The EcoWorldly webpage has a posting up with 17 reasons you may be a Korean environmentalist. Here are the Top Ten reasons:
1. You care about wellbeing, but you still smoke.
2. When you eat cow you call it cow.
3. You ride the bus and the train, but you still love Hyundai.
4. You may be a vegetarian, but you eat pig (not pork… see above).
5. You’ve visited a Korean environmental web page other than this one.
6. You recycle and compost, but you’re not sure why.
7. You can locate an organic grocery store in your city.
8. You know at least one person with a solar water heater.
9. You conserve water at home, but love the community spa.
10. You use almost all compact fluorescent light bulbs.
You can read the rest of the list with details via Asian Offbeat as well. Some of the items on the list are strange because I have never had a Korean tell me, "Do you want to eat cow or pig?" Koreans that speak English will say beef or pork but more often then not will use the Korean name for the food such as Bulgogi.
As far as composting here is my favorite Korean composting story. I’m sitting in my Bradley out in the field "defending" a road from an imaginary enemy and we were parked adjacent to a rice paddy that was behind a small restaurant. While parked there my crew and I saw an older woman from the restaurant walk into the rice paddy and take a crap right in front of us and then walk back into the restaurant. She came out later and then tried to exchange MREs from us for ramen and ice cream cones. I don’t know if she was an environmentalist, but it sure was funny.
Here are some other things EcoWorldly can add to there list:
- You believe you need to wear a decontamination suit to visit a local USFK installation
- You believe that formaldehyde diluted with water and processed through two water treatment plants can cause cancer.
- You believe this same formaldehyde is responsible for creating a monster in the Han River.
- When Korean corporations pollute and dump toxic chemicals into the Han River you could care less.
- You are linked to a North Korean spy scandal.
Anyone else have some ideas to add so we can make the EcoWorldly list more accurate?
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9:02 am on February 29th, 2008 1
This comment is not specifically on topic so don’t read on if you are looking for on topic responses.
The formaldehyde thing got me to thinking back to earlier times I had in Korea. All the soju and beer manufacturers in Korea used to put a touch of formaldehyde at the very tops of the soju and beer bottle as the formaldehyde would float on top of these beverages and apparently was added for preservation purposes. That’s why you still see some older Korean men who instinctively spill off just a little bit of the top of their soju/beer before they pour it into their glasses.
Just a bit of unrelated nonsense for you to read here. Thanks for reading.
Tim in Angeles sendzzzzzzzzzzzz
1:25 pm on February 29th, 2008 2
My goodness GI
Put away the Hateraid
7:54 pm on February 29th, 2008 3
Formaldehyde and Beer
http://www.beer-faq.com/beer-basics/formaldehyde-beer/
I don’t know about Green Koreans but I had two stinking hippie English “teachers” argue with me that a shower every day is a waste of water (not to mention how daily washing was bad for your skin and overall health).
I could smell the guy and the girl, from Seattle, was certainly ratty… and proud of it! Unbelievable.
While I am not unversed in the art of debate, you just can’t argue with stupid. I’d personally strip mine the whole planet before walked around with oily hair and flakes on the shoulders of my stinky shirts.
The best I could do was try to explain to them how many liters of water is wasted to produce a single cup of coffee… but, no… talk of limiting coffee made them defensive and angry… showers were still optional.
How about these entries…
You might be a Korean environmentalist when…
…you will buy a product made of powdered uranium, filled with dioxin and produced in a big, smoky factory next to a preschool as long as it says, “For Most Green and Joyful Living of the Wellbeing Mind” on one of its 6 layers of indestructible plastic packaging.
…you only eat Korean rice because “Korean rice is better for Korean person” even though it is produced by an old, eczemic farmer using a smoke-belching 2 stroke engine, downhill from a lead recycling yard, downstream from a mercury processing plant and downwind from a pig farm.
…you hate Japan because they transformed Korea from a natural paradise where man lived close to nature into a concrete-covered megalopolis dotted with factories, swarming with luxury cars and webbed with power lines.
…you recognize that fermentation releases incredible quantities of the global-warming greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide… so you refuse to eat kimchee or drink soju… even Green soju.
