> Daedong-beob unified the various forms of taxes to a single kind: rice. This, in effect, made growing rice equivalent to growing money, encouraging even more production than strictly necessary.
This is still relevant these days, whenever someone talks about linking a currency (and taxes collected in that currency) to a commodity like gold. The market for the metal becomes distorted, and the overall economy distorted as well, vulnerable to anything that might impacts the the mining or refinement of the metal.
Another historical connection might be how the weird status of silver and gold are linked to European colonization.
Rice makes quite a good currency, especially if you only have one primary cultivar. It's relatively fungible and dried white rice more or less lasts forever without spoiling. It's quite nice it has the side effect of also literally being food. If rice had been common in Rome, we might still be paying taxes in rice.
It's still used for bribes in Japan, where earlier this year the agriculture minister was sacked for receiving gifts of rice in the middle of a nationwide rice shortage. His replacement still has an outside chance to become the next prime minister.
As long as the largest form of economic activity was agriculture, and access to hard currency was limited, people were paying taxes with food (or labour in their landlord's fields).
We pay taxes in money because we have a diversified economy, where 90% of us are not subsistence peasants, and the money supply & availability of banking is large enough that we (or our employers) have cash on hand.
One thing that has stuck me in old tax records is that when taxes were paid in natura according to fixed exchange rates (e.g. one cow is two sheep, one measure of butter is three squirrel skins etc.), then government probably actually valued some income more than others. The "market value" of these goods almost certainly didn't match the fixed exchange rates, but people's ability to trade for the best tax unit were also limited (and often legally restricted to the same exchange rates!).
So e.g. pastoralists who paid their tax in actual skins may have been more valued than people who paid their tax in "a skins worth" of grain.
I wonder if there's some good books on this sort of thing.
>Another historical connection might be how the weird status of silver and gold are linked to European colonization.
Land is a finite resource so people fight over it. If you make your money a finite resource, then people will fight over money as well. It's not very complicated.
> To Koreans, they looked more like sauce bowls, leading them to conclude that the Japanese had starved themselves to stretch out the siege.
As a Bengali man, that's exactly how I felt when I came to USA and first visited japanese restaurants. Part of the reason we consume so much rice is that rice is kind of the main dish (not a side)- it literally takes up central and most of the space in your food plate.
Typical Japanese will devour their small rice bowl until there's none of rice grain is left over, since they're taught from the very young age not to waste food.
Most of other Asian nations will not eat their rice until it's completely finished. Even with their most delicious biryani dish there're always many rice grains left in the plate. I think the small bowl make it much easier to completely consume the rice unlike the big bowl or plate.
The Japanese mostly eat sticky rice, which is very easy to eat and "clean up" even with a chopstick.
The Indian subcontinent eat long-grain Basmati or similar rice which fluff up into individual grains on the plate. It doesn't make sense to individually pick out single leftover grains.
In nearly every culture is the idea of "Annapurna" or the god of food, and wasting food is generally frowned upon and considered bad table manners. I've been scolded plenty of times as a child for not cleaning up my plate in Nepal.
I wouldn't attribute it to small bowls at least. The Japanese instilling good virtues into their children almost institutionally perhaps plays some part in it, but also some of it is just physics.
For centuries, Korean peasants lacked food and endlessly complained of hunger but I won't cherry pick random historical (and foreign) observations to support it.
> One man in my parish is aged between 30 and 45, and in a bet he ate seven bowls—and that’s not counting the bowls of rice wine he drank. One old man, aged 64 or 65, said he had no appetite, and finished five bowls.
Well the part about the old man contains irony: he claimed to have no appetite, but his action of finishing five bowls of food is the opposite of what he said.
Reading the comments here and elsewhere, and these from my Korean friends -- this is not reflected in Korean restaurants, at least in France.
I have tried a few in and around Paris (the latest was yesterday, a small family-run one lost in some random street), and the food is at best normal size, and less positively massively overpriced.
You usually get 3 tiny plates (with two leaves of kimchi, to give some context) and a normal plate of food + a small bowl of rice.
This is enough for my French stomach, but reading about the lavish servings and whatnot, this may just be a local thing.
> Daedong-beob unified the various forms of taxes to a single kind: rice. This, in effect, made growing rice equivalent to growing money, encouraging even more production than strictly necessary.
