Acorn for Dinner!

In a previous post I mentioned that here in Korea, eating acorns is still popular. They usually use powdered acorn to make a jelly called Dotori-muk. This weekend, my partner, Eungbok, made some Dotori-muk with flour she purchased from a chef colleague who gathers the acorns herself around where she lives in south Seoul.  Here’s what the flour looks like:

And here’s the jelly, which looks a bit like brown tofu:

Eungok mixed the flour with water, and with sesame oil to give it consistency.  The flavour? I have to admit Dotori-muk doesn’t really have any.  But the jelly-like texture is very pleasant. Anyway, Dotori-muk is usually served with a seasoning sauce or in a soup flavoured with radish and seaweed, which is how we ate it. It’s packed with goodness.  Acorns are very nutritious and filling, while not containing fat, cholesterol,  or sodium. Its health benefits include being an antioxidant, and it’s good for stomach ailments, helping in the promotion of healthy gut bacteria.

The species of oak that are preferred here to make flour are Quercus dentata and Quercus mongolica, whose acorns have less tannin than other oaks. The acorn of Quercus mongolica, aka the Mongolian oak, has a cup somewhat like those of the familiar European oaks but is more bumpy - more rugged, one could say. Quercus dentata, aka Korean oak, Japanese emperor oak, daimyo oak, or sweet oak, has a hugely hairy cup, so this one is very unlike those I’m familiar with from Europe. Like this:

Once upon a time, wherever there were oaks and human beings acorns were a stapple of the latter’s diet. As  David A. Bainbridge writes in a fascinating essay entitled ‘Acorns as Food’ which I found on the Internet :

They occur in the archaeological record of the early town sites in the Zagros Mountains, at Catal Hüyük (6000 BC), and oak trees were carefully inventoried by the Assyrians during the reign of Sargon II. They have been used as food for thousands of years virtually everywhere oak trees are found. In Europe, Asia, North Africa, the Mid-East, and North America, acorns were once a staple food.

They were a staple food for people in many areas of the world until recently and are still a commercial food crop in several countries. The Ch'i Min Yao Shu, a Chinese agricultural text from the sixth century recommends Quercus mongolica as a nut tree. ……..

While it is often thought that oaks were a "wild crop" it is now clear that the oaks were planted, transplanted, and intensively managed. Informants and traditional songs tell of the selection and planting of oak trees. The early travelers often remarked on the “orchard like" settings encountered. How surprised they would be to find they were indeed orchards.

But as agriculture supplanted hunting-and-gathering, grains such as wheat, oats and rice became central to the human diet, and the acorn was relegated to being fodder for animals, such as swine. In medieval Europe in the autumn, swine would be released to forage for acorns in the forests, but their human owners would only recourse to  the nut of the oak in times of want and famine. In other regions of the world, however,  such as in what became California,  Europeans arriving in  the nineteenth century found that native American tribes treated acorns as a vital part of their diet. Of the situation today, Bainbridge writes:

A large commercial harvest still occurs in China, and acorns are sold on the streets by acorn vendors. The commercial harvest in Korea (where 1-2.5 million liters are harvested each year) provides prepared acorn starch and flour that reaches the American markets. Some acorns are collected in Japan. Acorns are still harvested and used in several areas of the United States, most notably Southern Arizona and California. There is still some harvesting in Mexico. Historically acorns were particularly important in California. For many of the native Californians, acorns made up half of the diet and the annual harvest probably exceeded the current sweet corn harvest in the state.

Why did the acorn get demoted in many places?  It’s true that it takes time and effort to make an oak nut edible. An acorn is full of tannin, and so needs to be leached with water. But as Bainbridge writes:

Studies at Dong-guk University in Seoul, South Korea showed the tannin level in one species of bitter acorns was reduced from 9% to 0.18% by leaching, without losing essential amino acids. Virtually all of the acorns the native Californians used were bitter and they were leached or soaked in water to remove the bitterness. They apparently based their preference on oil content, storability, and flavor rather than sweetness. 

Perhaps after the agricultural ‘revolution’, acorns, like all the other nuts that were once foraged by hunter-gatherers,  were on an unconscious level too deeply associated with more ‘primitive’ stages of  social development, and so had to be relegated, lest they remind humanity of the price they had paid for becoming sedentary and toilers of the soil. After all, Jared Diamond calls the agricultural revolution “the worst mistake in the history of the human race.”  Hunter-gatherers had a more varied diet, including fats, proteins and vitamins…..and acorns.  Farmers’ diet were simpler and less diverse, and they were constantly at risk of crop failure……when they would revert to the time-honoured convention of eating acorns. Add to this the fact that sedentism vastly increased  the likelihood of contracting communicable diseases, and the agricultural revolution does start to seem less than magnificent evidence of humanity’s ability to perpetually develop towards greater general prosperity and well-being.

