Beyond Korean Barbecue

By John Feffer, AlterNet. Posted June 10, 2005.

North Korea has 1) boasted of having nuclear weapons; 2) threatened to turn its neighbors into a "sea of fire"; 3) traded in illegal drugs and counterfeit currency; or 4) been enjoying a gourmet revival.

If you snorted at the last choice, think again.

Recent visitors to the "hermit kingdom" report that good food is no longer limited to government functions or the occasional hotel eatery. A new raft of restaurants -- from Korean barbecue to fast-food hamburgers -- cater to foreigners and locals alike.

"Everybody is now interested in making money, and restaurants are one way of doing so," says Kathi Zellweger of the Catholic aid organization, Caritas. "On my last trip I was told that in Pyongyang alone there are now over 350 new restaurants and I did note far more restaurant signs on buildings and also some 'beer drinking bars' packed with men in evenings."

While North Korea's thriving restaurant scene might seem like minor news -- a feature perhaps for the Wall Street Journal's offbeat middle column -- this new trend is in fact a key economic and social indicator of change. The U.S. media provides a steady diet of unappetizing images -- the shadowy nuclear complex, the military parades, the dour aging leadership. This is what "evil" is supposed to look like. But as the burgeoning restaurant trade suggests, the North Korean reality has departed significantly from the fixed menu we've come to expect.

From Famine to Feast?

In the late 1990s when I visited North Korea on an agricultural delegation, the country was still in the throes of a famine. Starving people were not visible on the street but aid workers were still encountering severely malnourished children in daycare centers and hospitals. The North Korean government was appealing to the world for more food aid. Yet our North Korean hosts insisted on bringing the delegation to extravagant meals at hotel restaurants. Knowing full well the economic hardships the population was enduring, we tried to beg off from these meals of grilled meat and spicy stews. Something simple would be fine, we said. But our hosts were eager to show us the best food on offer in Pyongyang and, no doubt, to get a proper meal for themselves in the bargain.

We ate alongside foreign businessmen, an occasional tourist group from China, and some of the 100 or so foreign workers in the country. Our hosts ordered North Korean specialties such as mung bean pancakes, a delicious stew made from "sweet meat" (a euphemism for dog), and, of course, cold noodles. Pyongyang is known throughout the region for its cold noodles, served in a broth with a slice of meat and hard-boiled egg. South Koreans who visit Pyongyang, our hosts told us, would eat several bowls of cold noodles at one sitting so overjoyed were they to taste the real thing.

Much has happened since the late 1990s. The famine has abated, though malnutrition remains endemic and the UN World Food Program forecasts serious shortages if foreign contributions do not resume flowing. The fitful detente between the United States and North Korea has broken down, the North has resumed its nuclear weapons program and declared itself a nuclear power, and the six-power negotiations to resolve the crisis have ground to a halt.

During this deepening imbroglio, North Korea embarked with much fanfare on an economic "adjustment," a term it prefers to the more radical-sounding "reform." Cold-war conservatives remain skeptical of Pyongyang's attempts to pull off a Deng Xiaopeng-style reform.

"North Korea's autarkic economy today seems utterly incapable of using peaceful international commerce to generate the revenues necessary to sustain the Democratic People's Republic of Korea," writes Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute. Eberstadt has long been predicting the end of North Korea; in his opinion, the economic reforms are just perfume to conceal the rot.

Other observers consider the economic transformation to be more substantial. Robert Carlin, a former analyst for the CIA and the State Department, believes that Kim Jong Il brought a high-level delegation to glittering Shanghai in January 2001 to convince the elite of the necessity of economic reform. By November 2001, Carlin says, "you got this very important instruction from Kim Jong Il that the basis of the economy was transformed. Profit was now the basis for measuring success in the economy."

After the economic "adjustment" was officially launched in July 2002, an internal battle between military hardliners and economic reformers continued to simmer within the ruling elite. The U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003, which encouraged speculation that next up would be either Iran or North Korea, seemed to strengthen the hands of the military. But as the U.S. army became bogged down in the Middle East and less capable of taking on another military challenge, the economic reformers in Pyongyang fought back. Carlin hypothesizes that by June 2003, the reformers had at least temporarily gained the upper hand.

John Feffer is working on a book about the global politics of food.

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