Similar situation in South India too. Eating culture is shaped by foods available. Here in western world, I'm shocked by how little rice they serve at my office lunch and at restaurants (we call it as cat food). I usually eat 4-6 times of that rice per meal at home. Still my people make a special observation that I eat very less food at home.
The old European one would have been bread: the traditional 2lb/900g ish size loaf would have been consumed in a day. Apparently Turkey still has very high levels of bread consumption.
A korean meal is only limited by the size of the table. I've visited resturants in korea where there were no less than 30 plates that came out of 1 set meal.
I've visited Turkish breakfast restaurants, where the whole family sits around a table with 50-80 plates of various stuff, for about 15€. Eating needs 2 hours.
There's not much leftover, as they are served in small little sauce-like plates. It's pretty frowned upon to ask for more banchan if you aren't going to finish it.
A substantial restaurant meal in Korea is usually served with several standard side dishes. Due to the expense and effort of providing these to each table, restaurants often require a minimum party size of two. Also, I'm not sure if it's illegal or just gross, but if a dish looks untouched, sketchier places will sometimes just pass it along to the next customer.
Most restaurants of this style have the full set pre-arranged on trays, stacked on shelves, ready to serve. Most of the banchan are a combination of dry, fermented, and strongly seasoned, so they don't spoil easily. When it's time to clean up, all the plates stack neatly on top of one another.
In terms of the total number of plates that the staff needs to serve and clean, it's probably not much different from a European meal that consists of several courses.
It was a fun reading as a Korean and my hometown Jeonju was even mentioned! My partner is non-Korean and I can definitely tell the difference in rice consumption for sure. I can eat much more much faster. But the funny thing is she can eat more bread faster than me.
Anecdotal story. Once I stumbled into Korean restaurant in China Town in NYC. I just ordered something like lunch. I was alone. They kept bringing plates after plates of various dishes. I was ashamed to leave so much food. Paid like 11 dollars but it was in ~2015.
i been to a museum that showed what Koreans in the 16th century ate with and I was shocked to find how huge the spoon and bowls were. It's not uncommon to find very tall Koreans 6ft and up these days but they are eating a lot less so I wonder how they've become all so tall.
This is similar in terms of macros to the traditional Irish diet in the 19th century, which for workers was purportedly made up of around 13 pounds of potatoes a day for an adult man. This traditional Korean diet appears to also be extremely high in carbs as a proportion. Of course these groups had significantly higher energy expenditures than most moderns, but it does seem possible that caloric excess in the absence of significant dietary fat does not drive obsesity / metabolic disease in the same way.
> it does seem possible that caloric excess in the absence of significant dietary fat does not drive obsesity / metabolic disease in the same way.
FWIW this is exactly the opposite hypothesis to that of the Keto diet (whereby consuming fat in absence of carbs does not drive obesity / metabolic disease)
To me seems more likely they were just burning more calories
What's the hypothesis there? Were they just shitting out the extra starch without digesting it? Due to conservation of energy the calories can't just vanish.
It doesn't seem physically possible for most adult men to consume 13 pounds of potatoes a day. I'm a large man and I think I'd burst or vomit before choking down that much, regardless of how hard I'd been working. Most likely that number is just wrong.
>it doesn't seem physically possible for most adult men to consume 13 pounds of potatoes a day. I'm a large man and I think I'd burst or vomit before choking down that much,
Presumably you aren't doing hard manual labor every day.
Hypothesis is that the irishmen were doing hard physical labor that required a high caloric intake. PCT thru-hikers consume 4,000-4,500 calories per day (at least I did) while staying thin. According to inter-net, 13 lb of potatoes has about 4,500 calories. Apparently US civil war soldiers expended 3-4k per day.
The Irish had milk also with all the potatoes. It made it a diet that could keep you alive and even thrive.
>Potatoes and milk, particularly buttermilk, were a nutritionally complete diet for many Irish peasants before the famine, allowing them to be healthier than some European counterparts who ate a bread-based diet.
Potatoes contain all proteins, if i'm not mistaken, only less than protein rich plant sources. Wheat and rice need to be combined with other sources to get all proteins.
> the rice bowl in the photo was 3.5 inches tall with a diameter of over 6 inches, holding nearly a liter of rice to be eaten with soup that came in an even larger bowl, with an assortment of side dishes. For one person. In one meal.
1 liter of Korean-style cooked white rice weighs about 500 grams. It contains about 1.5 Calories per gram, judging from the label on my Hetbahn. So that's about 750 Calories tops. The photo doesn't look like white rice, so the caloric content is probably lower.
