
July, the night has deepened while I spun out words to send you. The weather in Seoul nowadays is, how to put it, full of autumnal glitters. I wonder how many more glittering falls we’ll be allowed. I read and reread what you put so beautifully, that I’m a part of your priceless outside. I’m ever so glad I ventured outside for it allowed me to meet you. Even when we are old women, I hope the out we live in is neither flooded nor parched so we can have a sisterly picnic on a lovely day. Our taste buds will have matured with age, but we shall enjoy our meal together; we shall share seasoned spinach and guffaw at our big-liveredness. By then Nini will have grown old and died, no longer by my side. But I hope my Busan-home and your parents’ home will remain as they are, a constant source of familiar relief and unhomely precariousness. Let us return each time brimming with exciting stories, and throw our own potluck party. Let the world not end until we grow old and die. I miss you, July.
Craving a bite of your Harlem tteokbokki,
Jinhwa
