The Hedonists’ Checklists

"Favourable" painting by Michael Moreth

by Daniel Speechly

It started with galbi-jjim.

We ladled the savory stew onto our rice and into our mouths; it tasted of life itself: browned beef-ribs, carrot, potato, radish, pyogo mushroom, garlic, and jujube brought together in a simmering pot brimming with sugar and soy.

The glistening ribs plucked from the broth were like revelation precariously grasped between our chopsticks. With our first bites the world bared its soul, showing us possibilities we had never considered. With the next, we tuned into flavors we would later come to crave. And when we had finished, we knew we would never stop searching for what might come next–each new meal an exclamation mark on a life composed entirely of ellipses.

That is to say, life was incomplete before we arrived in Asia. In Michigan, California, Texas, Oregon, and Ohio life was stable, comfortable, and predictable, but it was bland. Growing up in suburban neighborhoods our culinary highlights were Little Caesars pizzas and 32 ounce cherry Slurpees. In summer, we paid for tickets at the Regal Cinema so we could fill ourselves with unlimited buttered popcorn and then sneak into a second movie to avoid the hot afternoon sun. We rode skateboards, bore road rash, and smoked cigarettes. And when we grew up or aged out of life on the periphery, we realized we no longer fit the tree-lined suburban lanes of our mid-sized American cities, and so we bought tickets to Asia–some for work and others to backpack (for weeks or months or even years).

Our nexus was Korea. We met in Busan and Seoul in our 20s and 30s seeking adventure. Steve, Dave, Tom, Bill, Zeke and I fell into a routine. We worked, ate, drank, and sang, and on Friday nights we didn’t go home until the morning light painted the street. Some said we became obsessed with this life. They said our collective ennui had bubbled over, and that we were a spoiled bunch, but it is more apt to say that we wanted lives full of flavor. In Asia, we found them and we became ravenous–seeking out new tastes to fill the void left by our suburban upbringings.

We arrived hungry, carrying lists with the names of dishes we had gleaned from Fodor’s and Lonely Planet. In the beginning, our lists were benign: they led us to become accustomed to local tastes, and as a result we ate galbi-jjim, and then followed up with gamjatang and ttukbaegi bulgogi (pork back stew and marinated beef soup respectively). These Korean comfort foods were revelatory but also easy on the palette–new but familiar–in that the deep umami of meat and soy transcended continents to create a universal food culture understood by all: even us suburban boys oohed and ahhed at the depth of such flavor combinations.

Those first meals were seductive. Every taste was still a new experience and there remained a plethora of foods to try. We were infatuated; maybe even in love with the constant flow of novelty, and Korea gave us more than we ever expected.

Food was life; it permeated everything we did. At breakfast, lunch, and dinner we sat across tables strewn with dishes piled with pickled vegetables, dry salted anchovies, and raw marinated squid. We strained to recognize what we were eating, but we learned not to ask because the knowledge that we were eating sautéed bonnet bellflower root left us just as perplexed as when we had asked. Instead, we learned to turn off inhibition and agree that we were eating deodok-gui and that it was delicious.

To improve our knowledge of Korean food, we learned about a meal called hanjeongsik, and we found out that ordering it resulted in the distribution of ten to twenty dishes meant to be shared between a group of two to four. We also discovered Sandeulhae, a restaurant where hanjeongsik was taken a step further, and where the servers wheeled out a tabletop heaped with food and slid the whole table theatrically into each booth. If it weren’t for the unadulterated joy we felt on our first visit, it would have been a Sisyphean task to taste each dish; but we were undeterred, for sharing such a meal allowed us to become spiritual brothers and sisters–sharing an affinity for this world we were learning to love. And so we munched through the unknowns, and–following the customs of the locals–placed pinches of shepherd’s purse, mugwort, mountain thistle, burdock root, and angelica tree shoots atop every spoonful of rice. What we knew of these foods was simple: to eat them made us happy.

The pursuit of such novel pleasures gave meaning to our lives, but even though we had our fill, we couldn’t get enough. We were compelled to cross items off our lists until our tastes took on another shape–becoming more eccentric–as our experience pushed us to the fringes of food culture, venturing toward the periphery and into the territory of the strange. Having exhausted all “normal” recommendations, we scrawled the names of devilish foods on our lists: beondegi tang (silkworm soup), hongeo (fermented skate), and meongge (sea pineapple). We recognized them as sustenance but realized that even a fellow obsessive, absent a long history of personal consumption, would find them difficult to swallow, and yet we wholeheartedly moved toward the challenge. We were determined to find pleasure in these experiences; we were too far gone to be stopped; but maybe we should have stopped, for the silkworms smelled of rotten earth and popped like musky wet balls of dishcloth between our teeth; each bite of fermented skate filled our olfactory cavities up to the eyeballs with the burning scent of urinal ammonia; and sea pineapple innards slithered down our throats leaving behind a mucusy trail of salty iodine.

We agreed that these dishes were torturous, but we persisted because the flavors fixed us in the present like the feeling of blistered feet in the final miles of a marathon, or maybe we continued chewing because such acts of mastication allowed us to fall into a whirling dervish’s meditative daze, reminding us that we were alive but also helping to maintain our small unreality that our checklists were the only things that mattered. And so we ate each terrible morsel with reverence (considering it a duty), and we swallowed each bite because it helped us feel a shared sense of purpose.