I would give at most 100 Calories for the soup and all the side dishes combined. The soup is mostly water, with very little solid content. (That chunk you see in the photo is rice. Dude is dunking his rice in the soup to make it softer, because who wants to munch on 1 liter of rough brown rice?) Meanwhile, his side dishes are leafy vegetables like kimchi and namul. Side dishes made of animal products like ham and eggs were considered a luxury until only 60 years ago. Fat was also a luxury, so everything had to be lean. This is in stark contrast to a Western meal, where fatty side dishes contribute a lot of Calories.
So that's about 850 Calories for the whole table, or about one Big Mac with medium fries and a sugar-free drink. Not a particularly heavy meal for an adult male who spends most of his time working in the field.
The reason Koreans ate a lot of rice, fruit, and vegetables is because those foods have low caloric density by modern standards. It's mostly just water and carbohydrates. If not for their high energy expenditure, Koreans would all have died of diabetes.
What is your take on the comparisons with Japan and the comments left by European visitors, both of whom who likely ate similar ingredients in Asia both of whom were noted to eat a lot less?
To me the article doesn’t really make sense. Either the Korean diet was being overstated (likely, but why if it was consistently noted?), or there was some unexplained extra energetic expenditure by Koreans versus Japanese (unlikely), or Koreans were significantly more fat than Japanese (unlikely).
There are records from every country around Korea, throughout recorded history, that Koreans eat a lot.
There are also statements that Irish farmers ate 14 pounds of potatoes, English peasants ate 4 pounds of bread, and that Japanese samurai ate 4 pounds of rice a day.
All of these statements were made from the point of view of aristocrats who had rich foods, as they looked down upon commoners who had nothing but plain starch to fill their caloric budgets with.
So I think that a large part of this stereotype has to do with the fact that Korea used to be one of the poorest countries in the world until very recently. In China, even commoners had access to delicious 9-Calories-per-gram cooking oil since the Song dynasty. In Japan, sushi as we know it appeared in the Edo period and became the fast food of choice for urban laborers. Meanwhile, Korean society remained almost exclusively agricultural until Western visitors arrived to take photos of their massive rice bowls. Same caloric content, just more voluminous.
There are also issues of measurement that were lost in translation. The report that Korean soldiers ate 3 times as much rice as the Japanese? True, Koreans ate 7 cups of rice, while the Japanese ate 2 cups. But the Japanese measuring cup was 3 times as large as the old Korean cup (hob). The much more reasonable 7:6 ratio can probably be explained by the fact that Koreans had the home advantage at the time of the war, or that Koreans are taller than the Japanese on average. And yes, the obesity rate is also higher in Korea, despite the fact that Japan has enjoyed a modern lifestyle for much longer.
* Korean are tall by East Asian standards; 3-4 cm taller than Chinese and Japanese
* Thais don't eat that much, but they will massively over-cater, and there's not really the same taboo as in Europe of food wastage. My father, who like me spent a couple of decades in Thailand (although at different times) reckoned it was because historically they've had very few food shortages compared to other countries
Taller than the Chinese average, perhaps, but northern Chinese are generally much taller than southern Chinese. Guess what's next to northeastern China? That's right, Korea.
Thais don't have big meals, but they do snack incessantly, which makes up for it. And overcatering for guests is a pan-Asian or arguably a global phenomenon.
Early mukbang wasn't really about gluttonous binge eating. It was more just a way for people to eat in front of their computers with another person. It's changed a lot now, though.
Korean peninsula has always been a target of invasion by its neighbors due to its fertile lands in the south west which produce majority of the rice compare to the rest of the country.
> Daedong-beob unified the various forms of taxes to a single kind: rice. This, in effect, made growing rice equivalent to growing money, encouraging even more production than strictly necessary.
This is still relevant these days, whenever someone talks about linking a currency (and taxes collected in that currency) to a commodity like gold. The market for the metal becomes distorted, and the overall economy distorted as well, vulnerable to anything that might impacts the the mining or refinement of the metal.
Another historical connection might be how the weird status of silver and gold are linked to European colonization.
Rice makes quite a good currency, especially if you only have one primary cultivar. It's relatively fungible and dried white rice more or less lasts forever without spoiling. It's quite nice it has the side effect of also literally being food. If rice had been common in Rome, we might still be paying taxes in rice.
