Spring onion’s freshness and South Korea’s protests
Spring Onion Revolt. South Korean President Yoon Suk-Yeol’s crisis crystallised after a recent supermarket appearance where he said the price of 875 won for a bunch of spring onions was reasonable. Koreans noted this was a just temporary discount at that supermarket spurred by subsidies. The real market price was between 3,000 and 4,000 won.
Yoon appeared out of touch and duplicitous. Protestors waved spring onions, their long green leaves a vivid rebuke to the president. His party lost its parliamentary majority, precipitating a political confrontation in which the president declared martial law on December 3. Six hours later, massive protests and a parliamentary vote forced Yoon into a humiliating reversal.
The vegetables most associated with Korean cuisine are cabbages, used for their iconic fermented kimchi, or medicinal plants like ginseng and mugwort. But spring onions are valued too, their mild pungency and green freshness putting them in both herb and vegetable categories. They are fermented into pa-kimchi and fried in pajeon pancakes.
In Eating Korea, Graham Holliday’s exploration of the cuisine, he describes old women selling spring onions by the roadside: “These women were widows and selling what they could grow was their way to supplement any meagre savings they might have along with the paltry state pension.”
Spring onions grow easily, as William Carlos William noted in his poem ‘To Be Hungry is To Be Great’. He describes “the small yellow grass-onion/ spring’s first green…” which when fried are
