::A Geek in Korea::

Sometimes you imagine a barrier or limit to something that seems so incredibly insurmountable when you first imagine the challenge, but when it is finally presented to you, the goal that you imagined doesn’t seem so difficult at all. For example, when I lived over a deserted restaurant that’s specialty dish was "daegi kopdaegi" (pig skin), I wondered how anyone could possibly eat such a thing. Pork rinds are probably just as bad for your health, but they are fried to the point of being indistinguishable from any other snack in the food aisle.

It wasn’t for health reasons I stayed away. It’s just the idea of eating pig skin that unsettled me. Who eats pig skin? Anyway, this was always a line I was content to define myself with having. It turns out though, when my wife and I were served some daegi kopdaegi as a free side dish with our pork dinner, once the barrier of ordering for myself was removed the prospect of actually eating such a dish no longer frightened me. Well, maybe it frightened me a little, but hey, free meat…of a sort.

My wife will not touch the stuff, and she was surprised to see that I was willing to try it. She said I didn’t need to try something just for the experience so that I could write about it for strangers on the Internet.. I gave her a look and said, "In some ways you and I are very different." I summoned up some courage, got a dab of red pepper paste ready, and prepared to eat daegi kopdaegi for the first time.

Here it is in it’s well cooked artery clogging glory. At this point, there were plenty of other things on the table that would be much better to eat, but I grabbed a piece of sangchu (red leaf lettuce) and got some samjeon (hot pepper and bean paste) ready for the experience. I grabbed that nicely rounded piece on the right, wrapped it up, applied sauce, and began to chew.

The texture was similar to some cheap meat I’ve eaten in the past on street corners in Korea. I’ve eaten pork before cut so close to the skin that I could see hair the occasional follicle in the fat. The fat usually cooks down and the meat is fine, if not a little oily and bad to look at. However, the taste of the pig skin was much like eating a wax lip. Nothing to chew down on, but something foreign in your mouth your tongue couldn’t exactly identify. It coated my mount with a strange sort of coat which I quickly washed out with water.

Something like pork rinds, if I remember correctly from the one time I ate them, but nastier without the satisfying crunch. It also had no taste other than fat, but no grissle. When McDonalds finally decides to stop messing around and just kill it’s customers as fast as possible, I could imagine a daegi kopdaegi burger. It would be like biting down on a fried piece of Crisco that had been battered. Add some lettuce and some sauce for flavor and give a pack of cigarettes and the largest coffee possible as the combo meal portions.