It's still used for bribes in Japan, where earlier this year the agriculture minister was sacked for receiving gifts of rice in the middle of a nationwide rice shortage. His replacement still has an outside chance to become the next prime minister.
> we might still be paying taxes in rice.
As long as the largest form of economic activity was agriculture, and access to hard currency was limited, people were paying taxes with food (or labour in their landlord's fields).
We pay taxes in money because we have a diversified economy, where 90% of us are not subsistence peasants, and the money supply & availability of banking is large enough that we (or our employers) have cash on hand.
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One thing that has stuck me in old tax records is that when taxes were paid in natura according to fixed exchange rates (e.g. one cow is two sheep, one measure of butter is three squirrel skins etc.), then government probably actually valued some income more than others. The "market value" of these goods almost certainly didn't match the fixed exchange rates, but people's ability to trade for the best tax unit were also limited (and often legally restricted to the same exchange rates!).
So e.g. pastoralists who paid their tax in actual skins may have been more valued than people who paid their tax in "a skins worth" of grain.
I wonder if there's some good books on this sort of thing.
>Another historical connection might be how the weird status of silver and gold are linked to European colonization.
Land is a finite resource so people fight over it. If you make your money a finite resource, then people will fight over money as well. It's not very complicated.
> To Koreans, they looked more like sauce bowls, leading them to conclude that the Japanese had starved themselves to stretch out the siege.
As a Bengali man, that's exactly how I felt when I came to USA and first visited japanese restaurants. Part of the reason we consume so much rice is that rice is kind of the main dish (not a side)- it literally takes up central and most of the space in your food plate.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%E0%A6%87%E0%A6%B2%E...
Typical Japanese will devour their small rice bowl until there's none of rice grain is left over, since they're taught from the very young age not to waste food.
Most of other Asian nations will not eat their rice until it's completely finished. Even with their most delicious biryani dish there're always many rice grains left in the plate. I think the small bowl make it much easier to completely consume the rice unlike the big bowl or plate.
The Japanese mostly eat sticky rice, which is very easy to eat and "clean up" even with a chopstick.
The Indian subcontinent eat long-grain Basmati or similar rice which fluff up into individual grains on the plate. It doesn't make sense to individually pick out single leftover grains.
In nearly every culture is the idea of "Annapurna" or the god of food, and wasting food is generally frowned upon and considered bad table manners. I've been scolded plenty of times as a child for not cleaning up my plate in Nepal.
I wouldn't attribute it to small bowls at least. The Japanese instilling good virtues into their children almost institutionally perhaps plays some part in it, but also some of it is just physics.
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Wasting food is faux pas in many a eastern cultures, including South Asian & Middle Eastern.
Ilish fish also known as hilsa, the king of fish. That’s one delicious fish.
What happened to all the excess calories they are eating? Huge bowl of rice, table filled with food, and the people look almost malnourished.
probably eating once a week
For centuries, Korean peasants lacked food and endlessly complained of hunger but I won't cherry pick random historical (and foreign) observations to support it.
> One man in my parish is aged between 30 and 45, and in a bet he ate seven bowls—and that’s not counting the bowls of rice wine he drank. One old man, aged 64 or 65, said he had no appetite, and finished five bowls.
Surprisingly comical record-keeping.
What do you find comical about it?
Well the part about the old man contains irony: he claimed to have no appetite, but his action of finishing five bowls of food is the opposite of what he said.
Reading the comments here and elsewhere, and these from my Korean friends -- this is not reflected in Korean restaurants, at least in France.
I have tried a few in and around Paris (the latest was yesterday, a small family-run one lost in some random street), and the food is at best normal size, and less positively massively overpriced.
You usually get 3 tiny plates (with two leaves of kimchi, to give some context) and a normal plate of food + a small bowl of rice.
This is enough for my French stomach, but reading about the lavish servings and whatnot, this may just be a local thing.
> Daedong-beob unified the various forms of taxes to a single kind: rice. This, in effect, made growing rice equivalent to growing money, encouraging even more production than strictly necessary.
This is not much of an explanation, since feudal Japan had basically the same system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kokudaka
maybe Japan's feudal lords were more corrupt, disincentivizing production. Whereas Koreans paid directly to the king
Similar situation in South India too. Eating culture is shaped by foods available. Here in western world, I'm shocked by how little rice they serve at my office lunch and at restaurants (we call it as cat food). I usually eat 4-6 times of that rice per meal at home. Still my people make a special observation that I eat very less food at home.
