“School is a place where you go to eat your lunch”
-Rodney Dangerfield
“In an ideal world for me, school lunch would be free for everybody”
Tom Colicchio
Aaand i’m back! In this week’s edition of From Soju to Kimchi, I’ll be talking about everyone’s second favorite time of the day at work….lunch (quite a distance from first place which is leaving work, but still comfortably in second).
I mean come on, you know whether it was at school back in the day, or now at the 9-5, once the time for lunch/lunchin (they go hand in hand) comes around, your day gets that much better. Whether it’s getting away from looking at a computer screen for three hours in a row or from your co-worker Larry whose BO you can smell from two cubicles over, or going out with some co-workers to blow off some steam about those goddamn TPS reports that Bill keeps bothering you about, lunch is like a sanctuary where you can regenerate your mind, body and spirit with a light, refreshing salad or a heavy, coma-inducing burger and fries.
I decided to talk about lunch this week because a) it’s relate-able – everyone eats lunch whether you’re in Seoul or back in the U.S. b) I like to talk about food and i’m ashamed that it’s taken me four posts in to really even mention it (I mean i’ve got the word Kimchi as part of the title of my blog for crying out loud) and c) I thought you all might want to know a little more about Korean food and how yours truly is gettin his lunches for free boiiiii!
I agree wholeheartedly with Tom Colicchio (partially because I idolize him for knowing so much about food and partially because he’s had the privilege of hosting Top Chef with Padma Lakshmi, my future ex-wife, for the past decade), free lunch for everybody. Fortunately in Korea, they feel the same way – everyone eats for free, including the teachers!
You see that’s always the one downside to lunch. Either you’re meal prepping the Sunday before/night before/morning of, eating leftovers that you don’t really want to eat when everyone else is going to the awesome burger joint across the street, or you’re eating out five times a week and wondering where a quarter of your paycheck went when you bother to check your bank account. Or it’s something in between all of this shite. Nevertheless, when it comes to lunch, either your bank account or your time are going to take a hit. And that is PRECISELY why in certain respects, I feel like I am in lunch paradise.
Lunch is free? Check. I don’t have to make said lunch or bring it to work? Check. Lunch is still so different from what i’ve eaten my entire life that I don’t care if there’s rice and kimchi served every time? Check, check and check! Ok now let me put up some pictures now so you can see what I’m working with:
I know, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking something along the lines of “Ewww, Christian you naaasty. None of that stuff even looks that good!” Well first things first Mister or Missy BACK OFF! Probably better then that damn pb&j you packed for lunch, or the leftover meatloaf from three nights ago or that $10 food truck burrito you just stuffed your face with that has you falling asleep at your desk and it’s not even 3:00 pm yet! Aaaand excuuuuse me for forgetting to add a Clarendon filter before I posted this to the blog; I could’ve edited the shit out of this to make it a meal fit for Queen Elizabeth, but i’m trying to give you the raw, unfiltered truth here ok?! If you want filters and the beautifully distorted truth though, feel free to add me on IG at thesaunteringsaari….
Now that we’re done with the shameless plugin and unnecessary attacks on my audience (I was just bullshittin, and you know this, mannnn), we can get back to lunch talk. In all seriousness though, the food is generally pretty good. I think I enjoy it even more because I’ve been doing this whole intermittent fasting thing which I started just before I left for Korea. I could do an entire post on this another time but essentially, I skip breakfast every day and eat all of my calories for the day in an 8 hour span beginning with lunch, so even if you put a couple of slices of toast and uncooked ramen in front of me, I’d probably still be pretty pumped up about it. But yes, eating rice and kimchi EVERY DAY can get a bit boring, so that’s why I almost always put whatever protein i’m served on top of the rice and I usually just serve myself a little bit of kimchi.
What can I say though, overall, it’s a pretty good deal. Half the fun is watching the kids trying to eat with their chopsticks (these aren’t my kids, mine are a bit older actually but same idea) and once i’m done I can just leave and spend the rest of lunch doing whatever I want.
But wait, what’s that?! Trouble in Lunch Paradise?! The lunch lady quit?! Oh noooo say it ain’t so Joe! Oh but it is, it is so. Unbeknownst to me, the lunch lady had hurt her leg a while back somehow and finally decided to quit as the physical labor of preparing lunch for 130+ people got to be too much for her. So for the past week, we’ve been having our lunches delivered by some sort of food service until the school can find a suitable replacement. My co-worker Chelsea and I have definitely noticed a drop off in quality, so the sooner the school finds a replacement the better. Until then, Lunch Paradise Lost.
“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven..”
John Milton, Paradise Lost
“The rice is mushy, the chicken stale and the kimchi too spicy. Think about the children dammit!”
Mutterings of Thesaunteringsaari, Paradise Lunch Lost
P.S. John Milton has got nothing on thiiissss!