It has been 13 months now that I've been living in the land of the morning calm, and it wasn't until today that I figured out one of the deepest, darkest secrets of this nation. My inquiry into the matter began shortly after I realized that every time I buy beef here in Seoul, I feel like I'm getting punched in the face. Why? Because in this city (and the entire country for that matter), beef costs roughly $2 per 100 grams, on a good day. Or $20 per kg, for those of you in the West who are used to seeing meat prices in kilograms. The reason they don't show you meat prices in kg here is because if they did, half the nation would turn vegetarian.
For months and months I wondered if I was eating cows from royal families (royal cows if you will), or cows owned by royal families, or something with the word royal in it. It'd only make sense. I looked for gold shavings in my chucks, shanks and briskets, but alas, I could find nothing distinguishably superior about the beef in South Korea. And this was all Australian beef as well. Majority of the beef you find in Korea comes from the land down under. Meat from cows actually raised in Korea costs $ 200000000000 per 100 grams. Or something like that. I stopped counting after the first few zeroes.
I finally figured it out today though. In my head, the story goes a lot like that of the film Deep Blue Sea. I've copied and pasted the plot of the film, as it is presented in Wikipedia, and adjusted a few phrases here and there to fit the situation in question.
"On a highly-populated top-secret peninsula facility called South Korea, a team of scientists are searching for a cure for Internet Addiction Disorder (IAD), a disease slowly crippling the Korean population. One of them, Dr. 김현주 (Kim Hyun-Ju) violates the code of ethics, and genetically engineers three Korean royal cows, intending to increase their brain capacity so that they can harvest the tissue as a cure for IAD. Unfortunately, the increased brain capacity also makes the cows smarter, faster, and more dangerous.
[...] However, an accident sets off a chain of events that allows the cows to engineer an escape, and flood the internal structure with milk, allowing them entry to target the humans within it. [...] The scientists make the startling discovery that the cows have not just been trying to kill them, but were actually leading them to flooding the facility (with milk) so they could escape into the open country to breed (but not be eaten)."
And so, to this day, it has been an ongoing battle of intelligence between the Korean people, and the Korean cows. The heightened brain capacity of the cows makes it hard for the Korean farmers to catch them and kill them for food. The few cows that they do manage to kill are the ones the farmers find in PC방s (or internet cafes), as these ones ironically have fallen prey to IAD.
And that, my friends, is why beef is so damn expensive in this country.
If you're the weird type that actually likes to read up on stats and research and 'legitimate' news, then you might prefer to read this to get your explanation on why beef is expensive in Korea. But, I don't know why one would even bother after reading this post of mine.