I'm sure that if you went back 100 years you'd be less surprised, but of course the rice would've been replaced with oat porridge or potatoes.
The old European one would have been bread: the traditional 2lb/900g ish size loaf would have been consumed in a day. Apparently Turkey still has very high levels of bread consumption.
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A korean meal is only limited by the size of the table. I've visited resturants in korea where there were no less than 30 plates that came out of 1 set meal.
I've visited Turkish breakfast restaurants, where the whole family sits around a table with 50-80 plates of various stuff, for about 15€. Eating needs 2 hours.
What do they do with all the food that doesn’t get eaten?
There's not much leftover, as they are served in small little sauce-like plates. It's pretty frowned upon to ask for more banchan if you aren't going to finish it.
But yes, the leftover dishes are thrown away.
A substantial restaurant meal in Korea is usually served with several standard side dishes. Due to the expense and effort of providing these to each table, restaurants often require a minimum party size of two. Also, I'm not sure if it's illegal or just gross, but if a dish looks untouched, sketchier places will sometimes just pass it along to the next customer.
Usually there isn't much. The plates are tiny and mostly have vegetables.
You eat them.
As someone who works in food service, that sounds like a nightmare, not just to prepare but to bring all of that to the table.
Nah it’s pretty easy https://youtube.com/shorts/OC0Bdc2Ks0o?si=xTioDi1DmyocrRVC
Most restaurants of this style have the full set pre-arranged on trays, stacked on shelves, ready to serve. Most of the banchan are a combination of dry, fermented, and strongly seasoned, so they don't spoil easily. When it's time to clean up, all the plates stack neatly on top of one another.
In terms of the total number of plates that the staff needs to serve and clean, it's probably not much different from a European meal that consists of several courses.
It was a fun reading as a Korean and my hometown Jeonju was even mentioned! My partner is non-Korean and I can definitely tell the difference in rice consumption for sure. I can eat much more much faster. But the funny thing is she can eat more bread faster than me.
Anecdotal story. Once I stumbled into Korean restaurant in China Town in NYC. I just ordered something like lunch. I was alone. They kept bringing plates after plates of various dishes. I was ashamed to leave so much food. Paid like 11 dollars but it was in ~2015.
Come back and try KTown on 32nd. (Get off the ground floors.)
$20 will buy a good meal. $40, decadence. (Avant alcohol.)
i been to a museum that showed what Koreans in the 16th century ate with and I was shocked to find how huge the spoon and bowls were. It's not uncommon to find very tall Koreans 6ft and up these days but they are eating a lot less so I wonder how they've become all so tall.
More protein
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When we visit my Korean in-laws, I can confirm a glorious feast is going to happen.
This is similar in terms of macros to the traditional Irish diet in the 19th century, which for workers was purportedly made up of around 13 pounds of potatoes a day for an adult man. This traditional Korean diet appears to also be extremely high in carbs as a proportion. Of course these groups had significantly higher energy expenditures than most moderns, but it does seem possible that caloric excess in the absence of significant dietary fat does not drive obsesity / metabolic disease in the same way.
> it does seem possible that caloric excess in the absence of significant dietary fat does not drive obsesity / metabolic disease in the same way.
FWIW this is exactly the opposite hypothesis to that of the Keto diet (whereby consuming fat in absence of carbs does not drive obesity / metabolic disease)
To me seems more likely they were just burning more calories
What's the hypothesis there? Were they just shitting out the extra starch without digesting it? Due to conservation of energy the calories can't just vanish.
It doesn't seem physically possible for most adult men to consume 13 pounds of potatoes a day. I'm a large man and I think I'd burst or vomit before choking down that much, regardless of how hard I'd been working. Most likely that number is just wrong.
>it doesn't seem physically possible for most adult men to consume 13 pounds of potatoes a day. I'm a large man and I think I'd burst or vomit before choking down that much,
Presumably you aren't doing hard manual labor every day.
Hypothesis is that the irishmen were doing hard physical labor that required a high caloric intake. PCT thru-hikers consume 4,000-4,500 calories per day (at least I did) while staying thin. According to inter-net, 13 lb of potatoes has about 4,500 calories. Apparently US civil war soldiers expended 3-4k per day.
The Irish had milk also with all the potatoes. It made it a diet that could keep you alive and even thrive.
>Potatoes and milk, particularly buttermilk, were a nutritionally complete diet for many Irish peasants before the famine, allowing them to be healthier than some European counterparts who ate a bread-based diet.
