South Korea’s solution to smog: eat more pork
The belief that pork detoxifies the lungs has prompted Koreans to consume more of the meat in light of recent pollution problems
Sales of pork have skyrocketed in South Korea, largely thanks to an old superstition that claims eating the meat helps the body dispose of pollutants taken in from breathing smog.
The reason for pork’s sudden popularity is tied with South Korea’s increasing air smog, an intensifying issue the country has inherited from eastern mainland China.
Korea’s environmental ministry recently classified the density of Seoul’s daily air pollution as a level three out of six, and local media reports have gone so far as to call the Korean capital’s smog problem an “air raid” from China.
Precautions taken by Korean citizens have led to spikes in the sale of face masks and oral cleansers, and this trend has now spread to pork.
According to Kang Hyung-sik, a Homeplus livestock supplier interviewed by The Seoul Economic Daily, the unsaturated fatty acids in pork can effectively discharge heavy metal particles such as arsenic and lead that accumulate in the lungs after breathing in pollutants.
Pork’s ability to “sweep away all the dirt in the throat” is not a common belief for many Chinese, who took to social networks like Sina Weibo to share the news and voice their scepticisms about the meat’s healing properties.
“It seems that smog and the number of folks suffering from lung cancer are not the only things that have been increasing recently,” one Weibo netizen remarked. “The number of Korean people getting fat from eating pork is about to increase too.”
The top photo comes from the Flickr gallery of Los Angeles-based food writers Guzzle & Nosh.
