Reckoning With Rice

North Koreans who defect to South Korea face some serious hurdles when it comes to integrating into a larger, faster-moving, and highly competitive society.  Even the basics of eating a meal are one of them:

"'When they first arrive there are so many different options, that they don’t know what to eat,' he said. 'But they always crave rice, so they pretty much eat mostly rice for the first two to three months, even if there are many other options available. And then after this phase, they start missing food they had back home.'

Kim, a waitress who asked to be identified only by her surname, only ate rice a few times a year when she was in North Korea, instead subsisting mostly on corn. When she first arrived in the South in 2017 she was 'completely awed' by the supermarkets, eating a constant stream of spicy Jin instant noodles for months before she became sick of the taste.

'No matter how much I worked in North Korea I could never afford rice,' she said. 'So now I can never throw away rice, even if I order too much.'”

Older South Koreans with any memory of the Korean War and its related hardships aren't slouches either when it comes to not letting any food go to waste, so I imagine North Koreans must be at a whole other level of frugality.