Potatoes contain all proteins, if i'm not mistaken, only less than protein rich plant sources. Wheat and rice need to be combined with other sources to get all proteins.
> the rice bowl in the photo was 3.5 inches tall with a diameter of over 6 inches, holding nearly a liter of rice to be eaten with soup that came in an even larger bowl, with an assortment of side dishes. For one person. In one meal.
1 liter of Korean-style cooked white rice weighs about 500 grams. It contains about 1.5 Calories per gram, judging from the label on my Hetbahn. So that's about 750 Calories tops. The photo doesn't look like white rice, so the caloric content is probably lower.
I would give at most 100 Calories for the soup and all the side dishes combined. The soup is mostly water, with very little solid content. (That chunk you see in the photo is rice. Dude is dunking his rice in the soup to make it softer, because who wants to munch on 1 liter of rough brown rice?) Meanwhile, his side dishes are leafy vegetables like kimchi and namul. Side dishes made of animal products like ham and eggs were considered a luxury until only 60 years ago. Fat was also a luxury, so everything had to be lean. This is in stark contrast to a Western meal, where fatty side dishes contribute a lot of Calories.
So that's about 850 Calories for the whole table, or about one Big Mac with medium fries and a sugar-free drink. Not a particularly heavy meal for an adult male who spends most of his time working in the field.
The reason Koreans ate a lot of rice, fruit, and vegetables is because those foods have low caloric density by modern standards. It's mostly just water and carbohydrates. If not for their high energy expenditure, Koreans would all have died of diabetes.
What is your take on the comparisons with Japan and the comments left by European visitors, both of whom who likely ate similar ingredients in Asia both of whom were noted to eat a lot less?
To me the article doesn’t really make sense. Either the Korean diet was being overstated (likely, but why if it was consistently noted?), or there was some unexplained extra energetic expenditure by Koreans versus Japanese (unlikely), or Koreans were significantly more fat than Japanese (unlikely).
There are records from every country around Korea, throughout recorded history, that Koreans eat a lot.
There are also statements that Irish farmers ate 14 pounds of potatoes, English peasants ate 4 pounds of bread, and that Japanese samurai ate 4 pounds of rice a day.
All of these statements were made from the point of view of aristocrats who had rich foods, as they looked down upon commoners who had nothing but plain starch to fill their caloric budgets with.
So I think that a large part of this stereotype has to do with the fact that Korea used to be one of the poorest countries in the world until very recently. In China, even commoners had access to delicious 9-Calories-per-gram cooking oil since the Song dynasty. In Japan, sushi as we know it appeared in the Edo period and became the fast food of choice for urban laborers. Meanwhile, Korean society remained almost exclusively agricultural until Western visitors arrived to take photos of their massive rice bowls. Same caloric content, just more voluminous.
There are also issues of measurement that were lost in translation. The report that Korean soldiers ate 3 times as much rice as the Japanese? True, Koreans ate 7 cups of rice, while the Japanese ate 2 cups. But the Japanese measuring cup was 3 times as large as the old Korean cup (hob). The much more reasonable 7:6 ratio can probably be explained by the fact that Koreans had the home advantage at the time of the war, or that Koreans are taller than the Japanese on average. And yes, the obesity rate is also higher in Korea, despite the fact that Japan has enjoyed a modern lifestyle for much longer.
Two thoughts:
* Korean are tall by East Asian standards; 3-4 cm taller than Chinese and Japanese
* Thais don't eat that much, but they will massively over-cater, and there's not really the same taboo as in Europe of food wastage. My father, who like me spent a couple of decades in Thailand (although at different times) reckoned it was because historically they've had very few food shortages compared to other countries
Taller than the Chinese average, perhaps, but northern Chinese are generally much taller than southern Chinese. Guess what's next to northeastern China? That's right, Korea.
Thais don't have big meals, but they do snack incessantly, which makes up for it. And overcatering for guests is a pan-Asian or arguably a global phenomenon.
Well yeah, isn’t korea the origin of the conspicuous gluttony of mukbang?
Early mukbang wasn't really about gluttonous binge eating. It was more just a way for people to eat in front of their computers with another person. It's changed a lot now, though.
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ah you are an expert in Korea ;)
Korean peninsula has always been a target of invasion by its neighbors due to its fertile lands in the south west which produce majority of the rice compare to the rest of the country.
Chinese love to piss on Korea.
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