…because of pollution, it angers you that Korea is the world’s 5th largest producer of car, 3rd largest producer of steel and largest producer of ships in the world… not to mention semiconductors and machinery… and you feel Korea peaked around 1953 when so many of the cities had been returned to a natural state.
…”close to nature” means “climbing” a “mountain” with 700 other people in matching red vest so you can yell “Yaaaahoooo” from the top… scaring the bejesus out of any remaining wildlife not yet displaced by 47,000,000 people covering everything they see in concrete while the government chants, “Have more kids, have more kids”.
…”close to nature” also means standing shoulder to shoulder at the beach with a few tens of thousands of other nature-lovers and proudly eating any critter that wasn’t able to get away… while smiling and saying, “Ahhh, beddy presh!”
…you feel only shame in all the potential marine habitat that Dok-do displaces.
…you shut the fan off every night… to conserve energy… not, of course, because you are deathly afraid of it.
1:49 am on March 1st, 2008 4
I realise that all of them are not to be taken seriously, but what the hell.
Number 7 sounds a bit dated, considering how every supermarket in Korea has a huge organic section these days. And a true environmentalist would know that Korea’s minimal labelling laws mean that 88% of “organic” food is anything but (see the link below). Number 10 also out of date, partially, because while promoters of new-fangled light bulbs like to point out that 90+% or so of the electricity used in old-style bulbs is wasted as heat, that heat in turn means less energy spent on central heating. The new bulbs still work out better for the environment in the end, but not to the extent often claimed.
If had to think of a “you do good X, but Y bad thing” example, it would be “You religously recycle all your cardboard and paper, but won’t think twice about receiving your fries from Burger King in a small bag in a medium bag in a big bag, and will regularly spend 3000 won in Morning Glory on a paper bags, just because they have Mashimaro cartoons on the side of them.”
Sorry, I would think of a wittier example, but I think I’m doing pretty good for my 5th whiskey and coke, yes?
Forgot to thank you for all your links to my blog sorry. Better late than never!
http://koreabeat.com/?p=540
9:39 am on March 1st, 2008 5
RE: formadehyde in Korean beer
I’m not a beer drinker, but I understand that American beer manufacturers have resisted putting ingredient information on the labels. Some of ingredients used in American beers include propylene glycol, alginate, barley malt and corn syrup as sweeteners, amyloglucosidase, and potassium metabisulfite. Mmmmm! Soft drinks should be avoided as poison, for among other harmful ingredients, most are preserved with sodium benzoate, which can damage DNA and is linked to cancer.
10:49 am on March 1st, 2008 6
Hmmm, maybe that was one too many drinks last night. I meant better I thank you later rather than never, sorry!
5:56 pm on March 1st, 2008 7
Sonagi, the big US brewers make crap that is so truly unlike real beer, it should be called something else. They don’t dare put the ingredients on their labels.
Real beer contains water, malted barley (and potentially wheat), hops and yeast. Depending on the particular style, various natural adjuncts may be added. For example, Hoegaarden, which is found in many Korean Maekju Jips, also contains trace amount of orange peel and coriander seed.
Barley malt is not used as a sweetener, but rather food for the little yeasties with which they create alchohol and carbon dioxide. Amyloglucosidase is an enzyme that is not used in real beers, but has a potential value in low-dextrine (adjunct (corn, rice, others) heavy) pseudo-beers. Potassium metabisulfite is a stabilizing agent that is heavily used in winemaking and has applications in brewing which can be a hazardous substance if large quantities were ingested. No real beer contains corn syrup. Plenty is added to that undrinkable crap known as Budweiser in the form of malted corn. Korean beers are seriously cut with rice and have very little hop presence.
Just to be sure the point is made and since I’m firmly off-topic already: Bud, Miller, Coors, OB, Hite, Cass, et. al., are not real beers in the traditional and true sense of the words. None would qualify under the German Beer Purity Law.
Thanks for the leeway, GI.
11:47 pm on March 1st, 2008 8
Oh, and I forgot to mention that if you don’t care to ingest formaldehyde in any form, you might want to avoid consuming anything with aspartame, which breaks down into formaldehyde in the body.
12:57 am on March 3rd, 2008 9