No Such Thing As Free Lunch

I'm sure you've all heard the old saying.  But it's been given a new meaning, at least for me, by my experiences here in Korea.

Because every workday our company provides lunch for all our employees, from the plant manager to the operators.  We're a fairly small operation right now, and we don't have our own cafeteria or anything like that.  In fact, until this summer we didn't even have a sink.  But now we do, in the small kitchen in our new "sea can land," as Blake likes to call it.  And we have the coffee maker, microwave, and small, dorm-style refrigerator, that we had at our initial site.  But those conveniences still obviously aren't enough to produce  the hearty meal that is provided each day.  Wait, did I say hearty?  Ok, that's probably a little too generous.  Well, it's a meal at least.  I think.

 

The lunches are provided by Cham-mat, a local catering company near the industrial complex.  They deliver the lunches each day directly to our sea cans.  They consist of smaller containers of food, larger containers of short, sticky, Korean white rice, and some sort of soup in large silver pails.  Sometimes they also bring rice water, which comes in the clear plastic pouches you see above.

My understanding is that there are different levels of meals from which a company can choose.  I believe they serve the different levels in specific colors.  Our lunches come every day in yellow containers.  Hence, we call them "yellow box" lunches.

I think the yellow box is the lowest level available.  I can't imagine anything worse being available anyway.

I'll start you off with one of the easier days.

That's some sort of pork cutlet with a kind of pasta salad.  Please notice the use of the terms "sort of" and "kind of" - I'm using them very loosely.  And kimchi.  There's pretty much always some kimchi.  And I think that's actually 2 different kinds this day.

These are pretty representative of our everyday meals.

And here are a couple soups. Mmmmmm.  And that's not a wow-this-is-really-yummy 'mmmmmm,' but more of an I'm-keeping-my-lips-pressed-tightly-together-so-I-don't-puke 'mmmmmm.' 

Actually, that one with sprouts is really one of the better soups.  Keep in mind "better" is entirely relative.

These are quail eggs, soaked in some kind of beef sauce.  But I don't think that "meat" it's sitting on is beef.  Blake claims that it is, but I don't think it looks like beef.  And it certainly doesn't look like beef that I eat.  'Cuz I don't eat that.

Of course, at least that was questionable meat.  There is also the wide variety of soy products that don't even have the decency to pretend.  And what is that pattern on the outer edges?  Ewww.

And normally I like fish.  In fact, in the States I love fish.  Seafood is a common choice of mine when eating out, and I also like to cook fish at home.  But fish here is another story.  They're tiny, and they taste very fishy.  Now I know what you're saying - it's fish, shouldn't it be fishy?  But trust me, "fishy" in the US and "fishy" in Korea are about as far apart as, well, the US and Korea.  Here is a lovely example of an often served dish.

You see, they like to fry the whole fish.  The WHOLE fish.  Skin, bones, head, eyeballs (even teeth, if you look really closely at that picture) and all.  And you can see from Jason holding it (he's one of the other Albemarle expats), that it's not very big.  So by the time you pick all the gross mess off the meat, you have maybe two bites of some pretty nasty tasting fish.  It's almost not even worth the effort.  Actually, I take that back - it's definitely not worth the effort.

I guess when I say I like fish, I mean like grilled fish covered with crawfish etouffee (and just for the record, that is the correct way to spell crawfish, I don't care what spell-check says.  and it doesn't even have etouffe.) from Harrington's in downtown Baton Rouge, or a fried catfish po-boy from Brewbachers (which also is not in the spell-check dictionary - man, what kind of Yankee wrote this stupid thing...), or even a Captain D's 2-piece meal (or 3-piece, you know, depending on how hungry I am).  I'm not into this whole "me caveman, me hunt fish, me cook fish on fire" thing.  Then again, who am I kidding?  When I cook fish, I go to WalMart and buy the frozen, 2-3 lb pkg of tilapia (no tilapia, are you kidding me?  c'mon, spell-check, now you're just being silly), pre-cleaned and fileted and ready to go.  But that just shows how refined I am.  Ha.  You can pretend you didn't notice that classy Captain D's reference a few sentences back.



Anyway, suffice it to say, this is the best part of the meal every day...

So this, ladies and gentlemen, is the free lunch they said didn't exist.  And you couldn't pay me to eat it.