And now that the next  ‘revolution’ -  the industrial -  is proving far from an unalloyed success, too, there are sound reasons for re-adopting the acorn as part of our diet. As Bainbridge writes:

There is a growing recognition that tree crops can play an important role in sustainable food production. Trees can be grown with less annual disturbance of the agricultural ecosystem and their deep roots allow the trees to reach nutrients and moisture in the deep soil. Acorns are an excellent example of a grain that grows on trees. We must begin to consider these traditional crops that fit temperate and semi-arid climates rather than trying to change the environment to fit crops that require extensive inputs of fertilizer and water.

I also noted  in my previous post a great TED Talk by Marcie Mayer the founder of Oakmeal, who certainly concurs with Bainbridge’s view on the future of the acorn as food. Here’s a link to the company’s website: https://www.oakmeal.com/

References:

David A. Bainbridge, ‘Acorns as Food. History, use, recipes, and bibliography’, Sierra Nature Prints, 2001.

https://www.academia.edu/3829415/Acorns_as_Food_Text_and_Bibliography

North Korea’s Victory over Covid-19

So, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea did not collapse due to the Covid-19 pandemic.  This is what the excellent website 38 North said on August 15 :

‘Despite widespread concern that a COVID-19 outbreak in North Korea would be devastating, given the country’s weak health care system, limited access to medical equipment, supplies and medicines, and widespread malnutrition, Pyongyang appears to have stabilized the recent outbreak in record time with minimal deaths, at least according to the official government narrative. While North Korea seems to have avoided drastic outcomes this time around, its anti-epidemic efforts came at high economic and social costs, and the largely unvaccinated population remains a concern to global efforts to combat this virus. Building the country’s capacity to deal with epidemics and health crises should be part of a global health strategy to prepare for future pandemics.’ (1)

Of course, we are used to not taking anything North Korea says at face value. Officially, they say that on July 29, 2022, the number of what are called euphemistically ‘fever cases’ reached zero. Almost 20 percent of the population fell ill, but the number of deaths was only 74, a case-fatality rate of 0.0016 percent. As all the experts point out, this is impossible. The lowest country for case-fatalities is Bhutan at 0.035 percent. Other countries with vaccination rates above 80 percent, such as Singapore, South Korea and New Zealand, reported 0.1 percent.  

But whatever the actual numbers, even the most hawkish critics of North Korea accept that the crisis was handled. The regime did not topple. Life (such as it is) goes on.

 So, why? 38 North offers some answers:

‘North Korea’s health care system is founded primarily on preventative medicine, making disease monitoring and prevention the priority. As such, during the COVID-19 outbreak, local doctors and medical students were tasked with visiting 200-300 homes per day to facilitate disease surveillance.

Based on state media reporting about the pandemic responses, it appears that the North Korean government’s stewardship of the response to the outbreak has been effective and efficient. They declared a national emergency immediately after the first confirmed COVID-19 case, ordered a nationwide lockdown, and delivered medicine and food to houses while promoting the production of domestic medicine. State media has also reported the case numbers and provided medical information about COVID-19 daily.

With limited geographic mobility and domestic migration even before the pandemic, North Korean society is set up in a way that makes controlling the transmission of this airborne virus easier than in most countries. In short, North Korea was able to quickly stop community spread through aggressive public health measures, and as such, has not experienced a catastrophic situation. Furthermore, the first reported COVID-19 case was said to have been of the Omicron variant, which while more contagious, is less severe than the original virus or other variants.’

What this prognosis boils down is an interesting fact: the least ‘open’ society in the world proved to be one of the best at dealing with the pandemic, while the most ‘open’ societies proved the worst. 

In his book Open. The Story of Human Progress (2020), Johan Norberg writes that ‘openness’ is inextricably tied to globalization: ‘Present day globalization is nothing but the extension of…. cooperation   across borders, all over the world, making it possible for far more people than ever to make use o the ideas and work for others, no matter where they are on the planet. This has made the modern global economy possible, which has liberated almost 130,000 people from poverty every day for the last twenty-five years.’ Norberg also notes that ‘when China was most open it led the world in wealth, science and technology, but by shutting its ports and minds to the world five hundred years ago, the planet’s richest country soon became one of the poorest.’ Nowadays, however, China has sufficiently opened up to globalization to become prosperous again.