But as we carried on, we became more and more frenzied. The more we ate, the more we craved, and although our path had been paved with intentions to reach a nirvana of unending pleasures, we had instead led ourselves into uncharted territory where we were forced to face a new uncomfortable truth: we had learned to enjoy disgust and we seemed to enjoy it as much as we enjoyed desire until the two became intertwined like conceptual points on a circular continuum, existing at opposite ends but only degrees apart such that the proximity of these contradictory feelings became the allure that kept us coming back for more. And so we ate blood soup, sea cucumbers, beef intestines, and spoon worms. And then we did it all again. Disgust and desire, we surmised, worked together like sweet and sour, and overcoming feelings of disgust to find a secret path to pleasure was the fulfillment of a carnal desire like none we had experienced.

This newfound feeling was discomfiting. It signaled that some unalterable change had taken place. It was as though our foundations had been swept away. We knew that the joy we once found in pizza, popcorn, and slurpees had become nostalgic memories of a past that no longer existed and for which there was no way to return.

From that point on our taste buds went wild, yearning beyond constraint for the unexpected. Good or bad, we simply craved what was new, and so we queued up for hours to follow the latest food trends. We sought every type of possible pleasure and focused every effort on the pursuit of novelty. We gorged on every food trend that landed in Seoul: honeycomb ice cream, japchae pancakes, mocha ppang, and salt bread. We showed up, got in line, and waited our turn. We stalked food trucks, made restaurant maps, and planned our weekends around food festivals. We did it all because we were insatiable.

At the long-closed Maja in Jamsil, once the trendiest affordable lunch for 20-somethings in Seoul, we ate pork loin stuffed with fish roe, breaded then fried and sliced thin. It was served with fresh grated wasabi, a sprig of coriander, and a healthy dab of green chili jam. We had never tasted anything like it. On the palette it was sweet, savory, and spicy; and between our teeth it crackled in a delicate crunch revealing the tender but toothsome textures of warm pork and salted roe. The synthesis was sophisticated; the flavor released was like a punch in the mouth followed by a sensuous kiss. We all agreed that it was the wait.

Between such meals, we fell into deep reveries: reliving restaurant experiences and dreaming of what was to come. We prayed for another Maja or a new Sandeulhae. We would have given anything for a chance to taste galbi-jjim for the first time all over again. We hoped that something new, delicious, and decadent would appear on the horizon.

Years went by in the pursuit of such novelty. Each new flavor gave meaning to the passage of time, and each new meal was like punctuation for a week that would have otherwise passed unnoticed–like movement between locations in our dreams. It felt like time had ceased to exist and that the only remaining presence was the food we shared. Unmoored from reality, we tried to affix to the ephemeral pleasure of our meals a permanence that might prove we existed. We tried as we might to become the living embodiment of “you are what you eat,” and we wanted nothing more than to be noticed.

But slowly or maybe suddenly, we became weary of it all. From local cuisine to culinary fusion, and from the highest to the lowest of edible pleasures, we lost our appetites. Nothing was new, and all sense of novelty sloughed off like a pair of jeans put through the wash one too many times. We had become so immersed in this life that eating Korean food in Korea no longer held any appeal. We had become too close to our subject. There was no longer a sense of physical nor psychological distance. The experiential nature of life was replaced by abstract intellectualism, and the pleasure of ignorance gave way to the weight of knowledge, leaving an imprint the size of our hearts. Every day felt like sitting among the roots of a banyan tree contemplating the shade of its leaves and branches rather than experiencing the sense of reprieve that comes from hiding from the sun’s summer heat. We lost the capacity to simply be. We burned out.

Languishing in the long shadow of an ineffable food afterglow, we knew that all the searching in the world would never again lead us to anything as reverential as our first galbi-jjim, as perplexing as our first deodok-gui or as shocking as our first beondegi tang. Our time in Korea had reached its expiration date, and we knew we would have to return home. Novelty, in all its forms, was simply lost. We had experienced too much, too quickly, and so we left.

When we went back to Michigan, California, Texas, Oregon, and Ohio, we did so alone, arriving in neighborhoods that differed from our memories. Home, it seemed, had become suffused with some unknown miasma. It floated biliously in the air. When we pointed it out to family and friends, they cocked their heads and looked at us with disbelief. They couldn’t perceive what we so easily noticed. We must have been jet-lagged they told us, but our feelings of unease persisted, lasting weeks and weeks.

 We had changed; we knew as much, but maybe the world had changed as well. Maybe the world we thought we knew only existed in memory. Or just as likely, we were experiencing symptoms of withdrawal: anxiety, restlessness, and indigestion–feelings which colored the world anew. Whatever the cause, the result was that home felt artificial, like a diorama built to resemble a previous life. Everything felt at hand, yet distant, putting us at such a remove that when we peered past the fourth wall separating us from our old reality, we realized it would be difficult to fit this new shape of home without experiencing it again.

We understood how much we had missed and how much we had forgotten, and so we gorged on Little Caesars pizzas, buckets of popcorn, and enormous cherry Slurpees, experiencing each as though it were our first.

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