North Korea is an obvious example of what happens when a country is ‘closed.’ Interestingly, on this level it follows the policy of the Joseon Dynasty (1392–1897) whose isolation earned Korea the named ‘The Hermit Kingdom’, and also made it a ripe pickings for Japanese colonial ambition in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries. Japan, of course, did ‘open’ up – it was the first of the East Asian nations to do so, and the first to colonize another East Asian country (Korea in 1910) and to defeat a western power (in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05) . In this sense then, North Korea is a reversion to a former societal model, whereas South Korea, who has aggressively joined the ‘open’ global market, is following themodel first pioneered by its neighbor and former colonial master, Japan. It is obvious in pretty much all terms which of the Koreas chose the better path.

*

But the ‘openness’ of globalization is precisely what allowed the pandemic to happen. This is a fact that North Korea’s success highlights.  The downside of ‘openness’ is porosity of borders. As Jared Diamond points out in his classic Guns, Germs, and Steel. The Fates of Human Societies (1997): ‘The rapid spread of microbes, and the rapid course of symptoms, mean that everybody in a local human population  is quickly infected and soon thereafter is either dead or else recovered and immune. No one is left alive who could still be infected. But since the microbe can’t survive except in the bodies of living people the disease dies out, until a new crop of babies reaches the susceptible age – and until an infectious person arrives from the outside to start a new epidemic.’ (Emphasis added) The classic historical case of this viral invasion is the virtual annihilation of the indigenous peoples of north, central and south America by ‘white’ settlers who brought their infectious diseases with them – diseases for whom they had developed immunity but the indigenous people , having never been exposed to them, had not. Diamond gives several examples. Here’s one that is harrowing in its definitiveness: ‘In the winter of 1902 a dysentery epidemic brought by a sailor on the whaling ship Active killed 51 out of the 56 Sadlermiut Eskimos, a very isolated band of people living on Southampton Island in the Canadian Arctic.’

An ‘open’ society is bound to be prone to epidemics, while a ‘closed’ one is more likely to be able to control them. But it is also much more dangerously vulnerable if (indeed, when) the closed gate is breached.  This vulnerability explains why a ‘closed’ society will desperately fight to keep the gate closed. But it also explains why they are doomed to fail.

Living in societies that value ‘openness’ is not just about markets, however. It’s also about ‘openness’ to worldviews,  beliefs and behaviour, and this means a society will also be vulnerable to cultural ‘infection’. An ‘open’ society is perpetually being ‘infected’ by alien worldviews, and this inevitably causes tensions, and possibly conflicts. But as time goes by, the people of an ‘open’ society develop ‘immunity’ to these novel cultural pathogens. This is clearly what has happened as western societies have become more tolerantly multicultural. But the onslaught is continuous, and inevitably unsettling. Meanwhile, in a ’closed’ society like North Korea – in fact North Korea could be described as the archetype of a ‘closed’ society – cultural pathogens are not an immediate danger. They lie safely beyond the closed gate – in South Korea, America, Japan - but the dangers they potentially pose can be used to install fear in the populace.

Interestingly, the North Koreans claim that the Covid-19 virus entered their land via ‘alien objects’ found on a hillside. They elaborated by saying that these ‘objects’ came via balloons from Korea (the South Koreans have banned the sending of propaganda via balloons across the DMZ, but it still happens).  Much more likely is that the disease entered via illegal trading with China.

In other words, total closure of a society is impossible. It always has been, as humans are hard-wired to trade. Where societies are concerned, there’s no such thing as totally water-tight barrel. They will always be leaky.   Which is why an ‘open’ society is an inevitable advance on a ‘closed’ one. But this is especially true in an era of technologies that allow for ease and speed of travel.  In earlier times, when people could only travel by foot, horse, horse and cart, or by sail across the oceans, being ’closed’ seemed a viable option. Today it obviously is not.

So, even though North Korea stamped put Covid-19 with remarkable success, it is surely still doomed.

(1) https://www.38north.org/2022/08/north-korea-appears-to-have-managed-its-covid-19-outbreak-what-comes-next/

Image source: https://www.ft.com/content/4f82c57b-fb10-4945-b6ab-df9445c57715